Onboard performance
Oh boy, I hadn’t realized it but I hadn’t actually tested any onboard video in about two years. Our 7700K review was non-traditional and didn’t include it and well the X299 and Ryzen launches haven’t really needed it as well. So I had to dig out the 7700K and do some additional retesting for this one. I included all of our old tests and went ahead and added a few new games as well so we can drop some of the old games in the future. Before I get into gaming though let's check out other situations.
Like in Cinebench where we take a look at video encoding performance. Now the 5775C was a special CPU from Intel that didn’t really gain much traction at the time but the Iris onboard GPU is still showing up stuff like the 8700K. Even more interesting to me though was the FPS gap between the two Coffee Lake CPUs due to the clock speeds.
The same gap can be seen in 3DMark in both the Fire Strike and Tim Spy benchmarks. The 5775C is still up top but the 8700K does really well, outperforming all of the past AMD APUs and putting a decent lead on the 7700K as well.
Now with the Unigine based tests, I was once again completely underwhelmed with the performance for every CPU when using the now very old Valley Benchmark with none of them coming anywhere near being playable. In the new Superposition benchmark, I tested at 720p and 1080p and 720p was much smoother as the charts show.
From there I got into the in game benchmarks. I was a little worried when I saw the result from TF2 and I did a lot of retesting here over and over. The 8700K struggled here when it really shouldn’t have. Thankfully we can toss that aside given its obvious issues and focus on the rest of the results that all seem to tell a better story. For starters, the 8700K puts a big lead over the 8400 in every test, showing that there are other real-world benefits for going with the i7 over an i5. For the most part, the 8700K was up near the top of the charts with just the 5775C out ahead of it. It will be interesting to see if the Iris GPU will see more use in the mainstream Coffee Lake CPUs Intel is bringing out next year. As it sits the gains from year to year are small. You can actually game at around 30 FPS in a lot of the older games though but without big improvements onboard may fall even farther behind as games improve.
