Coffeelake thread, benchmarks, reviews, input, everything.

[DrMrLordX]

Also, what motherboards look good

I haven't looked at the full raft of Z370 motherboards yet, but I know that ASRock has been doing quite well with their Taichi boards lately.

Z370 Taichi:

https://www.asrock.com/MB/Intel/Z370 Taichi/index.asp#Specification

Might be worth it to look at this article:

http://wccftech.com/intel-z370-motherboard-roundup-asus-msi-asrock-aorus-gigabyte/2/

That's just two companies though. I haven't done a comparison with Asus' offerings yet.

 

[dbrons]

Asus lineup is on their website.
https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/Intel-platform-Products/
I'll be using this board:
https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/PRIME-Z370-A/
looks like an updated version of the P8Z68V pro I've been running in my Sandy Bridge for 7 years or so. Real psyched to finally be upgrading
Dave

 

[TheF34RChannel]

Asus lineup is on their website.
https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/Intel-platform-Products/
I'll be using this board:
https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/PRIME-Z370-A/
looks like an updated version of the P8Z68V pro I've been running in my Sandy Bridge for 7 years or so. Real psyched to finally be upgrading
Dave

The Prime boards are the cheapy cheapy range, meaning lesser quality components, please be aware of this before purchasing. If you're okay with that that's great, if not, you may consider the TUF Gaming board; not expensive but far better quality. The Maximus range tops it though.

Edit: Or, consider the Strix range, which offers a plethora of boards that are of better quality than the Prime but below the Maximus range.

 

[TheF34RChannel]

EVGA announced their Z370 boards over the weekend. Unsure if anyone here likes EVGA...

Not for me: for GPUs and PSUs they're great in my book, for boards not so much as they often lack common features (internal USB 2.0 headers e.g.) and their BIOS is just...ugh... I prefer Asus or Asrock personally.

 

[ozzy702]

Not for me: for GPUs and PSUs they're great in my book, for boards not so much as they often lack common features (internal USB 2.0 headers e.g.) and their BIOS is just...ugh... I prefer Asus or Asrock personally.

Same. I haven't used an EVGA mobo since x58. Asrock has really done me well over the past few years. I'll be running a z370 Asrock mobo as well.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Not for me: for GPUs and PSUs they're great in my book, for boards not so much as they often lack common features (internal USB 2.0 headers e.g.) and their BIOS is just...ugh... I prefer Asus or Asrock personally.

Yep. I love me some EVGA power supplies and even graphics cards, but their mobos...eehhhh. Wouldn't put that in my rig.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I would look for at least an 8+4 power phase design using relatively good VRMs. I would trust ASRock, Asus, and probably Gigabyte in this regard. Might be worth it to look at Biostar to see what they're up to, since they've done some moderately interesting things lately.

MSI is pimping an 18-phase design with their top-end board but I know nothing of the components in use therein. It might actually be that board to get, though its advertised (for what that's worth) max DDR4 OC capability is below that of the Taichi (an 8+4 phase board).

 

[dbrons]

The Prime boards are the cheapy cheapy range, meaning lesser quality components, please be aware of this before purchasing. If you're okay with that that's great, if not, you may consider the TUF Gaming board; not expensive but far better quality. The Maximus range tops it though.

Edit: Or, consider the Strix range, which offers a plethora of boards that are of better quality than the Prime but below the Maximus range.

Well, I'll look closely at them but unless things have changed a lot, I would disagree with you. The Prime is a Z370 board like the others you mention. When I bought my Z68 board, the major differences between the prime and the others were gaming features and RGB lighting neither of which interest me.

I will read up thoroughly before I decide and I don't mind spending a bit more for a board so we'll see. I am buying things and already have a PS, and two hard drives. I have a 8700k on order.

 

[TheF34RChannel]

Well, I'll look closely at them but unless things have changed a lot, I would disagree with you. The Prime is a Z370 board like the others you mention. When I bought my Z68 board, the major differences between the prime and the others were gaming features and RGB lighting neither of which interest me.

I will read up thoroughly before I decide and I don't mind spending a bit more for a board so we'll see. I am buying things and already have a PS, and two hard drives. I have a 8700k on order.

It's not a matter of agreeing or disagreeing; factually the Prime boards are lowest in the Z370 range and thus uses lower quality VRMs, caps etc., and that's what I was trying to convey. Watch the OC3D 8700K video where it's treated as well.

 

[elpokor]

this compilation from Broda (@tweakpc.de) shows ASUS only used 1 controller and 2 different mosfets in their latest Intel launch (Z270). The "Maximus" boards have top notch Texas Instruments mosfets while the rest of the stock has mosfets manufactured by ON Semiconductors.

