The AnandTech Coffee Lake Review: Initial Numbers on the Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8400
by Ian Cutress on October 5, 2017 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i5
- Core i7
- Core i3
- 14nm
- Coffee Lake
- 14++
- Hex-Core
- Hyperthreading
Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
There are no presets for the graphics options on GTA, allowing the user to adjust options such as population density and distance scaling on sliders, but others such as texture/shadow/shader/water quality from Low to Very High. Other options include MSAA, soft shadows, post effects, shadow resolution and extended draw distance options. There is a handy option at the top which shows how much video memory the options are expected to consume, with obvious repercussions if a user requests more video memory than is present on the card (although there’s no obvious indication if you have a low-end GPU with lots of GPU memory, like an R7 240 4GB).
To that end, we run the benchmark at 1920x1080 using an average of Very High on the settings, and also at 4K using High on most of them. We take the average results of four runs, reporting frame rate averages, 99th percentiles, and our time under analysis.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G Performance
1080p
4K
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
222 Comments
View All Comments
Ian Cutress - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
That was a mistake on my part. On that I'm still mentally in an era where 150 MHz is a 10% gain. My quick mental arithmetic failed.ScottSoapbox - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
It's a shame you didn't compare it to the 7820X. I think it was expected that it would better the 7800X at least to some degree, so the more interesting comparison is how much performance does the added cost of 8 cores get you.Ryan Smith - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
The graphs were already getting ridiculously long. For something like that, be sure to look at Bench: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1904?vs=20...realistz - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
AMD panic mode. Price drop imminent.Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Price drop already happened. R7 1700X now USD$300 on Amazon.willis936 - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
I'd like to see the memory testing done on Ryzen done on coffee lake as well. It's clear that 2 DDR4 channels is not enough for 8 cores, at least with AMD's memory subsystem. Is it enough for 6 cores with Intel's memory subsystem? Also please be sure to use a GPU powerful enough to warrant even reporting the gaming results.bharatwd - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Kabylake is faster than Coffeelake. where is the 15% increase? what is the point of + and ++ iteration when there is no improvement in performance? intel is just burning wafers for no reason. Better for them to go back to tick tock clock and stop wasting resources................SunnyNW - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Honestly I'm not sure why Intel doesn't just keep fab lines for the 7th gen i5s going and just re-label into the 8th gen i3s and just bin differently, ie higher base/turbo.AleXopf - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Thanks for the review Ian. Just one question. Why do you think power consumption differs so much with the data from techspot, were the 8700k consumes 190w, and it's on par with the 16c32t 1920x?Ian Cutress - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
Are they testing at-wall power consumption at stock? That might add a bunch.Our power numbers are just for the CPU, not the at wall - they are derived from the internal calibration tools that the processor uses to determine its own power P-states, which in effect is directly related to the turbo.
There seems to be a lot of boards that screw around with multi-core turbo this generation, which may also lead to higher power consumption numbers.