Intel Core i7-8700K 6-Core 12-Thread Processor Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark Firestrike

Straight away, the new i7 is off to a flying start, delivering a score of 21760 in Firestrike. That’s a nice upgrade over the last generation, and even beats out the X299 i7-7740X, which for the record performs identically to the popular Z270 based i7-7700K. Overclocking rocketed the score further, pushing it to our second highest ever score to date, with the i9 holding onto a strong lead.

Stock

Overclocked

Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme

This test is all about the GPU, and shows us how well the PCIe throughput performance of the CPU compares. There’s barely a difference between anything here, but the 8700K managed a solid 5536 points stock and 5515 while overclocked.

Stock

Overclocked

PCMark 10 Express

For day to day system performance at home or in the office, that increased core count is bringing the good, delivering our 3rd fastest score by a nice margin over the 7820X. Overclocking kept it in the top three spots, virtually neck and neck with the 7740X and 8400.

Stock

Overclocked

WPrime 32M and 1024M

It’s no surprise that the most expensive CPUs are fastest when it comes to WPrime, but for a consumer CPU, the 8700K put out a time that sits nicely between the Ryzen 1700 and the 1700X at stock, although both those Ryzen CPUs tipped into the lead a little while overclocked. Still a great time though, and right in the ballpark of what we expected for the specifications.

Stock

Overclocked

Cinebench R15

i7’s are well known for being better at video rendering tasks compared to the i5, and the i3 ranges. Of course, the 8700K doesn’t slack in this task, with a nice score of 1418, although the Ryzen 7 series is still pulling ahead thanks to their 8-cores vs the Intel’s 6-core design. Furthermore, overclocking did bring good improvements, but the overall order of the CPUs remained about the same.

Stock

Overclocked

Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K

Again, the video transcoding performance is fantastic. It may look slow-ish, but we’ve been spoilt by £1000-2000 monster CPUs recently, the 8700K is still the fastest “consumer” CPU to date, and that’s something!

Stock

Overclocked