Kaby Lake vs Coffee Lake! Wait until things get sorted out or buy now?

[CapitalistVN]

A few days ago, Intel has introduced its newest microarchitecture, the 8th gen CPUs, called Coffee Lake. Now as a moderate gamer, I'm very excited about this as I can increase my core count in my i3-7100 to 4 cores for free! But since this generation is so new that the CPU market is not stabilized enough, and also there are only a few motherboards with chipset 300 that supports Coffee Lake, and they are really expensive (which is a really dumb thing to do Intel. Why they won't support 200 mobos longer?). Anyway, I planned to upgrade my rig to an i3-8350K to get overclocking and better performance. Should I upgrade it now or wait at least until 2018, because I also know that Intel will still introduce more 8th gen CPUs next year. btw I'm new and come from Vietnam, as you can probably guess...

[Fardin]

8 minutes ago, CapitalistVN said:

A few days ago, Intel has introduced its newest microarchitecture, the 8th gen CPUs, called Coffee Lake. Now as a moderate gamer, I'm very excited about this as I can increase my core count in my i3-7100 to 4 cores for free! But since this generation is so new that the CPU market is not stabilized enough, and also there are only a few motherboards with chipset 300 that supports Coffee Lake, and they are really expensive (which is a really dumb thing to do Intel. Why they won't support 200 mobos longer?). Anyway, I planned to upgrade my rig to an i3-8350K to get overclocking and better performance. Should I upgrade it now or wait at least until 2018, because I also know that Intel will still introduce more 8th gen CPUs next year. btw I'm new and come from Vietnam, as you can probably guess...

are you not content with what you have? if you are, then wait & upgrade next year to 10nm cannon lake/ice lake whatever lake they bring.  

[Jurrunio]

8 minutes ago, CapitalistVN said:

I can increase my core count in my i3-7100 to 4 cores for free!s...

Is that a joke?

 

8 minutes ago, CapitalistVN said:

(which is a really dumb thing to do Intel. Why they won't support 200 mobos longer?).

There will be people trying to mod 200 mobo to fit Coffee CPUs. Just wait for their results.

 

8 minutes ago, CapitalistVN said:

Anyway, I planned to upgrade my rig to an i3-8350K to get overclocking and better performance. Should I upgrade it now or wait at least until 2018

This tells me you dont have the highest of budgets. In this case get a Skylake or Kaby Lake i7 instead. Since Coffee introduces 6 cores to the mainstream users these old quad cores will come at a much affordable price.

[CapitalistVN]

No really. Since the last i3-7100 only has 2 cores/4 threads, this year we have i3-8100 and i3-8350k with 4 cores/4 threads for the same amount of money!

[ImNotThere]

3 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

 

There will be people trying to mod 200 mobo to fit Coffee CPUs. Just wait for their results

the fitting the cpu in isnt an issue, they are confirmed afaik to use the 1151 socket but coffee lake wont be compatible with z170 or z270

[Jurrunio]

2 minutes ago, CapitalistVN said:

No really. Since the last i3-7100 only has 2 cores/4 threads, this year we have i3-8100 and i3-8350k with 4 cores/4 threads for the same amount of money!

yeah, but you will have to pay for that so it's not free

 

Just now, ImNotThere said:

the fitting the cpu in isnt an issue, they are confirmed afaik to use the 1151 socket but coffee lake wont be compatible with z170 or z270

I mean BIOS mods.

[InertiaSelling]

@CapitalistVN If you already have an i3 7100, you're going to spend much more money on an 8th gen CPU + 3xx motherboard than you would on a much better 7th gen CPU for your current motherboard. Why would you do that ?

[CapitalistVN]

3 hours ago, InertiaSelling said:

@CapitalistVN If you already have an i3 7100, you're going to spend much more money on an 8th gen CPU + 3xx motherboard than you would on a much better 7th gen CPU for your current motherboard. Why would you do that ?

That's my question! Wait 'till things get sorted out or just buy the newest 8th gen processors? Waiting might get me some cheaper 300 chipset mobos and better CPUs, but then the CPUs that will be released in 2018 will flip the whole market. Guys like me will want a 4 core i3 for a bargain price, then the CPU stock went out, then the whole thing will get like mining GPUs out-of-stock thing. Buying now will help me avoid those problems but higher price tag.

