Intel Core i5-8600K: Six mid-range cores

Since Coffee Lake-S is becoming more and more a digital launch and the hardware is not really available in quantities, we could actually take our time. The new Intel Core i5-8600K is also more of a fata morgana, the auc... In the AI test of Civilization IV, all CPUs position themselves in a good way as one might expect from the technical data.

Important preliminary remark on CPU selection and overclocking

Contrary to our usual handling, not benchmarking the productive areas with overclocked CPUs, as it is also rather unlikely in reality, this time we tested both coffee-lake CPUs both in factory condition and overclocked. We were simply interested in how well this architecture could scale with clock increases in different scenarios, as we have already seen a lot of performance improvements in gaming.

And since we want to stay fair, we have also overclocked the Ryzen 7 1700 and Ryzen 5 1600X to its reasonable limits, as this comparison also has a certain charm. In contrast to gaming, we had to run the older core i5-7600K with 4.9 GHz this time, because the CPU already generated errors in some HPC runs. The 100 MHz less clock compared to the comparatively more demanding games, however, should be able to hurt.

DTP and Presentation

With Adobe's Creative Cloud, we use an exemplary benchmark that can well represent both single and multi-core performance. This test of a production application makes more sense than synthetic benchmarks. After Effects CC is the classic parade horse for parallelizable work, where core numbers go beyond clock.

But no matter how we turn and turn it, as long as all the cores can't be used, Coffee Lake usually wins thanks to the slightly higher bar. With Adobe's InDesign CC, however, the phenomenon occurs again that the Core i5-8600K, like the Core i7, falls back behind the Core i5 7600K reproducibly – for whatever reason.

3. Encoding and Multimedia

In our selected test with Handbrake, the new Core i5-8600K can dominate pretty much anything in its class by default.

Only with the more elaborate high-quality setting does the whole thing look a little different. Here AMD's Ryzen 7 1700 can narrowly dominate due to the larger number of cores, if you only get overclocked properly. Then it is inferior to a Ryzen 7 1800X at the same time in (almost) nothing.

4th. Compression and decompression

The six cores of the Core i6-8600K, coupled with the high clock speed, give the CPU the class victory again, even if the more expensive Core i7-8700K performs a tick better.