To the best of my knowledge, I'd assume having the same voltage controller and different mosfets would lead to the same~ish voltage ripple and overclock, albeit with more power consumption due to a sligthly worse eficiency. I'm by no means a pro in VRM discussion, so feel free to correct me if needed.

 

[maddie]

Price = quality, no questions asked.

Enthusiasts? A definition in flux.

 

[JoeRambo]

I've bought several Z270 Prime mobos, and they ran Kabylake @ 5Ghz perfectly fine. Planning to buy Z370 Prime A. I'd say for casual OC on air/water they are more than enough. But i'd not go down to Prime-P, as that one seems cheapened out by using ALC666 sound, compared to ALC1220 on -A. And probably elsewhere.

 

[dbrons]

yes, I probably shouldn't have said disagree because certainly the Prime -A is a lower cost board. I'll just say that different builds have different priorities. And yes, the high quality japanese capacitors in the audio system of the Prime board,, along with heaphone amplifier is is something important to me.
Dave

 

[TahoeDust]

i5-8400 is looking like a killer sub $200 gaming chip...

https://www.purepc.pl/procesory/test_intel_core_i5_8400_vs_amd_ryzen_5_1600_wojna_szesciu_rdzeni

 

[coercitiv]

i5-8400 is looking like a killer sub $200 gaming chip...

Although I do agree the i5 8400 is a very appealing sub $200 gaming chip, let's do this properly and not reference a gaming review that uses 2133 RAM. We already have a decent Techpowerup review using 3200 C14 RAM that puts the 8400 in a very nice spot.

PS: nice job bringing that which cannot be named back into the Intel thread.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Although I do agree the i5 8400 is a very appealing sub $200 gaming chip, let's do this properly and not reference a gaming review that uses 2133 RAM. We already have a decent Techpowerup review using 3200 C14 RAM that puts the 8400 in a very nice spot.

PS: nice job bringing that which cannot be named back into the Intel thread.

I think 2133 or 2400 RAM makes sense for testing the 8400, since a) it's cheaper and b) once the cheaper chipsets are out many people will want to pair the 8400 with a $100 or under motherboard.

You could make an awesome shoebox PC with the 8400, cheap ITX motherboard, cheap RAM, and maybe a GTX 1070.

 

[LTC8K6]

I think 2133 or 2400 RAM makes sense for testing the 8400, since a) it's cheaper and b) once the cheaper chipsets are out many people will want to pair the 8400 with a $100 or under motherboard.

You could make an awesome shoebox PC with the 8400, cheap ITX motherboard, cheap RAM, and maybe a GTX 1070.

I couldn't sleep knowing that the chip did not at least have the proper minimum spec 2666 ram.

 

[krumme]

I think 2133 or 2400 RAM makes sense for testing the 8400, since a) it's cheaper and b) once the cheaper chipsets are out many people will want to pair the 8400 with a $100 or under motherboard.

You could make an awesome shoebox PC with the 8400, cheap ITX motherboard, cheap RAM, and maybe a GTX 1070.

Nobody question that. It just borders on trolling to bring in a gaming scheme made from 2133 on a ryzen chip. Several thumbs up to crap post like that referencing the purepclab whores. Next step is perhaps people complaing the ryzen name beeing mentioned.
Besides 2666 seems like a fine match for the 8400. It can use the bandwith. No reason to save the few dollars if any on antique 2133 or 2400 ram.

 

[SPBHM]

I couldn't sleep knowing that the chip did not at least have the proper minimum spec 2666 ram.

also, since z370 is the only compatible chipset right now and those MBs can run the memory at 3200 or any other speed, I think it's fair enough to test it with higher speeds, still 2133 is interesting because I think H310 +8400 + cheapest possible DDR4 is going to be the way to go once H310 (or whatever is called) is out.

 

[Zucker2k]

Could someone quote my infamous post about the 7800x rendering Ryzen obsolete (with a view to what's to come - coffelake)?

This thread is full of win, except the part which pretends to talk about coffeelake in a vacuum. I mean, virtually all the reviews do the inter-platform comparison, as they should. That's what Intel wants; to highlight this killer release against the process-limited Ryzens. How are we even pretending to be discussing the reviews without the necessary comparisons? Cheers to the few keeping it real; loving those graphs with the ridiculous looking percentage differences. The ball's in AMD's court. What I'm intrigued about the most is if the12nm LP process will hold under the shear weight of those hefty 4.5Ghz+ overclocks. Only time will tell.
I'm almost tempted to go 'necro-mining' to dig up some naysaying posts regarding coffeelake, but Raghu's fierce defense of 'lake's dominance of the desktop landscape for the near future is placation enough, and I'm really enjoying the rare sight.

