Office & Productivity
Adobe Creative Cloud
Core i7-8700 with its stock heat sink lost some ground to Corsair's closed-loop liquid cooler in the Illustrator test. Otherwise, there was little to differentiate both configurations.
The stock Core i7-8700K barely beat Core i7-8700 in our aggregate score. However, overclocking the K-series chip to 4.9 GHz propelled it into a second-place finish (after Core i5-8600K, interestingly enough).
Web Browser
The Meltdown and Spectre patches imposed performance penalties on Intel CPUs through our Web browser tests. However, Core processors still lead through these lightly-threaded benchmarks.
The Krakken suite tests JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography. AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X slid in ahead of Core i7-8700, reminding us that second-gen Ryzen CPUs are much more competitive than their predecessors in workloads that aren't well-optimized for parallelization.
MotionMark emphasizes graphics performance, rather than JavaScript, but is also sensitive to CPU clock rates. There, Core i7-8700 turned things around and beat the Ryzen 7 2700X. We weren't expecting a stock Core i7-8700K to carve out such a large advantage over the vanilla -8700, though.
Productivity
The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Core i7-8700 impressed in this benchmark by barely beating a stock -8700K. But the benefit of an unlocked K-series chip became evident in the Core i5-8600K and Core i7-8700K results at 4.9 GHz.
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. This workload is parallelized, so it responds well to Ryzen's core count advantage. Nevertheless, a six-core design with Hyper-Threading allowed Core i7-8700K to muscle out the competition when we overclocked it to 4.9 GHz.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, so the Ryzen processors took an uncontested lead.
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