The 8th generation 'Coffee Lake-H' chips for enthusiast notebooks are finally here. Intel is doing all it can to woo the masses back from AMD Ryzen by increasing core counts and boosting clocks. This generation also sees the rebranding of the Core i7-HK series as the 'Core i9'. Intel naturally claims significant improvements over the 7th generation 'Kaby Lake' but does it actually hold true? What do the new CPUs mean for the mobile enthusiast? Our preliminary review of new 'Coffee Lake-H' Core i7-8750H-powered notebooks tells what's improved and what's not. We also list out some of the notebooks that will debut this Spring sporting the new chips.

Introduction

The quest for cramming more and more power into thinner and thinner designs is an ongoing one. No one can be quite sure of when utopia will be achieved in this quest, but we are getting there slowly generation-by-generation, chip-by-chip. Towards that end, the most recent step forward is the launch of the new 8th generation 'Coffee Lake-H' (CFL-H) mobile chips by Intel.

Not to be confused with the existing 8xxx series of the 'Kaby Lake-Refresh' lineup, 'Coffee Lake-H' seeks to represent the very best of what Intel has to offer for the mainstream consumer notebook market. To date, the 8th generation is comprised of the 'Kaby Lake-R' 15W U-series, the 'Coffee Lake-S' 35W-95W chips (which includes the Pentium Gold G5600T to the Core i7-8700K), and finally the recently announced 'Kaby Lake-G' chips starting from the 65W Core i5-8305G to the 100W Core i7-8809G with integrated AMD Radeon RX Vega M graphics. The 45W -H parts were conspicuous by their absence — until now.

Intel has finally filled the void with the introduction of the new 45W 'Coffee Lake-H' chips starting from the Core i5-8300H all the way till the Core i9-8950HK. These chips come with a slew of new features and the Core i7 and Core i9-series are Intel's first hexa-core offerings in the enthusiast mobile gaming/multimedia space. Intel had tremendous success with the 7th generation 45W Core i7-7700HQ, which powered nearly every gaming laptop out there in the last year and Intel is surely looking to repeat history all over again with this new generation.

CFL-H has two main poster boys: the Core i9-8950HK, which aims to replace its older cousin the Core i7-7820HK, and the Core i7-8750H, which can be expected to find its way into most enthusiast gaming and content-creation notebooks. Most of the features are identical across the lineup however, the Core i9-8950HK advertises increased turbo boost speeds and a 12 MB L3 cache (vs. the 9 MB cache in the Core i7 series) — not too shy from its 'Skylake-X' Core i7-7900X HEDT cousin (which sports a 13.75 MB L3 cache). The higher L3 cache should help in facilitating better inter-core communication and enhanced multi-core performance. Like the Core i7-7700HQ was for 'Kaby Lake', we expect the Core i7-8750H to be the staple CPU of its generation, and for this reason it will be the subject of most analyses in this article.

The Core i7-8750H is a 6-core 12-thread CPU fabricated using the 14nm++ process with a base clock of 2.2 GHz and a turbo boost clock up to 4.2 GHz. The base clock is notably lower than the 2.8 GHz base frequency of last generation's Core i7-7700HQ, while the turbo clock is 400 MHz higher. The CPU operates in a 45W TDP envelope and sports a generous 9 MB L3 cache. Gauging from information shared by Intel, unlike the i9-8950HK, the i7-8750H does not feature Intel's new Thermal Velocity Boost (TVB) technique, which offers up to a 200 MHz burst over the maximum turbo clock given the right temperature and power conditions. As we will be seeing soon, the i7-8750H seems to struggle with sustaining turbo speeds even without TVB. Unlike its elder brother, the Core i7-8850H, the 8750H is completely locked, which means there is not much overclocking potential with this CPU.

In this preliminary review, we aim to determine what CFL-H (specifically the Core i7-8750H) has in store for the mobile enthusiast and whether it is worth your hard-earned dough for an upgrade over your current platform. We will also take a look at some of the new laptops expected to land this year sporting CFL-H CPUs. We received a few samples from the likes of Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte all of which sport the i7-8750H and variants of either an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or GTX 1070 GPU. The primary focus of this review is on core CPU performance but we did manage to run a few synthetic graphics benchmarks as well to have a more comprehensive picture of the purported gains in moving from 'Kaby Lake' to 'Coffee Lake-H'.