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Intel i7-8700K Review - MMORPG.com
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Intel i7-8700K Review - MMORPG.com
Cores and clock speeds, base, boosts, and threads: the march of progress in the processing world continues ever on. With each passing generation, we see these advancements tick by but with Coffee Lake, Intel is defending their claim on the marketplace superiority against a reinvigorated AMD. We wanted to see for ourselves just what Intel’s latest i7-8700K has to offer. Coming from an i7-7700K, is it worth the upgrade?
Comments
For normal gaming computer you'd want to compare I5 8400, I5 8600K and Ryzen 1600x to each other. All of them are enough to give you 60 fps at 1080p resolution. As long as you don't have better monitor than that and don't stream, and most of us don't, further investment to a processor brings very little benefit.
I think the best thing to take away from your gaming benchmarks is that all of the CPUs are fast. The only times that any of the games ran at under 80 frames per second is when all of them did because of an obvious video card bottleneck.
Actually at 1080p with a gtx 1060 with current day games.. all these CPU’s have no influence on the fps anymore... bottleneck is the gpu...
Altough for some older MMO’s you want as good single core CPU performance as possible.. games like eq2 are still single threaded and CPU heavy...
I just invested in a new MMO system, the 1600x combined with a GTX 1060 works miracles
Best MMO experiences : EQ(PvE), DAoC(PvP), WoW(total package) LOTRO (worldfeel) GW2 (Artstyle and animations and worlddesign) SWTOR (Story immersion) TSW (story) ESO (character advancement)
Thanks for catching that. I'll get that fixed.
Most games are graphics card locked these days anyways unless of course, they are running a very unoptimized engine. If you don't want to bother with a graphics card, get the new AMD cpus with graphics on the chip, the graphics are 100% better than what Intel offers.
I am just not impressed by this chip. Seems that Intel is whiffing at the plate a lot these days.
It seems to me the status quo (its all about the graphics card) is still firmly in place and is not going to change anytime soon... within reason of course, but there's simply no reason for most gamers to consider CPU's like this unless they just like wasting money, or epeen.
The Intel CPUs will have whatever performance hit there is for a Meltdown fix. For most consumer purposes, the performance hit will be modest, as in single-digit percentages, and sometimes the very low single digits.
Intel has claimed that they will have new CPUs with a proper hardware fix for Meltdown later this year. Such a claim is dubious when you consider how long it takes to design a CPU, leading to several possibilities:
1) They're lying outright, or perhaps assuming an extremely ambitious and optimistic schedule, such as not needing any respins.
2) They were aware of Meltdown before outside researchers told them about it and has already been working on fixing it in the next generation, hoping that no one would notice the problem until the new, fixed generation was available.
3) They figured out how to rig together a fix purely in metal layers without needing to change any silicon. This would probably be more a security by obscurity thing to make Meltdown much harder to use, but not a proper hardware fix.
4) They've managed to do by far the fastest major redesign of a highly complex chip in history. If that's what they think they've done, then this is probably a subset of option (1).
Option (2) is possible. It's likely that the first AMD CPUs to use speculative execution were also vulnerable to Meltdown, and at some point, they decided that they really should improve its security and fixed it. Such a fix could have happened a decade ago for all we know.
If Intel's claims of a Meltdown fix in hardware later this year are anything other than option (2), however, then they would constitute an additional reason to distrust Intel on security. Making a mistake in your design that someone catches will inevitably happen, but falsely claiming that you have a fix when you don't is completely avoidable.
First, MCE is not always stable. Avoid it, disable it. Second, it uses a crap ton of unnecessary voltage. thrd, it's misleading and gives people a reason to hate on Intel and an otherwise awesome CPU, and I don't like it. The CPU is great, I got one too, it doesn't need MCE, you can OC it of you want. MCE is pretty much OC for noobs that are afraid to play in BIOS, and rest assured, you gonna pay with BSODs for that.
