Intel's Coffee Lake-S flagship, the Core i7 8700K is - in our view - the fastest gaming CPU that money can buy right now, but what if you don't have £350/$350 to spend on a new processor? The new i5 line looks almost as exciting, bringing six physical cores to the mid-range market for the first time. The 8600K continues Intel's tradition of cutting hyper-threading and reducing clocks while leaving overclocking as an option, shaving off £100/$100 in the process. However, just as intriguing is the i5 8400 - a £180/$190 hexacore offering that offers remarkable value.
Going into this review, we had plenty of questions. Bearing in mind how brutally powerful the 8700K is, to what extent is hyper-threading necessary? Is the i5 just as good once overclocking is factored into the mix? Just how fast is the more budget orientated 8400 and how does the new Coffee Lake-S stack compare to last year's Kaby Lake? If you're still holding onto your legacy 2500K - as many are - just how much of an upgrade are the six-core i5s? And to what extent can AMD's Ryzen 5 compete?
That's a lot of topics to cover, so this review will be somewhat on the lengthy side, so let's kick off with the core specs - and some degree of confusion. Intel's official base and boost clocks for Coffee Lake show a yawning chasm between the 8400 and the 8600K, but in actual fact, running flat out, the budget chip happily locks at 3.8GHz - a state of affairs confirmed across multiple motherboards, even remaining the case when we paired it with a stock Intel heat sink and fan. The boost clocks actually signify the fastest single-core speed - suggesting just a small step between 8400 and 8600K - yet real world testing does show a more noticeable gap.
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