Typically the lowest an 8700K will go at stock is 3.95GHz during Prime95 FMA3.
If the power limits are configured as they should (95W PL1, 119W PL2), it is impossible for the CPU to consume more than that in any workload.
hmm, that PL2 is oddly close to the power consumption that a "good sample" of 8700K draws during a similar torture test with MCE settings (47x cores, 44x cache)
MCE draws almost exactly 120.6W/1.210V=100Amps average during torture testing, I've seen this aswell on a "bad sample" of 8700K and it drawed high 120s to low 130W while needing 1.280Vcore minimum to be stable. Mind you both CPUs had the toothpaste replaced with liquid metal, so it should be comparable to a soldered one.
Now, on the overclocking speculation... bumping +300Mhz across all cores and cache (50x cores, 47x cache) on the bad sample turned out to be impossible even with 1.45V. It maxed out at 49x/46 with terrible temps and 1,4V. The good one can do the +300Mhz bump, but it takes almost 158/1.341=118Amps to get there:
if any of you guys have a golden sample or an 8086K around there, feel free to repeat this test and post your results. I manually reset the sensors when the voltage spikes as the test begins and then come back around the 4 minute mark to take the screenshot when it finishes. It may be worth a separate thread if you feel it would clutter this one.
The bottom line is that going from PL2 (which seems to be equivalent to MCE activated) to +300Mhz takes 158/120=131.6%Watts. I can't see 5.5Ghz happening... heck, even 5.1Ghz truly stable in octacores would be somewhat miraculous given that they haven't anounced new improvements beyond 14nm++ and one would assume they've allocated those engineering resources to fix the 10nm mess.