



For those looking for an upgrade to their gaming desktop, but don't want to pony up for one of Intel 's Skylake-X processors (or go the AMD Ryzen 7 route), it's looking like the upcoming hexa-core Coffee Lake processors are going to be overclocker friendly.

As we already know, the Core i7-8700K has six cores capable of executing 12 threads, a base clock of 3.7GHz and can turbo boost to 4.3GHz (all cores). The Core i7-8700K can also crank up its maximum clock to 4.7GHz on a single core. That "K" designation means that the processor is multiplier unlocked, allowing for better fine-tuning when it comes to unleashing the beast.

The fine folks over at Expreview were able to get an early sample of the chip up to 4.8GHz across all cores using air cooling. This should be music to the ears of enthusiasts that are looking for a quick and easy overclock without having to resort to liquid cooling.





A Delidded Intel Skylake-X Chip - Credit: der8auer

However, the site cautions that breaking past the 5GHz barrier is possible, but requires delidding to take care of any inefficient thermal transfer problems (there are two extra cores that are fired up on the Core i7-8700K, after all, compared to the Core i7-7700K).





With that being said, we're already beginning to see some early benchmarks for Intel's Coffee Lake processors. While the Core i7-8700K shows some slight improvements over the Kaby Lake-based Core i7-7700K in single-thread benchmarks thanks to architectural improvement (despite its clock speed disadvantage), it truly shines in multi-threaded benchmarks thanks to its two additional cores.

It is expected that Intel will release its Coffee Lake desktop processors next month. The follow-up to Coffee Lake is reportedly Intel's processors built on the 10nm+ Ice Lake architecture. These chips will be available in up to 8-core/16-thread configurations and will be supported by Intel's Z390 chipset.