discussion With Coffee Lake shaking up the landscape in two weeks, will Linus & Co. rethink their idea of the best CPU for pure gaming?

[Techhog]

Linus, since at least Sandy Bridge it seems, has long felt that 4 core and 4 threads is all you need for a pure gaming machine (even using the 7600K in his RGB build guide), and for good reason. That has, for the most part, been the case for a long time. That said, Coffee Lake presents an interesting challenge to this idea. What was i5 is now i3, while the new i5 should perform similarly to an i7. This means that one of two things could come out of his review of the 8th-gen K SKUs in two weeks:

 

1. Linus will declare the (likely sub-$200) i3 8350K to be the best value for gamers, sticking to his guns. This makes a lot of sense, as it could open the door for a GTX 1080 build at a great price, and the i3 might even overclock a little better.
2. He'll start thinking about the current trends in newer games and see more value in i7 performance at an i5 price than in i5, and as such the i5 brand will remain king

First of all, no, I'm not ignoring Ryzen. If Zen+ can increase clocks things will shake up again; however, realistically, Intel is just the king of gaming and Ryzen will need some serious price cuts soon. Hopefully this will change next year.

 

Second, you're probably wondering why I'm making this thread now... Well, I just think it'll be more interesting to do it a little while before we see anything ant then later compare our predictions to reality. Of course, you can present another possibility and give your own prediction of what the top gaming CPU for the money of Holiday 2017. Then we'll see how it actually turns out. Personally, I see Linus & Crew going with option 1, at the very least up to 1070 Ti-based systems. However, assuming a price no higher than $270 US, I think that the 8600K will be the better choice for a system you want to last a long time; it could even be the true successor to the 2500K. And yes, it has two fewer threads than current i7s, but it should still pretty much match them in multithreaded workloads. The worse overclockability might hurt it though. If reports of 4.8GHz on all cores on air come to fruition, an overclocked 8600K could last a very long time. 

 

What do you think?

[m0k]

how do you people not get tired ...of speculating

[DrMacintosh]

Coffee Lake will shake things up just as much as a small train going by. 

[MaxBunny]

If it's any good then AMD/Ryzen will drop in price to compete. But it's not going to be anything particularly new or special. If anything, Intel saturating the market with multiple models like Call of Duty iterations every year is already making prices better for us.

[Skanky Sylveon]

I doubt that Coffee lake will shake things up much.

[epsilon84]

Well a lot depends on the street price of the i3 8350K vs the i5 8600K.

 

Looking at current i3 vs i5 pricing that gap is around $100. You could argue that the $100 could go towards a faster GPU, $100 is roughly the difference between a GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, for example. A 8350K + GTX 1080 will beat a 8600K + GTX 1070 in almost every game, especially at resolutions above 1080P. 

 

However, the 8350K could potentially bottleneck a GTX 1080 at 1080P gaming, especially at stock 4GHz (not so much at 5GHz) and you could argue that the 8600K + GTX 1080 would be the more 'balanced' CPU/GPU combination despite costing $100 more.