DTP, Office & Multimedia Performance
DTP and Presentation
Adobe’s Creative Cloud gives us a look at real-world single- and multi-threaded performance. As such, it's more interesting to us than synthetic benchmarks for productivity testing.
After Effects CC is the classic example of a workload that prizes parallelism, so core count trumps clock rates.
As long as some cores go underutilized, though, Coffee Lake usually wins thanks to its higher frequencies.
Strangely, under InDesign CC, the Core i5-8400 repeatedly falls behind Intel's Core i5-7400. The same happens when we test the K-series SKUs. This is likely a result of lower Turbo Boost frequencies, handing the advantage over to Kaby Lake's higher base clock rates.
Encoding and Multimedia
The new Core i5-8400 keeps up with other processors in its class. However, the pricier Ryzen 5 1600X takes the lead once we overclock it.
Taxing high-quality settings allow AMD to close the gap, and Ryzen 5 1600X now beats the Core i5-8400 in stock form. Again, though, it's also more expensive. The difference, of course, is that AMD gives you freedom to overclock. A tuned 1600X better-justifies the price premium.
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