 

[Bouowmx]

Intel Core i5-8400 review at PC Gamer.

Multi-core enhancement is ineffective, on a GIGABYTE board. So, what was GIGABYTE USA saying on YouTube?

Despite being multiplier-locked, Intel Core i5-8400 ring/cache frequency can be increased.

 

[coercitiv]

Multi-core enhancement is ineffective, on a GIGABYTE board. So, what was GIGABYTE USA saying on YouTube?

Despite being multiplier-locked, Intel Core i5-8400 ring/cache frequency can be increased.

We're still in the early days of this platform, there's a good chance to see this come through with a BIOS update. Good news on the uncore overclock though, I was actually more worried about that than the actual max clock adjustment.

 

[epsilon84]

I think 2133 or 2400 RAM makes sense for testing the 8400, since a) it's cheaper and b) once the cheaper chipsets are out many people will want to pair the 8400 with a $100 or under motherboard.

You could make an awesome shoebox PC with the 8400, cheap ITX motherboard, cheap RAM, and maybe a GTX 1070.

I see no problem with testing the 8400 with DDR4-3200 (or faster) on Z370 boards since these boards can actually take advantage of XMP settings. The 8400 at $190 isnt exactly a budget CPU and gimping it with slow RAM doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

On cheaper B/H chipset boards then using DDR4-2666 should be the standard as that is the fastest memory supported and it isn't much more than DDR4-2133/2400 anyway.

If reviewers want to take the value angle and gimp the 8400 with slow RAM then it goes without saying that the "other" platform should also be using the same RAM. I dont want to imagine the backlash from AMD fans though were Ryzen to be paired with such slow RAM, the performance hit (especially in gaming) won't be pretty at all...

 

[DrMrLordX]

Could someone quote my infamous post about the 7800x rendering Ryzen obsolete (with a view to what's to come - coffelake)?

Oh please no.

This thread is full of win, except the part which pretends to talk about coffeelake in a vacuum. I mean, virtually all the reviews do the inter-platform comparison, as they should. That's what Intel wants; to highlight this killer release against the process-limited Ryzens.

I wasn't aware that we were meant to be doing Intel's bidding. Or AMD's for that matter.

That aside, do you really want more thread derailment? If people come in here and snarkily remark over and over that "well Coffeelake might be great but you can't actually buy it!" to which some dunce retorts "you mean like AM4 boards up until May?" after which hilarity ensues. Some ingrate will then bring up 12nm LP and how Intel can't launch anything on 10nm, and how Intel keeps delaying products, and apparently has nothing on tap for the desktop except 8c/16t Coffeelake until sometime in 2019 if they're lucky . . .

and so forth, and so on.

Meanwhile, people who wanted to come in here and figure out where they can buy the chip, what boards to get, what RAM to get, how to configure the platform, etc. get swamped in page after page of dross. And you know it's true, just look at the gargantuan Skylake/Kabylake/Skylake-X thread. Hell the whole reason why this thread was created was to avoid such nonsense.

How are we even pretending to be discussing the reviews without the necessary comparisons? Cheers to the few keeping it real; loving those graphs with the ridiculous looking percentage differences. The ball's in AMD's court.

So what you really want is a victory lap? Cheers to you then, The 8700k is the best gaming CPU on the market, and probably the preferred desktop CPU for anyone with a budget in the upper mainstream range. And really, who wants Skylake-X either, for that matter? A few power users will want it, but for the most part, the 8700k is it. There, are you happy? That should settle the entire thing, because it's true.

Meanwhile, the "ball" is not in AMD's court. AMD is small potatoes no matter what the CPU sales on one particular German retailer might tell you. Intel sees foundries out foudry-ing them (TSMC, Samsung, and hell let's throw in GF for good measure). Intel sees Apple out-designing them (A11x). The ball is in Apple's court and in TSMC's court, really. How badly do they want to cut into Intel's exposed underbelly? AMD is just picking off whatever marketshare they can as they transition to an AI/GPU compute company.

So enjoy Coffeelake while you can. Hell enjoy Wintel while you can. Intel and MS are both exposed. If they fall, none of us may much enjoy the consequences. Either that, or we'll learn to love Linux on ARM.

 

[beginner99]

AMD is just picking off whatever marketshare they can as they transition to an AI/GPU compute company.

AMD clearly is investing more in CPU. And it makes sense. Server CPUs have higher margins than GPUs. Especially with how they make EPYC, yields must be great. Given the lack of availability of Vega, yields either suck or AMD prefers to keep their fabs loaded with producing zeppelin dies.