Who's buying a 6 core Coffee Lake CPU? (Poll Inside)

[Rifter]

Except 1700 is a big regression in gaming/single threaded perf from a stock 7700K.

Its only a big regression in gaming if you play below 1080p. And if you are still gaming below 1080p you likely arnt running anything from this decade anyways let alone a KL or Ryzen CPU.

 

[Madpacket]

Except 1700 is a big regression in gaming/single threaded perf from a stock 7700K.

Not really. Depends on resolution. And if playing at 1080P or lower you're probably playing competitive games which only need an unlocked Core i3/Core i5.


https://youtu.be/t8K2yc11eC4

 

[Alpha One Seven]

Already have an 8 core. A six is a downgrade.

 

[dwade]

Not really. Depends on resolution. And if playing at 1080P or lower you're probably playing competitive games which only need an unlocked Core i3/Core i5.


https://youtu.be/t8K2yc11eC4

Another day and another pro-AMD Hardware Unboxed video. Their outler results compared to everyone else's is hilarious.

 

[jpiniero]

Already have an 8 core. A six is a downgrade.

Even faster six cores?

Intel badly needs to get it out, but once the 8600K is out it'll be the king of gaming and there won't be much reason to get anything else. Unless the price starts to get up there...

 

[TheF34RChannel]

Even faster six cores?

Intel badly needs to get it out, but once the 8600K is out it'll be the king of gaming and there won't be much reason to get anything else. Unless the price starts to get up there...

Actually, as someone above illustrated (watch dogs 2) and I myself can corroborate the results, the 8700K with HT will be the gaming king.

 

[Madpacket]

Actually, as someone above illustrated (watch dogs 2) and I myself can corroborate the results, the 8700K with HT will be the gaming king.

One game?

 

[Madpacket]

Ryzen is slower at some things so not really the perfect upgrade.

The 8600K will be slower than the less expensive 8 core Ryzen chips in many other things. It'll boil down to those who want pay a premium to play poorly threaded games for that 5 - 15% speed advantage at lower resolutions, while surpassing a overclocked Ryzen 1600X in multithreaded workloads.

The 1700 will likely remain the best overall CPU for the price, especially for those of us who play at 1440P or higher.

That being said I do hope there's some way of getting Z170 or Z270 boards with adequate VRMs working with these new hex cores so there's an upgrade path, but so far all things so far are pointing to no.

 

[Madpacket]

Another day and another pro-AMD Hardware Unboxed video. Their outler results compared to everyone else's is hilarious.

I don't watch his videos that often but he tends to bench lots of games compared to other reviewers giving a more complete picture.

Is he really an AMD shill? And if so, why?

 

[crashtech]

Perhaps we can stipulate that the 8600K will be the gaming heir apparent...

 

[Alpha One Seven]

Perhaps we can stipulate that the 8600K will be the gaming heir apparent...

So Intel will take the crown from...Intel.

 

[frozentundra123456]

The 8600K will be slower than the less expensive 8 core Ryzen chips in many other things. It'll boil down to those who want pay a premium to play poorly threaded games for that 5 - 15% speed advantage at lower resolutions, while surpassing a overclocked Ryzen 1600X in multithreaded workloads.

The 1700 will likely remain the best overall CPU for the price, especially for those of us who play at 1440P or higher.

That being said I do hope there's some way of getting Z170 or Z270 boards with adequate VRMs working with these new hex cores so there's an upgrade path, but so far all things so far are pointing to no.

Did you mean 8700K? Because the 8600k will be very unlikely to be more expensive than the 8 core ryzen chips, and most likely will be a bit cheaper. And again, it depends on workload. It will be faster in many applications as well, namely those that utilize six cores or less.

