CPU Empire Strikes Back - 6core i5 and 4core i3 incoming

This new family introduces the first-ever 6-core Intel Core i5 desktop processor and first-ever 4-core Intel Core i3 desktop processor.

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The one other chip that is worth mentioning is the Intel Core i5-8400. This is a 6 core processor with no hyper threading and no overclocking enabled so what makes it so special? The pricing. Intel Core i5-8400 has been priced at a remarkable $182 US range which is under the $200 US pricing range.

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joxer said:

The time for 2core CPUs to die has come. Thank god.

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Intel Core i5-8400 Conclusion:

But the winner today in my review is the Core i5-8400. This chip, for under $200 US is a deal breaker. It has 6 cores, can boost up to 4 GHz and delivers amazing price to performance for the price point. The chip has great gaming performance and having 6 cores at hands mean that you can still be able to do all the multi-tasking you want without any issues.

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joxer said:

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Die i7, dieeeeeeeeeee!!!

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Forget all the headline-grabbing overclocking figures, this is the Coffee Lake chip for gamers. Sure, the tantalising prospect of having your K-series i5 running at a heady 5.1GHz, without melting through the layered PCB of your motherboard, is like a siren call to us PC people, but if it’s not delivering anything tangible for games that hardly matters.

We’re going to see a whole lot of gaming machines built around the Core i5 8400 in the coming year, and rightly so. It’s a seriously powerful little gaming chip for the money, and it’s definitely grabbed my attention.

As I said earlier, if you need high-performance CPU power for $250 or less, then the K-series Coffee Lake and the six-core, 12-thread AMD Ryzen 1600, or 1600X, will be great shouts. But, for us gamers, it’s all about the Core i5 8400. It's an incredibly good value chip delivering unprecedented gaming performance for the money.

The fantastic-value Core i5 8400 is the gamer's chip from Intel's 8th Gen Coffee Lake range, which is surprising considering the K-series i5 is capable of hitting 5.1GHz without issue. But overclocking gives you no extra gaming performance that the powerful extra cores Coffee Lake can't offer on their own.

Outside of the realm of gaming things are obviously different. The higher frequency of the overclocked i5 8600K, and the extra thread-count of the R5 1600 and 1600X, mean that they’re far better choices for anything that demands serious multi-threaded CPU performance.

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Intel i5-8400 review - the best new gaming CPU in years
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Looking at the big picture, there are now three primary candidates in the $200 CPU market: Core i5-8400, Ryzen 5 1600, and Ryzen 5 1500X. For gaming purposes, Core i5-8400 is definitely the way to go, delivering 25-35 percent better performance than the Ryzen 5 parts. But that's with a high-end graphics card, so if you're going with a mainstream GPU the gap will be much smaller. In application performance, Intel also comes out ahead of both Ryzen 5 parts, something that wasn't at all true of the previous i5-7400/i5-7500 offerings.

That makes the Core i5-8400 the best overall processor in the mainstream market. It's just a damn shame you don't even have the option of upgrading an existing Z270 system with the Coffee Lake parts, but it's still an excellent value and well worth considering. Intel is more generous this round in both core counts and clockspeeds, mostly because it had to be in order to come out on top. With renewed competition from AMD in the CPU market, we can only hope that 2018 will continue to give us more dramatic improvements in CPU performance, at a price that won't make us flinch.

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Core i7-8700K Review: Coffee Lake Brews A Great Gaming CPU

Intel says that its Core i7-8700K is the company's best gaming processor ever. So, we use a geometric mean of 99th percentile frame times, a good indicator of smoothness, converted into an FPS measurement, to gauge the veracity of this bold claim across our suite. Five of the games we test were released in 2016, and five are older (2014/2015). Extra cores could enable more performance as software evolves, so we also include a chart with newer games that thoroughly utilize available host processing resources. We also have price-to-performance charts that get split up to include both the price of the processor and extra platform costs. For the models that don't come with a bundled cooler, we add an extra $25 for a basic heat sink. We also add $20 if overclocking requires a more expensive motherboard (as is the case for Z370).

Despite a few missteps, Core i7-8700K lives up to Intel’s claims. While it doesn't beat the -7700K by a massive margin, the Coffee Lake flagship does deliver better performance in stock and overclocked form. Of course, adding a Z370 motherboard and competent cooler knocks you over the $400 mark, so be ready to pay for that privilege.

Value-seekers have to be asking if Core i7-8700K's price tag is even worth paying, then. After all, you can get Ryzen 7 1800X-class performance out of an overclocked Ryzen 7 1700 for $300 or less. But based on our matrix, Coffee Lake gives you the best performance (furthest to the right) without getting too crazy on price. We're naturally wondering how Core i5-8600K will fare. For now, though, Core i7-8700K is the gaming CPU to own.

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joxer said:

The question is… Are you gaming? Or facebooking? If gaming, then i5. If facebooking, you must buy i7, obviously.

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