With 2017 kicking off, AMD made a comeback in the CPU market with their Ryzen lineup of CPUs. With Intel finally facing AMD’s wrath of competition, it was a no-brainer for Intel to finally show us a leap. With Intel’s 8th-generation launch of SKUs, Intel has finally upgraded the core counts across most of its CPUs. The Core i7-8700-K here comes with two extra cores, with hyper-threading enabled effectively giving it twice as many threads. With the i7-8700k launch, many gamers and content creators are curious how much of a leap Intel has gained with its 6-core, 12 thread CPU.
As of the 7700k, Intel was still the IPC king when it came to showing off their IPC. However, AMD’s excellent core count and caught up IPC gave it some momentum to gain onto Intel. As the NDA lifts, JayzTwoCents was among the first to showcase the power of the i7-8700k($349) in a number of tests taking on AMD’s Ryzen R5 1600X($250). Following his video, Linus, from LinusTechTips also shed some light on the subject by publishing the benchmarks for these titles.
Both reviewers did agree and have noticed that Intel is continuing to use weak TIM between the CPU and the IHS which leads the i7-8700K’s temperature and power consumption as a limiting factor. However, due the Ryzen’s architecture, the excellent thermals yielded a limited overclock. This limited the Ryzen 5 1600X to the usual 3.9GHz barrier. Meanwhile, the i7-8700K managed to hit 5GHz on all cores. Here’s some benchmarks.
The Intel Core i7-8700K easily crushes the Ryzen 5 1600X in CPU-dependant titles. However, in titles where the GPU is the limiting factor, the Ryzen 5 1600X is sticking with the rest of the high-end pack. Similar performance tests conducted by Linus and his team showed off impressive leaps for Intel on the productivity side as well where Intel’s 8700K showed off what its strong IPC and extra cores could achieve. But for the massive price differences between the two CPUs, even the Ryzen 7 1700 seems to have gotten some tight competition. Finally, thanks to AMD, the PC hardware community has gotten some excellent leaps between the two companies. However, noting that the temperatures are the limiting factor for the 8700k’s overclocks thanks to Intel’s dedicated support for TIM, there’s no telling why Intel continues to opt for TIM even with the 8700-K. Maybe a more furious AMD Ryzen 2 CPU should be able to trade blows again. But at the price point of $359, there’s no denying these are excellent results.