 

[moonbogg]

6/6 is going to be kind of lacking I think. BF1 multiplayer and many other games completely max out a quad i5. Adding two more cores will help, but it won't be ideal and I'd still expect CPU usage to be pretty high and not leave much room for comfort. If it was an 8 core i5, then that would be nice and sufficient, but 6 cores with no HT...that's some seriously entry level stuff right there and will be easy to overwhelm. However, it will likely pack a big gaming punch for the price. It just won't do much else very well and will be marginally adequate in terms of thread count.

 

[Carfax83]

Again, no.

Clock speed always matters about the same amount for both completely serial and completely parallel loads and everything in between.

You're misrepresenting what I'm saying. I never said that clock speed didn't matter, or that it was irrelevant

I just said that it mattered less as the workload becomes more parallelized. This is absolutely true, as you only need to look at embarrassingly parallel workloads like graphics where the GPU has always had much lower clock speeds than CPUs, but much more execution units.

Clock speed and IPC are the factors that are constant in their importance, it is core count that fluctuates in importance depending on the degree of parallel execution illustrated nicely by Amdahl's Law.

No one has said that clock speed is unimportant, so I don't know why you even bothered to write this.

 

[crashtech]

@moonbogg ,we haven't seen a CPU like the 8600K, nobody really knows what it will do. I think it's going to do surprisingly well in gaming.

 

[Carfax83]

Basically almost all CPUs from AMD and Intel. Even the Xeon Phi only has 72 cores.

I think you need to reread what you just quoted. I never said CPUs, I said GPUs. When have you ever seen a GPU that had a small handful of cores with very high clock speeds?

 

[Carfax83]

@moonbogg ,we haven't seen a CPU like the 8600K, nobody really knows what it will do. I think it's going to do surprisingly well in gaming.

8600K is going to be an excellent gaming chip, but if someone were to ask me, I would always recommend the 8700K. Coffee Lake having a dual channel memory controller will make it very sensitive to memory performance, and the 8600 series will particularly be susceptible as it will have less L3 cache and lack hyperthreading. Not many people are aware, that hyperthreading helps to mask memory latency and memory latency is very important in gaming for performance.

 

[crashtech]

8600K is going to be an excellent gaming chip, but if someone were to ask me, I would always recommend the 8700K. Coffee Lake having a dual channel memory controller will make it very sensitive to memory performance, and the 8600 series will particularly be susceptible as it will have less L3 cache and lack hyperthreading. Not many people are aware, that hyperthreading helps to mask memory latency and memory latency is very important in gaming for performance.

It always comes down to the value proposition, six real cores with high clocks, even w/o HT, will provide performance in excess for most games, imo. But I am with you in that I will take the 8700K, yet for me it's not really about gaming performance.

 

[moonbogg]

@moonbogg ,we haven't seen a CPU like the 8600K, nobody really knows what it will do. I think it's going to do surprisingly well in gaming.

I get a feeling you may be right, lol. It may end up being crazy good, who knows. 6 real cores should perform better than 4/8, so it will be interesting. 6 without HT may produce less heat and will also cost less and likely perform similar to the 6/12 in most games, so it might be the go-to gaming chip for lots of people. I'd go with the 8700K any day over the i5 though.

 

[TheF34RChannel]

I get a feeling you may be right, lol. It may end up being crazy good, who knows. 6 real cores should perform better than 4/8, so it will be interesting. 6 without HT may produce less heat and will also cost less and likely perform similar to the 6/12 in most games, so it might be the go-to gaming chip for lots of people. I'd go with the 8700K any day over the i5 though.

Precisely what I am thinking. The i5-8600K will be a gaming beast, however for those games that benefit from HT the i7-8700K will be a monster. I want the monster.

 

[tamz_msc]

Except as others have pointed out, you are giving up significant ST performance and clockspeed for that 'upgrade'. For highly parallel workloads, sure, the R7 1700 would be a significant upgrade, that should be obvious. But it's not an overall upgrade because in ST and max clocks it's a downgrade.

Coffee Lake though, would be a 'real' upgrade in that you gain MT performance (approx 50%) whilst not losing any ST performance. That is, assuming of course that you can overclock most 6C 8600K/8700Ks to around the ~5GHz mark.

