Intel Core i7-8700K Coffee Lake CPU Benchmarked With MSI Z370 KRAIT Gaming Motherboard

Even though Intel just finished showing off a Cannon Lake wafer for the first time, the more immediate release on the desktop is Coffee Lake, a sort of stop-gap solution to satiate users who are pining for something new. Having already launched in mobile form, Coffee Lake will arrive on the desktop very soon. In the meantime, a new set of benchmarks for Intel's top-end Coffee Lake processor, the Core i7-8700K, has found its way to the web.

One thing to look forward to with Coffee Lake is a bump in core count on several of the SKUs. Starting with the Core i5-8400 and going on up to the Core i7-8700K, these will be the first 6-core chips from Intel aimed at mainstream users. Two of the four 6-core processors support Hyper Threading to boot, giving them both 12 threads to throw at tasks.

The Core i7-8700K will be the meatiest of the bunch, with 6-cores/12-threads racing along at 3.7GHz, with a 4.3GHz boost clock. For single-core tasks, the Turbo clock can ramp up to 4.7GHz. It also has 12MB of L3 cache to play with, and 1.5MB of L2 cache. Compared to the Core i7-7700K (Kaby Lake), which is clocked at 4.2GHz to 4.5GHz, the Core i7-8700K runs a little slower, but should perform better overall because of the additional cores and architectural enhancements.


An early CPU-Z test run backs this assumption. The Core i7-8700K scored 525.4 points in the benchmark's single-core test, outpacing the Core i7-7700K at 492 points. And in the multi-threaded test, the Core i7-8700K scored 3,832.6 points, compared to 2,648 points on the Core i7-7700K.


Here we have a look at how the Core i7-8700K fared in the ChessBase benchmark. In the single-threaded portion, it scored 3,513 kilonodes, and in the multi-thread portion it scored 24,537 kilonodes. That is a slight improvement in single-threaded performance over the Core i7-7700K (3,500 kilonodes) and a bigger bump in multi-threaded performance (17,500 kilonodes).


We are more familiar with Cinebench, typically a brutal benchmark that is finally starting to look more tame as processors with higher core and thread counts emerge. In this case, the Core i7-8700K scored 1,402 points when tapping all available cores/threads (and 144.33 frames per second in the OpenGL test). In our own testing of the Core i7-7700K, it scored 988 points in the multi-threaded portion of the test.

All of this testing was performed on an MSI Z370 Krait Gaming motherboard with 16GB of DDR4-2666 memory, with the processor was kept at stock. The takeaway from all of this is that Coffee Lake will be another modest bump in performance, though where the architecture really shines is in applications that can take advantage of the additional cores and threads.