Review: Intel Core i7-8086K (14nm)

by Tarinder Sandhu on 13 June 2018, 10:00

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC)

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Conclusion

Our research shows it's 100-150MHz better than the in-house Core i7-8700K when approaching the 5GHz barrier.

The limited release of the Intel Core i7-8086K is more of a marketing push than real-world benefit over the readily-available Core i7-8700K. Plumbed in with the same frequencies on all but a single core, this new chip is a speed-binned version of the Coffee Lake architecture.

There's little point in forking out the extra £60 or so for this model - £380 vs. £320 - if running at stock speeds, but it does make a modicum of sense when going for an all-core 5GHz on a mainstream Intel platform cooled by a capable heatsink.

Research shows it's 100-150MHz better than our in-house Core i7-8700K when approaching the 5GHz barrier, and if you like that number, the best chance is with this processor. In that case, the £60 premium is probably less than you'd pay a specialist company that guarantees certain overclocks via their own binning. We expect most Core i7-8086K chips to hit a perfectly stable all-core 5GHz with sub-1.3V.

Of course, being a limited edition chip, with around 42,000 available to the public, the prudent enthusiast may just keep one aside for future appreciation - geeks and their money are easily parted for limited-run products.

More pragmatically, the higher boost clocks increase Intel's lead in light-load tests when compared to AMD Ryzen, though those eight-core, 16-thread CPUs still do very well from a bang-for-buck and multithreaded performance perspective.

Intel is asking you to pay a 20 per cent premium for a chip that is likely to overclock better than the Core i7-8700K. Is it worth it? That absolutely depends upon your overclocking viewpoint and whether having a limited-edition processor tickles your fancy.

You'll know if you want one.

 


The Good
  
The Bad
First consumer Intel CPU at 5GHz
Overclocks to all-core 5GHz easily
Potent Coffee Lake architecture
Limited edition
  
20 per cent premium over 8700K
No cooler in box



Intel Core i7-8086K


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Posted by ik9000 - Wed 13 Jun 2018 10:56
coffee lake architecture, so it still gets a slow down with meltdown and spectre patches right? Can you confirm whether these were turned on in your testing or left off so it can be compared directly to the older tests in the charts. If the latter, what is the performance drop once they are run with the MD + Spectre patches activated?
Posted by lumireleon - Wed 13 Jun 2018 14:52
Explain how does PiFast benchmark help us in the real world?
Posted by kalniel - Wed 13 Jun 2018 15:13
lumireleon
Explain how does PiFast benchmark help us in the real world?

It has an OK correlation with most real world tasks that are not heavily threaded.
Posted by ByteMyAscii - Wed 13 Jun 2018 15:52
lumireleon
Explain how does PiFast benchmark help us in the real world?

As much as any artificial benchmark meant to represent the performance under a task utilizing certain types of features or workloads on a CPU.
As kalniel said, PiFast is single-threaded, and so offers a relative performance comparison for applications which are entirely or mostly single-threaded.
That still applies to a lot of games for instance.
Posted by EN1R0PY - Wed 13 Jun 2018 17:21
ByteMyAscii
lumireleon
Explain how does PiFast benchmark help us in the real world?

As much as any artificial benchmark meant to represent the performance under a task utilizing certain types of features or workloads on a CPU.
As kalniel said, PiFast is single-threaded, and so offers a relative performance comparison for applications which are entirely or mostly single-threaded.
That still applies to a lot of games for instance.

While I don't broadly disagree with you I have to say the old ‘most games are singlenthreaded’ had been used as a defence for focusing on these kinds of benchmarks for too long. Even IF a modern game is single thread heavy the main thread still uses much more of the functionality of the core that deviding 23 by 7 over and over again. I really don't think there is a direct comparison, approximation sure, but going by the pifast scores alone you'd get a very different picture from actual gaming benchmarks.

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