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DTP, Office, Multimedia & Compression
We ran the older Core i5-7600K through our application test suite at 4.9 GHz, while the U.S. lab was able to maintain 5 GHz for the game testing. This boils down to a difference in sample quality between our offices, reminding us that maximum overclock frequencies aren't guaranteed.
DTP and Presentation
Adobe’s Creative Cloud gives us a look at real-world single- and multi-threaded performance. As such, it beats synthetic benchmarks as a productivity test. After Effects CC is the classic example of a workload that prizes parallelism, so core count trumps clock frequencies.
Overclocking helps propel Core i5-8600K out in front of the stock Core i7-8700K, though.
Meanwhile, in Adobe's InDesign CC, both Coffee Lake-based CPUs fall behind a stock Core i5-7600K. Presumably, this is another instance where higher clock rates in lightly-threaded tasks reign.
Encoding and Multimedia
The stock Core i5-8600K dominates every other CPU except for Intel's Core i7-8700K at default settings during SPECwpc's default HandBrake test.
Overclocking naturally changes the landscape quite a bit, helping a couple of Ryzen CPUs compete more aggressively. Then again, at 4.9 GHz, the -8600K lands in first place ahead of those tuned Ryzens.
The more taxing high-quality benchmark asks more from the field, allowing AMD's overclocked Ryzen 7 1700 to slide in ahead of Core i5-8600K at 4.9 GHz.
Core i7-8700K doesn't need overclocking to achieve compelling performance. It's flying high on Hyper-Threading. Just imagine that processor running at the same 4.9 GHz we used in our review.
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