Coffee lake chips to ship October 5th

[trs96]

Here's the specs and prices from Intel. With an i3-8100 you'll be getting 4 cores and a base clock of 3.6 Ghz. Pretty much a 7th gen Core i5-7500 for about 80 dollars less. Thank you Intel, we knew you could do it ! That chip will be bought up by budget gamers all over the world. The Core i series dual core chip is now history. I'd assume there will still be low cost dual core Pentiums for biz machines etc.

Start watching the video at the 2:50 point to skip the long advert in the beginning.

 

[ShatteredAvenger]

I'm really excited by the i3-8100, but I fear all the cost savings will be negated by the necessity for a Z370 board

 

[trs96]

I'm really excited by the i3-8100, but I fear all the cost savings will be negated by the necessity for a Z370 board

You don't really need a Z370 with the I3-8100. There are always boards that cost a lot less in the different chipsets. Something like a B360M should be well under $100. Those may not be out yet on Oct. 5th but likely later in 2017 or early 2018.

 

[ShatteredAvenger]

Obviously this is just a rumor right now, but supposedly Intel has claimed that Coffee Lake CPUs will require the "extra power" of the z370 chipset and so an H or B variant isn't possible. I'd love for that to be proven wrong, but that's what Intel is claiming right now. Obviously the i3 variants don't need the extra power, but I guess I can understand the desire to keep things simple.

https://www.eteknix.com/no-b360-h370-motherboards-intel-coffee-lake-z370/

 

[trs96]

Look at the "sources" from the Eteknix article: (According to VideoCardz.com and citing their sources from China) Take that with a few grains of salt. I think they are mostly trying to justify why Z270 motherboards won't work with Coffee Lake. Then look at the exact quote from the article: "There are no B360/H370 motherboards coming this year." Intel has said there will be lower cost Pentium C.L. chips so it would make no sense to not have B360 motherboards for those.

The motherboard makers will come out with H and B variants, just at a later date than the initial launch. They haven't had the time to manufacture them yet since C.L. launch was moved up 3 months or more. Intel has rushed Coffee Lake to market because PC gamers are flocking to Ryzen builds for their gaming rigs. Gamers spend a lot of money for the most bang for your buck hardware. Ryzen speaks to that market right now. They are Intel's key consumer PC market. As we all know Intel has completely missed on getting their chips in mobile phones so they can't afford to lose out in the PC desktop market.

Here's the I7-8700K GeekBench scores. You definitely want a Z370 paired with this beast. An 4 core I3-8100, not so much. The I7-7700K averages around 19,00 GB multi core score so the newer I7 K cpu is certainly worth it for content creators and high end gamers. This 8700K score is without any overclock. If you overclocked up to 4.7 what would multi-core scores be ? A lot higher.

 

[ShatteredAvenger]

Hmm, those are all good points. I realistically won't be building until next spring anyhow, so hopefully there's some cheaper boards by then. I totally get why we need the new boards for the 6-core CPUs.