[InertiaSelling]

@CapitalistVN Oh, right. It's not CPU vs CPU, it's mobo + CPU vs much better CPU. I'd recommend you stick with Kaby Lake. You'll get much better performance by spending 300$ on a 7700k rather than 160$ on an i3 8350k and an expensive 300 chipset motherboard.

[sub_0ptimal]

arn't the i3 k series a joke? why buy an unlocked i3 when you could buy a regular i5?

 

imo, you should wait for 10nm if you can. like others have posted, in a few weeks you will be able to buy an i7 for your current mobo for the price of an 8th gen i3 + 370 mobo.

[InertiaSelling]

@Septopus For about 160$, you get a 4 core CPU with the single-threaded performance of an i7 6700 and the multi-threaded performance of a ryzen 5 1400. It's positioned against AMD's 1500x, whose price has dropped to about 170$, and the first leaked benchmark seems to indicate that it would be a much better choice for a pure gaming computer. This is no joke. You must be mistaking the 8350k for the ~220$ dual-core i3 7560x made for the x299 platform.

[sub_0ptimal]

yes, that's what I was remembering. 

 

Comparing the 8350k to the 8400, you can boost the i5 to 4Ghz single clock, get 6 cores/threads, 3mb more cache, and support for 2666 RAM over 2400. That seems like a pretty good deal for $14 difference. 

 

I'm really interested in coffee lake, because I will be upgrading from sandy bridge, so I'm looking for the best bang for my buck. 

[SpaceGhostC2C]

1 hour ago, CapitalistVN said:

That's my question! Wait 'till things get sorted out or just buy the newest 8th gen processors? Waiting might get me some cheaper 300 chipset mobos and better CPUs,

Waiting can benefit you in two ways: cheaper motherboards, cheaper used / destocking Skylake and Kaby Lake CPUs you can just plug in your motherboard. Non-Z motherboards will eventually come for locked CPUs, I assume, and should be cheaper.

1 hour ago, CapitalistVN said:

but then the CPUs that will be released in 2018 will flip the whole market.

Unless they come with some Sandy-Bridge-type of revolutionary improvement, they won't. This was it: Ryzen was a disruptive leap by AMD, Coffe Lake brings the performance/price realignment by Intel as a response. To the extent that each company comes up with incremental improvements only, the market will look the same.

1 hour ago, CapitalistVN said:

Guys like me will want a 4 core i3 for a bargain price, then the CPU stock went out, then the whole thing will get like mining GPUs out-of-stock thing. Buying now will help me avoid those problems but higher price tag.

Won't happen. If you are willing to buy a new motherboard, you already had Ryzen 3s and Ryzen 5 quads, now you have some CL i3s, and there is no crypto-mining based on low end CPUs. This is what the price of quad cores look like. It's only going down.

Bear in mind that these i3s will mostly match current i5s, and trail a bit against current i7s. If you have a Z170 or Z270, and are concerned about gaming performance mostly, you have a better alternative to moving to Ryzen or to Coffee Lake: buy a used i5 or o7 supported by your motherboard, and make sure you don't pay more than the price of a new ir or Ryzen 5 1500X at most, since that's their value in the current market.

[SpaceGhostC2C]

5 minutes ago, Septopus said:

yes, that's what I was remembering. 

 

Comparing the 8350k to the 8400, you can boost the i5 to 4Ghz single clock, get 6 cores/threads, 3mb more cache, and support for 2666 RAM over 2400. That seems like a pretty good deal for $14 difference. 

 

I'm really interested in coffee lake, because I will be upgrading from sandy bridge, so I'm looking for the best bang for my buck. 

Yes, I think to anyone with a motherboard supporting Intel's quad cores, Coffe Lake can only be enticing from i5s onwards. CL i3s only make sense for people building from scratch (or in the face of very dysfunctional second hand markets).

[sub_0ptimal]

@SpaceGhostC2C yes, the perplexing move by intel though is that coffee lake requires a new 370 series mobo, so anyone interested will kind of be building from scratch. Plus they've already got the new 10nm CPUs on the horizon, so these chips aren't backwards compatible and the mobos won't be upgradeable.