I always chuckle at these comments regarding what constitutes a 'significant' upgrade. Suppose a 4970K owner has the option of a getting 5960X at 300$(with motherboard+RAM another 300$). Isn't this a significant upgrade? Because that's what the R7 1700 actually is(unless you really, really care about AVX2).

 

[TheGiant]

Coffee Lake though, would be a 'real' upgrade in that you gain MT performance (approx 50%) whilst not losing any ST performance. That is, assuming of course that you can overclock most 6C 8600K/8700Ks to around the ~5GHz mark.

This,

it is the first time in like 10 years when we don't have to sacrifice anything while increasing core count.

 

[tamz_msc]

It is interesting that you say that, because I have resisted from upgrading from my own i5 2500K @ 4.5GHz for that very reason. What is 'significant' is totally subjective of course, but I would argue that a 'noticeable' increase in performance would constitute a 'significant' upgrade.

So, for me personally, Coffee Lake makes sense as an upgrade as it provides a 'noticeable' ST gain (approx 30% taking into account IPC improvements and higher clockspeeds) whilst MT performance would probably be closer to a 100% gain if you factor in the extra 2 cores and HT, were I to opt for a 8700K.

A R7 1700, for example, would have provided a small IPC boost over my 2500K but at the expense of 500MHz clockspeed (assuming a 4GHz overclock on the 1700), so overall ST would be a 'sidegrade' at best. Of course the MT capabilities of the 1700, like the 8700K, would be roughly 2x that of my overclocked 2500K, if not more.

Assuming the prices quoted earlier are correct and the 8700K is $80 more than the 1700 (notwithstanding platform costs, I would assume a Z370 would be the costlier platform) would I prefer the 8700K despite the higher cost? I would have to say yes, as I really don't want to 'sidegrade' my ST performance from a chip I've owned since 2011.

Let's do a quick calculation using numbers from hardware.fr:
http://www.hardware.fr/articles/965-2/performances-applicatives.html
At stock, an R7 1700 or an i7 5960X would give you anywhere between 2.5-2.7x the performance of the 2500K in applications. Using the uplift from the 4790K to 5820/5930K, if we use the 7740K as a baseline, we can estimate a 8700K would also land smack in between the R7 1700 and 5960X.

However, from the gaming charts, we can see that while the 1700 only affords a 30% uplift, the 5960X gives over 50%, while the 8700K could in theory give 70% more performance, again using the 7740X as a baseline, while going from a 2500K.

This seems like a very bad compromise, but if you think that this is only true for 1080p performance using a GTX 1080/1080Ti class card, which has a couple of takers though I'd argue they're in the relative minority, then at present, the situation does not seem so dire.

 

[PeterScott]

You're misrepresenting what I'm saying. I never said that clock speed didn't matter, or that it was irrelevant

I just said that it mattered less as the workload becomes more parallelized. This is absolutely true, as you only need to look at embarrassingly parallel workloads like graphics where the GPU has always had much lower clock speeds than CPUs, but much more execution units.

No one has said that clock speed is unimportant, so I don't know why you even bothered to write this.

Yes, you said clock-speed mattered less, and I said it maintains it's importance. Not sure what your difficulty is.

Clock-speed importance remains the same regardless of load type because it always has a proportional impact.

It matters in GPUs as well. Most of Pascals gains over Maxwell came from clock-speed increases.

But GPUs are specialized rendering HW, and this is a CPU discussion, so try to stay on topic.

More specifically this is about 6 core Coffee Lake which could be a great CPU no matter how parallel the workload.

A big part of how great Coffee Lake will be, depends on how high people can get it's clock-speed.

 

[tamz_msc]

My 2500K is clocked at 4.5GHz, not the stock 3.3GHz as used in those charts... would make a big difference to those figures.

Not really, here, for example, it’s faring better, but still coming up short on a Haswell i5.

You probably don't feel the difference because you're probably GPU limited.