Although it's essentially a 7700K with two additional cores and some extra L3 cache, Intel'south Coffee Lake-based Core i7-8700K proved to be enough of an advancement over its Kaby Lake predecessor for united states to crown it the new gaming king a few days ago.

Nonetheless, we recognize that it may not exist an bonny upgrade for existing 7700K owners, not to mention that it's somewhat expensive at $360. With supply existence very limited at the moment, buying one this twelvemonth might exist challenging fifty-fifty if you lot are interested.

With that in mind, nosotros've purchased the more affordable Core i3-8100 and 8350K to see what they have to offer.

For $180 the Cadre i3-8350K is nearly a rebadged Cadre i5-7600K: both are 14nm quad-cores operating at ~4GHz, but the 8350K is 25% cheaper and should be faster thanks to a larger 8MB L3 cache. In curt, you're substantially getting a petty more for a trivial less with the 8350K.

The Core i3-8100 goes for a much more appealing $120. Although it's locked at three.6GHz, it should be comparable to the Cadre i5-7400 or 7500, sporting the same 6MB L3 enshroud, but roughly 40% more affordable.

Whereas the Core i3-8350K is priced to compete with the Ryzen five 1500X, the 8100 takes on the Ryzen three series. The only disadvantage the locked 8100 part faces right now is the complete lack of upkeep motherboards. Z370 boards currently start at $120, while B350 boards tin be had for equally footling as $60 or about half the cost.

We're also interested to run across how the 8350K compares to the Cadre i5-8400. The six-core 8400 is merely $10 more and I think I'd rather have the two extra cores for such a small price increase rather than the ability to overclock, but let'southward encounter what the benchmarks have to say...

Benchmark Time

Retention and Application Operation

Starting time up allow's check out the memory bandwidth performance. These DDR4 dual-channel retentiveness controllers await to exist good for effectually 31-39GB/s of retentiveness bandwidth when using 3200 memory.

Since the Core i3-8100 is a locked role, you'll ideally want to characteristic it on a cheaper motherboard that the Z370 models currently on offer. For now the options are limited so this ways anyone ownership an eighth-gen Cadre processors will accept to pair it with a Z370 board and with that you lot have unlocked retentiveness frequencies. On upcoming B360 boards for example y'all will be limited to DDR4-2400, and then I've decided to test the i3-8100 using both DDR4-2400 and 3200 memory.

Here we see when using DDR4-2400 retentiveness the 8100 is limited to a retention bandwidth of 28.6GB/s. Increasing the retentiveness speed to 3200 boosts the bandwidth by 25% and this will no doubt aid performance in a number of games and applications. Meanwhile the unlocked and higher clocked 8350K was tested using DDR4-3200 memory and information technology managed 36.8GB/s of bandwidth.

Moving to Cinebench we see that the Core i3-8100 is able to outpace the Ryzen 3 1300X in both the single and multi-threaded tests, and then based on this information technology's going to be a rough ride for the heavily cutting downward Ryzen series. The 8350K based on frequency should only be around 10% faster than the 8100 but here we run across information technology with an 18% advantage, the merely possible explanation being that the 33% increment in L3 enshroud chapters helps it in this test.

Regardless while it smokes the Ryzen 5 1500X'due south single thread score information technology's 16% slower for the multithreaded workload. Then based on this I look the 8350K to punish the 1500X in well-nigh games but trail in well-nigh of the productivity tests. I should note that the 8350K simply just beats the Core i5-7600K while it's 23% slower than the Core i5-8400.

Before we get to that a quick look at the PCMark 10 scores. The 8350K actually manages to outscore the Core i5-8400 here while the 8100 beats both the Ryzen three 1300X and R5 1500X. The 8100 was 5% faster when using DDR4-3200 retentiveness opposed to 2400, so not a huge margin but a small heave nonetheless.

Moving to the Excel Monte Carlo simulation we discover that the Core i3-8350K is really much slower than the Ryzen 5 1500X, 24% slower in fact. It was too 9% slower than the 7600K and 19% slower than the 8400.

The Core i3-8100 has more luck as it was 18% faster than the Ryzen three 1300X and 26% faster than the Core i3-7350K. It's also worth noting here that the faster DDR4-3200 retention didn't offer the 8100 an reward in this application.

Next up we accept the VeraCrypt results and hither the Ryzen 3 1300X actually pulled ahead of the Core i3-8100, albeit by a slim margin. The Core i3-8350K roughly matched the 7600K merely was 32% slower than the Core i5-8400. That said, information technology was at least 40% slower than the Ryzen 5 1500X, so the 8350K gets a chip hosed in this application.

Jumping to the 7-Nil information we see that again the 8350K just tin't alive with the R5 1500X, although it was only 4% slower for the pinch workload, it was 25% when decompressing. The 8350K besides gets completely annihilated by Intel's own 8400 every bit the Core i5 CPU was 35% faster. The Cadre i3-8100 looks much better and it is able to tackle the Ryzen 3 lineup without much issue.