Intel Core i7-8700K And Core i5-8400 Review: Coffee Lake - More Cores, Performance And Value

Intel Core i7-8700K And i5-8400 - Cinebench, POV-Ray, Fluid Dynamics

Cinebench R15 is a combination CPU and OpenGL 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and can utilize any number of threads, which make is an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

Cinebench
3D Rendering Benchmark

cine

The 8-core Ryzen 7 1800X edges past the Core i7-8700K in Cinebench and maintains an approximate 100 point lead in the multi-threaded test. The Core i5-8400, however, punches well above its weight class and just misses the mark set by the Core i7-7700K. In the single-threaded test, the Core i7-8700K outpaced every other processor we have tested.

POV-Ray Performance
Ray Tracing Benchmark

POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

 pov

POV-Ray tells a similar story to Cinebench. Here, the Ryzen 7 1800X once again outpaces the Core i7-8700K in the multi-threaded benchmark, but the 8700K dominates Ryzen 7 in the single-threaded test. The Core i5's 6 physical cores also outpaced the Core i7-7700's quad-core / 8-thread configuration here.

STARS Euler3d
Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

This benchmark is multi-threaded, but is also dependent on platform bandwidth, so the final results are not determined by compute performance alone. Cache and memory bandwidth and latency affect the score as well...

stars
The Core i7-8700K and Core i5-8400 performed very well here. Their additional cores, relatively high clocks, and support for faster memory help push them ahead of all of the other mainstream processors -- it's only Intel's higher-end, multi-core processors with quad-channel memory that finish out in front.

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