My eyes actually had to readjust to the game play as it blew the old system completely out of the water, despite the fact that my old system was still very good at running just about everything I had thrown at it up to that point. The only thing I'm waiting on now is for either the prices of the third party Nvidia cards to come down, or for Nvidia to get more of their own cards back into stock so I can upgrade my video card to something fun.
-Dragon Dagger
Joined 2004 - I can't believe I've been a MMORPG.com member for 20 years! Get off my lawn!
Not by much. My 4-yr old Haswell 4-core performs 77-78% of what this chip does on most benchmark comparisons. However I'm not seeing the 23% "increased performance" as worth the cost of a console system in upgrade....and that's just the chip, which my MOBO isn't compatible with, so I'd have to upgrade that as well. Also it would eat up 12% more power usage than my current chip too, so that is a factor on the long-term cost.
Many, many games do not even take use of the 4 cores in a quad-core system, so upgrading to a 6-core would be irrelevant to gaming. Sure it is good as a workstation, most likely for game design or even server hosting; but not general gaming that I can see.
So I'd say 3 years with great performance, and 6+ years with some performance degradation. The higher the resolution you will play at, the less performance degradation from the CPU, as you're pushing the GPU instead.
It's better to keep it at stock voltages and no OC or at most very small OC for the first couple of years. Then do something more aggressive only once it starts getting old and there's much less to lose should it break.
But if you do OC, this CPU is a bit different with voltages and stuff. Basically all z370 motherboards feed lots of voltage into these CPUs, so you can see up to 1.33V easily for some scenarios (for example a High Performance power plan and idling around would shoot the CPU to 4600-4700MHz due to its Turbo Boost; to achieve these frequencies a motherboard would run 1.32-1.33V into the boosted cores; on load frequencies drop, and voltages too, so the CPU can maintain TDP).
So we have a situation where the CPU is normally fed almost the maximum recommended of 1.35V into the CPU regardless of overclocking or not. But more importantly, a lot of 8700Ks don't need that voltage at all, and it's not uncommon to see stable 5GHz on 1.28V or something, so at that point you'd have to be wondering what's safer for the CPU - OC and manual, lower voltages, or not OC and Auto voltages that reach quite high.
IMO the best solution is to see what's best in your case. Lower end motherboard with pretty bad VRM? Just leave as it is or slap a 4.7GHz on all cores and lower Vcore as much as possible while remaining stable under stress testing.
Decent motherboard with good VRM and nice cooler? Depends on how much your CPU needs to go to 5GHz. If it's a lot of voltage, like 1.38V, you might need to delid to run it cooler. If you can do 5GHz on 1.25V, lucky you, probably delidding is unnecessary.
To go beyond 5GHz you really need lots of cooling and a delidded CPU. These things get really hot.
In the end, the 8700K remains awesome in all of these scenarios.
I know, I know. People are not used to these chips, they are still thinking you're supposed to hit 60C at most and other such stuff, and 90C scares them. The thing is, the CPU does not even throttle until 100C, so Intel is considering that the top limit, and they are always on the safe side.
Times change. I'm sure you can run the Kaby Lake series, including this 6 core incarnation at temps up to 90C easily. Do I like it? Hell no. It's actually not the CPU I am worried about. It's the VRMs on the motherboard, which can easily reach 120C on some models.
As for delidding, personally I am not doing it, not because I think it's stupid, but because I'm too poor to risk my CPU, i.e. I want the warranty. But for a person who doesn't feel like 350USD is lots of money, they should definitely do it. Intel is at fault here with their crap TIM between the die and IHS. Delidding results in 15-25C temp drops, absolutely incredible.
Also there are kits for it. It's safe to do, about the same levels of safe as mounting a videocard or CPU or a more complicated big cooler. Only problem is voiding warranty, but again that's a problem for people like me, I'd wager somebody living is a civilized, Western, non-shithole country with a half-decent job 350USD is hardly something to be worried of.