Core i7-8700K CPU by Intel Review

Performance in programs

Cinebench R15

Cinebench R15 is based on the Cinema 4D software. It is very useful to measure the performance gain obtained by the presence of several processing cores while rendering heavy 3D images. Rendering is an area where a bigger number of cores helps a lot, because usually this kind of software recognize several processors (Cinebench R15, for example, can use up to 256 processing cores).
We ran the CPU benchmark, which renders a complex image using all the processing cores (real and virtual) to speed up the process. The result is given as a score.

On Cinebench R15 CPU benchmark, the Core i7-8700K was 9% slower than the Ryzen 7 1700X, and 42% faster than the Core i7-7700K.

Blender

Blender is a image and movie redering software that uses all the threads of the CPU. We used the program to render a heavy image of a project named Gooseberry Benchmark. The graph below shows the time the CPU used to finish the image, so the less, the better.

On Blender, the Core i7-8700K was 12% faster than the Ryzen 7 1700X, and 41% faster than the Core i7-7700K.

CPU-Z

On its current version, the well-known hardware identification software CPU-Z comes with a benchmarking tool, which measures CPU performance for one core and for all available cores.

On the single thread benchmark, the Core i7-8700K was 20% faster than the Ryzen 7 1700X, and performed similarly to the Core i7-7700K.

On the multiple thread benchmark, the Core i7-8700K was 14% slower than the Ryzen 7 1700X, and 38% faster than the Core i7-7700K.

Handbrake

Media Espresso is a video conversion program that uses the graphics processing unit of the video engine to speed up the conversion process. We converted a 1 GiB, 1920x1080i, 23,738 kbps, .mov video file to a smaller 320×200, H.264, .MP4 file for viewing on a smartphone. The results below are given in seconds, so the lower the better.

Here the Core i7-8700K performed similarly to the Ryzen 7 1700X, and was 41% faster than the Core i7-7700K.

WinRAR

Another task where the CPU is very demanded is on file compacting. We ran a test compacting a folder with 8 GiB on 6.813 files to a file, using WinRAR 4.2. The graph below shows the time taken on each test.

On WinRAR, the Core i7-8700K was 28% faster than the Ryzen 7 1700X, and performed similarly to the Core i7-7700K.

V-Ray Benchmark

V-Ray Benchmark is a tool for measuring image rendering performance using the processor and the graphics card. It renders two images, one using the processor (CPU) and one using the video engine (GPU). We ran the benchmark and compared the CPU time on the graphics below.

On V-Ray, the Core i7-8700K was similar to the Ryzen 7 1700X, and was 40% faster than the Core i7-7700K.