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
Ashes of the Singularity Escalation
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of DirectX12s features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four-minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run a fixed v2.11 version of the game due to some peculiarities of the splash screen added after the merger with the standalone Escalation expansion, and have an automated tool to call the benchmark on the command line. (Prior to v2.11, the benchmark also supported 8K/16K testing, however v2.11 has odd behavior which nukes this.)
At both 1920x1080 and 4K resolutions, we run the same settings. Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at Extreme settings, and take the frame-time output for our average, percentile, and 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
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mapesdhs - Monday, October 9, 2017 - link
GN did a great video on this, it's certainly complicated.crimson117 - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Will the included heatsink / cooler be viable on the i7-8700? Or would you still need to buy an aftermarket cooler?AndrewJacksonZA - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Typo page 7 (Civ AI):"an asymptotic result wken you"
"wken"
jimjamjamie - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
RIP hyperthreading for anything under $300...Anonymous Blowhard - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Buy AMD.mapesdhs - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link
Or a used Intel, sooo much value. I'd been looking for a 4930K upgrade for an X79 system (over a 3930K), so as to provide proper PCIe 3.0, etc., main focus is animation, rendering and video processing; gave up, bought a 10-core (20 thread) XEON E5-2680 v2 instead for 165 UKP (very easy to find). It scores 15.44 for CB 11.5, and 1381 for CB R15 (these tests force an all-core Turbo of 3.1GHz), compare these to the 8700K numbers, not bad at all for a board as old as X79, and the temps/power/heat/etc. are excellent.AndrewJacksonZA - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Thank you very much for your efforts, ladies and gentlemen, this was a really informative review and I enjoyed reading it. :-)sonichedgehog360@yahoo.com - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Here is a more accurate TDP test:https://img.purch.com/image001-png/w/711/aHR0cDovL...
bongey - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link
Quiet now, Anandtech only publishes what Intel tells them to publish.Ian Cutress - Saturday, October 7, 2017 - link
Last week I was being called an AMD shill. Before that, an Intel shill, Before that, an AMD shill. Swings, roundabouts, hedges.