Launch & Live Stream

Intel is launching six new CPUs today, but they are not expected to enter wide availability for another 2 to 4 weeks from what I gather (no official word on that – just reading between the lines).

We’re reviewing one motherboard from Gigabyte, the Aorus Ultra Gaming 7, two motherboards from ASRock (the Z370 Gaming Professional i7 and the Z370 Gaming K6), and we have a live stream with MSI to cover seven of their Z370 motherboards for this launch! (You can check out the livestream on our Youtube channel, here).

Coffee Lake is a big deal for Intel – it is a six core part “for consumers.”


What’s new about Coffee Lake?

Six cores in the i5 and i7 parts; Higher stock clock speeds (up to 4.7ghz on one core for the 8700k!). There is no backward compatibility here – these CPUs are only compatible with motherboards based on the Z370 chipset. Official support for memory speeds up to DDR4-2666 is also new, though most board vendors are certifying DDR4-4000 and beyond for overclocked speeds.

In our testing, the additional memory speeds do help feed the additional two cores in some scenarios, especially high frame rate gaming.


 

       

cache

tdp

Core i7 8700K

6

12

3.7GHz

4.7GHz

12MB

95W

$359

Core i7 8700

6

12

3.2GHz

4.6GHz

12MB

65W

$303

Core i5 8600K

6

6

3.6GHz

4.3GHz

9MB

95W

$257

Core i5 8400

6

6

2.8GHz

4GHz

9MB

65W

$182

Core i3 8350K

4

4

4GHz

NA

6MB

91W

$168

Core i3 8100

4

4

3.6GHz

NA

6MB

65W

$117


The Motherboards

Here’s a rundown of the seven boards we’re covering in the live stream from MSI:

Expect full reviews of the MSI Z370 Godlike Gaming and the MSI Z370 Carbon AC soon. We’re also going to post summary articles of all the above boards, I/O and PCIe layouts.

 

Other Boards

Here’s a link to the very first Z370 motherboard we’ve reviewed, the Gigabyte Ultra Gaming 7:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8IIMa5Qfd4

 

 

Up next are reviews for the two boards from ASRock – live in just a few days.