LGA 1151 Processor - Intel Core I5-8600K

VERDICT

It’s not as fast as we hoped at stock speeds, but the Core i5-8600K’s six cores take very well to overclocking

- James Archer

THE PAST FEW months in the desktop CPU market have been the most interesting in years. AMD finally made itself relevant again with the Ryzen 7, 5 and 3 lines, as well as the more enthusiast-focused Threadripper. Intel, whose laurel-resting was evident in the underwhelming Kaby Lake generation, responded with a range of premium Kaby Lake-X and Skylake-X chips that were so expensive that they were out of most people’s reach.

Not long after, Intel came up with even more surprises. First, its 8th-gen line-up would include not just the main 14nm Coffee Lake chips, but a series of updated ‘Kaby Lake refresh’ parts and even some 10nm Cannonlake designs. Second, the Coffee Lake Core series would be receiving an extra two cores across the board – so the successors to 7th-gen dual-core chips would be 8th-gen quad-core chips, and so on.

Hence, we have the Core i5-8600K, the headliner of Intel’s latest mid-range Coffee Lake CPUs. It replaces the Kaby Lake Core i5-7600K, and since that was a quad-core chip, this new part comes with six cores. Again, there’s no Hyper-Threading support, so it has six threads as well. The trade-off initially appears to be per-core speeds: the Core i5-8600K has a base clock speed of 3.6GHz, a slight drop from the i5-7600K’s 3.8GHz, although maximum Turbo Boost speeds have increased a tad, from 4.2GHz to 4.3GHz.

LIQUID’S IN

Since the extent to which Turbo Boost can increase clock speeds is dependent on thermal headroom, sufficient CPU cooling is, therefore, more important than ever, especially since Intel has crammed the extra cores on to a processor that’s physically no larger than its Kaby Lake predecessor. Indeed, it slots into the very same LGA 1151 socket, though the new Z370 chipset means that you’ll need to purchase a new motherboard regardless.