Intel Core i7 8700k CPU Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

• 3DMARK Firestrike
• 3DMARK Skydiver
• 3DMARK Time Spy
• Unigine Heaven

For synthetic benchmarks, I ran 3 of the 3DMARK applications. These were Firestrike, Time Spy and Sky Diver. Sky Diver was only used for testing the integrated graphics on the 8700k, Intel’s UHD 630 graphics. I also tested Unigine Heaven Benchmark on both the discrete GPU and the IGPU. Firestrike and Time Spy were tested with the CPU and GPU at stock and overclocked.

3DMARK

3DMark is a computer benchmark tool created and developed by Futuremark used to determine the performance of a computer’s 3D graphic rendering and CPU workload processing capabilities. It does this through a series of graphics and physics and or CPU tests. I used 3DMarks most popular benchmark, Firestrike as well as their newest DX12 benchmark, Time Spy to test the MSI Lightning 1080 ti. The card was tested at both stock and overclocked to +125 on the core and +150 on the memory, using MSI Afterburner. I ran both Firestrike and the new DX12 benchmark, Time Spy. I also ran Firestrike and Time Spy on my Z270 test bench using the7700k at 5.0 GHz and same 3200 MHz Trident Z memory. The charts clearly show a slight advantage with the 8700k over the 7700k in Firestrike. This is even more clear with the DX 12 benchmark, Time Spy.

Unigine Heaven

The Heaven Benchmark is a DirectX 11 benchmark designed to stress your GPU under heavy loads. The Heaven Benchmark can be used to determine the stability of a GPU under extremely stressful conditions. I ran the heaven benchmark with the MSI Lightning 1080 ti on a custom Preset, Ultra Quality, Extreme Tessellation, AA X8, in 2560 x 1440p using the DX 11 API. With these settings, the MSI Lightning 1080 TI received an overall score of 2326 with an average FPS of 92.3 a minimum or 34.3 and a maximum if 207.4.  This is a very slight increase over the pairing of the MSI Lighting 1080 ti and the 7700k. On the 7700k, the Lightning 1080 ti received an overall score of 2297 with an average FPS of 91.2 a minimum or 29.5 and a maximum if 201.5.