Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
Office & Productivity
Adobe Creative Cloud
At stock settings, Core i7-8086K offered minimal improvement over the Core i7-8700K in our overall Adobe Creative Cloud score. Even though this suite has a few parallelized workloads, the final score is heavily influenced by the lightly-threaded tasks common in most desktop applications. So, it wasn't surprising to see the Core i7-8086K's superior overclock beat the tuned -8700K by 6.5%.
Web Browser
The Krakken suite tests JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography. Core i7-8086K trailed the -8700K in stock form, though overclocking changed the story.
The MotionMark benchmarks, which emphasize graphics (rather than JavaScript), are exceedingly sensitive to CPU clock rates. Yet, Intel's stock Core i7-8086K trailed the -8700K again, reinforcing our opinion that some motherboard firmware versions aren't fully optimized to exploit the 5 GHz single-core Turbo Boost bin.
Productivity
The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Other platform-level considerations affect this test as well, including the storage subsystem. Core i7-8086K exploited its clock rate advantage in stock and overclocked trim to provide snappy performance.
Our video conferencing suite measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection to model real-world usage. Core i7-8700 beat the -8086K by a hair; however, its locked multiplier prevents it from vying for chart-topping performance. Core i7-8086K posted a lead at stock frequencies during the writing benchmark, reinforcing that win after overclocking.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, so it's no surprise the tuned Ryzen 7 processors lead by a large margin. The overclocked Core i7-8086K fared best among Intel's CPUs, but there's no substitute for core/thread count in this workload.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPUs Content
