Intel Core i5-8600K Review

Manufacturer: Intel

UK price (as reviewed): £259.99 (inc. VAT)

US price (as reviewed): $289.99 (exc. tax)

There are plenty of reasonably priced motherboards around with some dipping down to just over £100 plus a good array of smaller micro-ATX and mini-ITX boards too. 

This means that with overclockable K-series CPUs, at least, Intel is very much able to compete with AMD, and the Core i5-8600K is a critically important CPU for Intel, marking the new mid-range and all-rounder position if you want to mix gaming with content creation.

AMD, of course, is very strong here, with its two six-core CPUs - the Ryzen 5 1600 and 1600X now retailing for far lower prices than they did at launch. The Ryzen 5 1600, for example, was retailing for just £167 when we wrote this, which is £100 less than the Intel CPU here, plus it offers 12 threads compared to Intel's six. Even if the AMD CPU is a tad slower in some games, that's probably worth taking on the chin given the price saving, but a lot rests on just how quick and overclockable the Core i5-8600K truly is. 

We're looking at some fairly healthy frequencies, with an all-core boost of 4.1GHz and maximum single-core boost of 4.3GHz. Intel has increased cache levels compared to its quad-core predecessor too, with 1.5MB total L2 cache and 9MB L3 cache, with the latter being 3MB down from the Coffee Lake flagship Core i7-8700K, which also throws Hyper-Threading into the mix.

Specifications 

• Base frequency 3.6GHz
  
• Turbo frequency 4.3GHz
• Core Coffee Lake-S
  
• Manufacturing process 14nm 
  
• Cores/threads 6/6
  
• Cache L2: 6 x 256KB, L3 9MB 
  
• Memory controller Dual-channel DDR4, up to 2,666MHz 
  
• Packaging Intel LGA 1151 V2 (Coffee Lake / Z370)
  
• Thermal design power (TDP) 95W 
• Features Turbo Boost 2.0, SpeedStep, AVX, AVX2, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4, SSE4.2, EM64T, F16C