Intel Core i5 Coffee Lake i5-8600K BOX (BX80684I58600K)

Light heavyweight champion

Intermediate models of the Core i5-8500 and 8600, by analogy with the 7500 and 7600, were not released by Intel, at least at the start of the eighth generation (perhaps they will appear later). The junior i5-8400 is immediately followed by the top-end 8600K — also six-core, but with a high base frequency (3.6 GHz), an even higher auto-overclocking frequency (4.1 – 4.3 GHz) and the possibility of manual overclocking (as evidenced by the "K" suffix). Integrated UHD 630 graphics included.

Record overclocking

The overclocking potential of each particular processor instance is always a lottery. But judging by the reviews on east european and foreign hardware sites, the Core i5-8600K is almost guaranteed to hit the 5 GHz mark. And in the presence of a motherboard with a reinforced power subsystem, overclocking can reach 5.2 – 5.4 GHz. And this is not a dropsy or liquid nitrogen, but an ordinary tower air cooler.

Frequency matters

Due to the lack of support for the technology of parallelization of physical cores to Hyper-Threading threads, the i5-8600K heats up less than the twelve-thread Core i7-8700K. This allows it to be overclocked to a higher frequency and, as a result, it can better cope with games that are demanding not so much on the number of cores, but on the performance of each of them. Examples of such games are PUBG and ARMA 3. If you are primarily interested in them, build a computer on 8600K. If you play all the new games in a row, then it’s better to bet on eight or twelve-thread AMD Ryzen 5.