Romanian Tech Site Overclocks I7 8700K to 5.1GHZ, Shares Benchmarks Early.

With the official launch of the Intel Coffee Lake series of processors happening on October 5th, mainstream tech sites are heeding NDA and not releasing any numbers or information ahead of time. As we’ve seen in the past, though, there are sites who don’t adhere to NDA and jump the gun on providing performance numbers in order to drive traffic. The NDA-breaking site in this instance, a Romanian site known as Lab 501, is the one who published performance numbers for the I7 8700K after performing benchmarks using a number of popular programs, including Cinebench and Handbrake. In addition, gaming benchmarks were performed using GTA: 5 and Metro: Last Light. How did the new Coffee Lake I7 8700K fare?

Though these are early numbers, the I7 8700K is certainly looking as expected in these benchmarks, performing around the level of the Ryzen 7 1800X in Cinebench and Handbrake, while it was able to dominate the Ryzen in the synthetic FireStrike and real-world GTA5 gamng benchmarks. The gaming benchmarks are helped out a lot by the high core clock of the I7 8700K and I’d expect to see possible improvements as optimization takes place on the platform. Keep in mind that the I7 8700K only has six cores compared to the eight on Ryzen 7 1800X, so the numbers in multi-threaded benchmarks look pretty good.

Lab 501 was able to clock the I7 8700K to 5.1GHz using the Gigabyte Z370 Gaming 7 motherboard. Their overclock was achieved without too much trouble or effort. Interestingly enough, the overclock was achieved using a high performance air cooler. We previously reported that water cooling was necessary, but this was an assumption. 5.1GHz on air is very impressive, indeed. The motherboard that LAB 501 is using, the Z370 Gaming 7 from Gigabyte, caught my attention as an attractive option for my upcoming I7 8700K build, so it’s nice to know that it has some overclocking chops.

Check out the benchmark results from Lab 501’s leaked review, below: