The unlocked hex-core i5-8600K from Intel’s latest Coffee Lake generation of processors is the new flagship of the i5 series, succeeding the Kaby Lake quad-core i5-7600K. The 8th generation of processors brings the largest performance uplift since Sandy Bridge by adding more cores at each of the i3, i5 and i7 product lines. Like the other Coffee Lake processors, the i5-8600K is built upon optimized 14nm architecture, marginally improved upon from Kaby Lake and Skylake. The 8600K has a 95W TDP and a nominal stock clock of 3.6 GHz, which boosts to 4.1 GHz for all six cores, 4.2 GHz for dual/quad and 4.3 GHz for single core. Early benchmarks put the i5-8600K’s effective speed 15% ahead of the i5-7600K. A 50% increase in multi-core speed is explained by two additional cores and thanks to the quad-core clock bump from 4 GHz on the 7600K to 4.2 GHz on the 8600K there is also an additional 5% performance boost across all workloads. All Coffee Lake processors require a 300-series chipset, making a straight CPU upgrade unfeasible despite sharing the same socket as their Z270 predecessors. Even though most games still use less than 4 cores simultaneously, the i5-8600K is a great choice for gamers but for $80 less, the 8350K which is
faster than last years 7600K and only marginally weaker for gaming than the 8600K is certainly well worth considering as well. [Oct '17CPUPro]
Within minutes of the first, pre-release, 7000 series userbenchmark results, AMD’s marketers broadcast a 20% win over the 12900K via thousands of anonymous twitter, reddit, forum and youtube accounts. Buying new AMD products is like buying used cars: it takes time, experience and a taste for sales hype. It’s difficult for consumers to make rational choices while AMD completely dominates “sponsored news” and social media channels. Ten years ago, when AMD was the underdog, this type of marketing was understandable. Today, with a capitalization of $150 Billion USD, it’s disrespectful to AMD's own users. Even with Intel's marketing department asleep at the wheel, Ryzen will quickly end up in the same state as Radeon. Following a series of overhyped releases, consumers have little interest in the Radeon brand. The combined market share for all of AMD’s (discrete) Radeon RX 5000 and 6000 GPUs (Steam stats) is just 2%. Although the new 7000 series Zen4 CPUs are actually around 15% faster than their predecessors, they have hefty cooling requirements (TDP +60% vs 5000 series), 30 second BIOS post times, expensive DDR5 RAM requirements and only work with expensive motherboards. Despite the 7000 series struggling to match Intel’s outgoing 12th gen, AMD market it as a “future proof” platform! They want users to pay a premium for last gen performance in exchange for the shallow promise of upgrades in the future. Over the next few days, Intel’s 13th gen (Raptor Lake) will launch. Shoppers will do well to wait until then. Despite AMD’s Neanderthal marketing techniques, it’s hard not to admire their technical progress. AMD-Raptor4 and Intel-Zen13 would be better fitting product names. [Sep '22CPUPro]
We calculate effective speed which measures real world performance for typical users. Effective speed is adjusted by current prices to yield a value for money rating. Our calculated values are checked against thousands of individual user ratings. The customizable table below combines these factors to bring you the definitive list of top CPUs. [CPUPro]
Welcome to our PC speed test tool. UserBenchmark will test your PC and compare the results to other users with the same components. You can quickly size up your PC, identify hardware problems and explore the best value for money upgrades.