This 8700K is actually best of both worlds. It has plenty of threads and also clocks ridiculously high for single threaded stuff pretty much out of the box. It does great with multithreading and also runs games well where multi threads don't count all that much (yet). They could bump up the multi clocks to at least 4GHz, but I guess it's a good balance. Intel is doing similar to NVIDIA with graphics. The chips boost so high out of the box it almost defeats the purpose of overclocking and most people won't even see the need to do that.
I noticed this too, a striking similarity in behavior when it comes to core voltage/temp and the OC ceiling it hits with Pascal/GPU Boost 3.0.
Its really a sign of a very strong process/node, and it seems the lottery effect is heavily mitigated by now.
You should check the Digital Foundry review. It rofflestomps the 7700K in games that can use more cores. Extremely smooth frametimes, better than any other cpu on the market.
Somebody gets the real world scenario
Even a quad core optimized game will see a huge benefit because you are always multitasking anyway these days. Browser up for whatever? It will run on the spare cores. Streaming? Got two cores for that. Want to do in-depth monitoring at full GPU utilization, so very high polling rates? No problem.
And yes, the real profit is not always measurable in hard FPS, because most of the time, even with Ivy I can hold 120 fps in many cases, but you do lose that stutter that is so extremely pronounced especially at high FPS/refresh rates.
This 8700k is a winner, and I'm gettin' one
1080p and 1440p tests seem to be more GPU than CPU limited. Perhaps test with 1080Ti instead of 1080 in the future @ W1zzard?
Also no temp graphs. In Hardware Unboxed video he's sample went to 5,2Ghz but at 97c at load. Ouch.
Better question is what use is the high OC potential if you can't use it without buying AIO or custom loop and voiding warranty in the process?
Sure you can OC to a point but after that it gets too hot and throttles back down so net gain=0
This is why there are 720p tests. If you want to see raw relative performance that's where you gotta go.
At 1080p every GPU will provide different FPS, which is precisely the real world scenario where everyone runs something different. I would say its more relevant to NOT use the highest end card, there are way fewer people who have similar; oh and even a 1080ti will find its max with this CPU at 1080p, don't you worry. There are multiple games heavy enough for that.
@W1zzard awesome as always, and thank you for sticking to the 720p benches. I'm a big fan