Coffee Lake



Hi guys, my name is Tudor and I am one of the Chief Editors of LAB501. Some of you, who are passionate about overclocking, might know me under the nickname Monstru. We are a Romanian hardware website, which tries to provide accurate information based on thorough testing and investigation, to our native tongue readers. However, one of our reviews recently got the attention of international readers, and after seeing a lot of questions, complaints about the charts we use and a few misunderstandings here and there, we decided to answer some of these questions in our own way, by making a full English review, with new graphs (yes… you won… we changed those graphs you hated so much), and a better page management, so it is easy to read and understand.

However, before we dive into the technical stuff, I feel that we have to clear some air, because it is obvious that our situation is not known by many, so some people may make some false assumptions. First of all, we didn’t break any NDA. Even more, we never actually broke any NDA. As long as we get our samples from the manufacturers we work with, we don’t even need to sign a piece of paper – a gentlemen agreement is enough for us. However, in those occasions when we do not get a sample from the manufacturer, but we do lawfully acquire the new products by our own channels, we may sometimes publish a review that fits our own schedule. For instance, we had a similar situation 5 years ago with Bulldozer, and now we have this situation with Coffee Lake, since Intel closed their local offices and Romania is not part of their media communication loop anymore.

That being said, I want to apologies to our media colleagues for this situation – we know exactly how it feels. It was never our intention to take the spotlight away from anyone, nor was our intention to do it “for the clicks”. If traffic or fame was the thing that we were after, this would have been the original story, not the Romanian version. No, we just wanted to share the information with our readers, since next week we will be away from the country, being involved in an international modding competition. That is all, there is no fowl play or petty intention behind this review.

With that in mind, I want to urge you, their readers, to properly give your attention to the results of the hard work editors from all over the world are putting as we speak in their Coffee Lake launch reviews. Our review only reflects our testing conditions and our approach. However, a CPU can be tested in so many ways that you cannot get the whole picture from reading one review. So please, whenever their NDA expires, keep your eyes on your favorite website and read their stories. That is the only way in which you will be fully informed, and their hard work rewarded.

Now, before we move on, we need to share a few words about us, since some readers may have never heard of LAB501 and may doubt our technical competence. So there it goes – we are a team of hard-core enthusiasts who have been playing with hardware for more than 20 years, and more than a decade ago we decided to start our own website. We cover any major launch that happens in the world and we work closely with most manufacturers. We also won some international overclocking competitions in the past (GOOC 2010 World Finals, MOA 2011 Istanbul, MOA 2010 World Finals). so we are pretty close to this subject. Also, very often we visit factories in China, Taiwan or Hong Kong, and we keep a very close connection with most system integrators and OEM manufacturer.



