Anandtech.com is gone

[housecat]

I run an overclocked 8700k with an overclocked ring ratio, and when I could play Apex Legends under Linux (before they blocked Linux users via updated anticheat - it really wasn't a great game anyway) I never once experienced a crash. This article seems like mostly FUD to me.

I haven't read it in years, but I think he said the problems started really showing up as the core count got to 10. It just wasn't going to work going forward at least.
The 8700K is the CPU I wish I would have jumped on at the time. I regretted not getting that one. I'd still be running it today too I think.

 

[Mazzspeed]

I haven't read it in years, but I think he said the problems started really showing up as the core count got to 10. It just wasn't going to work going forward at least.
The 8700K is the CPU I wish I would have jumped on at the time. I regretted not getting that one. I'd still be running it today too I think.

This overclocked 8700k has been a little cracker of a chip. I flog it to death, it never misses a beat and still pulls the frames in all my games, it's like the 1080Ti of CPU's.

 

[housecat]

This overclocked 8700k has been a little cracker of a chip. I flog it to death, it never misses a beat and still pulls the frames in all my games, it's like the 1080Ti of CPU's.

That's exactly how I always viewed the 8700K. Some would say 6C/12T isn't enough, nah. It's like my 11900K, some would say if I don't have a 7900X3D I have trash for gaming. Working well over here. I wouldn't trade it. Not for anything that wasn't free in exchange at least. Moving to a proper PSU has stabilized everything that I used to have to disable from Optimized Defaults in my BIOS to achieve. PCIE Native Power Management, Clock Gating, and towards the end on my old PSU, C-States. Although things didn't get out of hand until I moved from my 4070 to a 5070, which I only did because it was a cheap upgrade.

When I jumped on Ryzen, Intel has the 7700K and that was a tough pill to swallow when Ryzen was coming soon with 8C/16T. Just like with 12th gen, I jumped less than one year too early and missed out on the 8700K. Which is definitely what I needed. A 7700K held its own in games for a long time though, better than people realize due to the cores being able to stretch their legs from less heat. If I remember correctly, it was able to maintain higher clocks than a lot of higher core count chips and did surprisingly well in games for a long time. Even though 4C/8T sounded obsolete even many years ago.

I wasn't as much of an Intel fan as I am today though, or I would have gone 7700K since that's what I needed when my Q9450 just no longer made sense to keep going as parts were dying. It needed a PSU, started sparking on startup, and so I sold the parts for very little and then started years of troubleshooting early Ryzen issues. The 7700K was a very stable platform that would have served me well, and then probably one more upgrade to carry me into today. Hopefully I would have waited for 12th gen and still be on that today.

We'll see if my upgrade in 2029/2030 with Hammer Lake is another early adopter bust or intelligent upgrade point, like 8th and 12th gen were.

 

[Mazzspeed]

That's exactly how I always viewed the 8700K. Some would say 6C/12T isn't enough, nah. It's like my 11900K, some would say if I don't have a 7900X3D I have trash for gaming. Working well over here. I wouldn't trade it. Not for anything that wasn't free in exchange at least. Moving to a proper PSU has stabilized everything that I used to have to disable from Optimized Defaults in my BIOS to achieve. PCIE Native Power Management, Clock Gating, and towards the end on my old PSU, C-States. Although things didn't get out of hand until I moved from my 4070 to a 5070, which I only did because it was a cheap upgrade.

When I jumped on Ryzen, Intel has the 7700K and that was a tough pill to swallow when Ryzen was coming soon with 8C/16T. Just like with 12th gen, I jumped less than one year too early and missed out on the 8700K. Which is definitely what I needed. A 7700K held its own in games for a long time though, better than people realize due to the cores being able to stretch their legs from less heat. If I remember correctly, it was able to maintain higher clocks than a lot of higher core count chips and did surprisingly well in games for a long time. Even though 4C/8T sounded obsolete even many years ago.

I wasn't as much of an Intel fan as I am today though, or I would have gone 7700K since that's what I needed when my Q9450 just no longer made sense to keep going as parts were dying. It needed a PSU, started sparking on startup, and so I sold the parts for very little and then started years of troubleshooting early Ryzen issues. The 7700K was a very stable platform that would have served me well, and then probably one more upgrade to carry me into today. Hopefully I would have waited for 12th gen and still be on that today.

