Leaks point to the Intel i7 8700K beating the AMD Ryzen 7 1700; Intel is back and they want blood!

The Intel Core i7 8700K is Intel’s first mainstream 6-core CPU, but it may also be Intel’s fastest yet, if these leaks are to be trusted. While previously we have shared leaks of it trading blows with AMD’s Ryzen 5 1600X, we did note that the i7 8700K was running at unusually low clocks for an Intel CPU. Now, we have leaks of it benched at 4.7 GHz, and it beats the AMD Ryzen 7 1700 running at it’s stock 3.7 GHz with a sizeable lead.

The benchmark didn’t reveal the RAM frequency and timings, and neither did they overclock the Ryzen 7 1700 CPU despite deciding to test the i7 8700K overclocked to 4.7 GHz. With the above caveats, take these results with a pinch of salt as we even see the i7 8700K potentially cannibalizing sales of their HEDT CPU, the i7 7800X on the X299 platform.

The 6-core Intel Core i7 8700K literally wipes the floor with the Ryzen 7 1700, while matching it in Cinebench’s multi-threaded benchmark despite featuring two cores and four threads less. The older i7 7800X and i7 7700K running at stock had no chance at all against the overclocked Intel Core i7 8700K, which really leaves me wondering is Intel really going to make their hexa-core Skylake-X CPU irrelevant so quickly?

Still, it would boil down to pricing in the end. Given the recent Kaby Lake Refresh launches where prices remained the same while core counts doubled, we might see Intel do the same here for the Intel i7 8700K. If the Intel Core i7 8700K is priced at the same RM1600-ish price point of the i7 7700K, Intel would dominate the CPU market once again.

Pokdepinion: Intel’s product lines have been upgraded really drastically in this 8th Generation. Can’t help to think that Intel has been holding out on us, milking consumers with products that offered no real gain just because they can, considering they had a long monopoly of the market. Suddenly, in this 8th Generation we see more cores across the board.