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
Benchmarking Performance: CPU Legacy Tests
Our legacy tests represent benchmarks that were once at the height of their time. Some of these are industry standard synthetics, and we have data going back over 10 years. All of the data here has been rerun on Windows 10, and we plan to go back several generations of components to see how performance has evolved.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
3D Particle Movement v1
3DPM is a self-penned benchmark, taking basic 3D movement algorithms used in Brownian Motion simulations and testing them for speed. High floating point performance, MHz and IPC wins in the single thread version, whereas the multithread version has to handle the threads and loves more cores. This is the original version, written in the style of a typical non-computer science student coding up an algorithm for their theoretical problem, and comes without any non-obvious optimizations not already performed by the compiler, such as false sharing.
CineBench 11.5 and 10
Cinebench is a widely known benchmarking tool for measuring performance relative to MAXON's animation software Cinema 4D. Cinebench has been optimized over a decade and focuses on purely CPU horsepower, meaning if there is a discrepancy in pure throughput characteristics, Cinebench is likely to show that discrepancy. Arguably other software doesn't make use of all the tools available, so the real world relevance might purely be academic, but given our large database of data for Cinebench it seems difficult to ignore a small five minute test. We run the modern version 15 in this test, as well as the older 11.5 and 10 due to our back data.
x264 HD 3.0
Similarly, the x264 HD 3.0 package we use here is also kept for historic regressional data. The latest version is 5.0.1, and encodes a 1080p video clip into a high quality x264 file. Version 3.0 only performs the same test on a 720p file, and in most circumstances the software performance hits its limit on high end processors, but still works well for mainstream and low-end. Also, this version only takes a few minutes, whereas the latest can take over 90 minutes to run.
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masouth - Tuesday, October 10, 2017 - link
lol, he makes a comment on how SOFTWARE is written and you can't jump off YOUR bandwagon (be it Intel or Neutral) quick enough to heap your scorn.Dolpiz - Saturday, October 14, 2017 - link
https://youtu.be/oCSkyNHXIAE?t=20m48squanticchaos - Monday, February 5, 2018 - link
If you consider Ryzen does not have integrated graphics, Coffee lake beats its TDP hands down.Crono - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
I love the smell of coffee In The MorningIGTrading - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
We know that this is a "short" "pre-review", but it is a bit bizarre that there is no mention of AMD in the conclusion.Not that we consider that AMD should be necessarily mentioned in an article dedicated to an Intel launch, BUT Intel's offerings were always discussed in the conclusion section of every AMD review.
So we would consider it's just fair to remind people in the conclusion as well that the new Coffee Lake chips from Intel are a welcomed addition, but that they are unable to completely dethrone the competition and should be praised for the fact that AMD will be now forced to lower the Ryzen prices a bit.
The way it is right now, the conclusion is written like Intel is the only alternative, quad or hexa core, with nothing else on the market.
Personal opinion :
Despite me being the technical consultant on the team, this was observed by two of my colleagues (financial consultants) and they even brushed it away themselves as "nitpicking" .
Since I've worked in online media myself, this looks very similar with an attempt to post something to "play nice" with Intel's PR so we've decided to post this comment.
Therefore we eagerly await Ian's full review, with his widely appreciated comprehensive testing and comparisons.
Nevertheless, thank you Ian for your work! It is appreciated.
eddieobscurant - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
What did you expect, Anandtech is an intel pro review site. They didn't even mention the huge price difference between intel's z370 chipset motherboards required for coffee lake in contrast to amd's b350 chipset motherboards. It's almost double price.RDaneel - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
I haven't been following this closely, but does that mean that b350 boards are about $60? That's incredible! The Z370 I'm looking at is only $120, which didn't seem that bad, but if the b350s are really $60-70, then it might be worth checking out. Are they really that cheap?kpb321 - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Yup. Newegg shows almost a dozen B350 boards for $60-$70 currently. Most are micro ATX but there are a couple ATX boards in that range currently (after rebate) including "gaming" boards like the MSI B350 TOMAHAWK.name99 - Thursday, October 5, 2017 - link
Really? Other times I've heard they are a pro Apple review site, a pro IBM review site, and a pro MS review site.They really seem remarkably catholic in whom they support.
seamonkey79 - Friday, October 6, 2017 - link
It depends on the article.