We'll see if my upgrade in 2029/2030 with Hammer Lake is another early adopter bust or intelligent upgrade point, like 8th and 12th gen were.

I love 6C/12T processors, better than 4C/8T, without the thermals of 8C/16T+ processors. Holding outright all core boost clocks pushed to the limit still reign supreme over an extra two cores/threads, and pushing all cores/threads is easily achieved without runaway thermals and elaborate cooling with 6C/12T. I've totally disabled all power/thermal limiters and run a fixed vcore, and even under high end air cooling my CPU stays within reasonable thermal limits and remains rock stable.

I can push this thing to an all core 5GHz overclock, I keep it at 4.8GHz as it's my daily that I use for work as well as gaming - better to leave the extreme overclock saved for only the times I feel it's necessary (which is almost never).

 

[housecat]

I love 6C/12T processors, better than 4C/8T, without the thermals of 8C/16T+ processors. Holding outright all core boost clocks pushed to the limit still reign supreme over an extra two cores/threads, and pushing all cores/threads is easily achieved without runaway thermals and elaborate cooling with 6C/12T. I've totally disabled all power/thermal limiters and run a fixed vcore, and even under high end air cooling my CPU stays within reasonable thermal limits and remains rock stable.

I can push this thing to an all core 5GHz overclock, I keep it at 4.8GHz as it's my daily that I use for work as well as gaming - better to leave the extreme overclock saved for only the times I feel it's necessary (which is almost never).

I haven't looked into it recently (or ever) as far as 4 vs 6 vs 8 core thermals, but I believe you given what I saw out of the 7700K. I wouldn't consider buying on that basis today, enough time has passed that I think it's a bit of a moot point. But back in these older generations it was worth thinking about: Ryzen 8 core thermals vs Intel 4-6 core. In a fair comparison that makes sense at least. Not comparing a modern 8 (or even my 11th gen) to an older 4-6 core.

I'm also sure it varies depending on the generation, process node etc. I would assume my 14nm 11th gen 8 core is one of the hottest 8 cores and worst at what you're describing. Although it does have a Noctua D15 on it. It's the opposite of the 7700K (and 8700K) that I mentioned, doing better in games for a longer period of time than I ever expected it would.
But it does hold 5.1Ghz on all cores indefinitely in some scenarios, even under stock settings. I see 5.3GHz on each of the 8 cores reporting in hwinfo. The rhetoric on Reddit is as if my 11900K is slower than everything that came before it and it's the worst-gen ever. I wanted to go back to Intel at the time, and not lose PCIE 4.0 and I wanted to gain USB 4.0 / TB4. I use every port on my machine, including the motherboard headers. A 4K monitor and two 1080P. My systems always seem to find or run into platform quirks that exist or GPU issues. Once I stabilize like now, I try to not upgrade anything until I have to.

Today I'd reach for either a 7900X3D or 265K if I were forced. It's going to take Hammer Lake or later with a RAM price collapse (2029 or 2030), or my machine to have a major part fail to get me to upgrade.
I have a 5070FE paired to my 11900K. And while there might be some performance on the table, especially in 1080P 360Hz Valorant which is probably the most intense thing I do, I'm still pushing framerates around my refresh rate with GSync on. It seems fine.

 

[housecat]

I love 6C/12T processors, better than 4C/8T, without the thermals of 8C/16T+ processors. Holding outright all core boost clocks pushed to the limit still reign supreme over an extra two cores/threads, and pushing all cores/threads is easily achieved without runaway thermals and elaborate cooling with 6C/12T. I've totally disabled all power/thermal limiters and run a fixed vcore, and even under high end air cooling my CPU stays within reasonable thermal limits and remains rock stable.

I can push this thing to an all core 5GHz overclock, I keep it at 4.8GHz as it's my daily that I use for work as well as gaming - better to leave the extreme overclock saved for only the times I feel it's necessary (which is almost never).

Following up on this.. I just built / rebuilt a new system... 2026 and I went with 8 cores. I got the 9850X3D to replace my 11900K. Just crossed my mind as I've been setting things up for this machine that in a way, 8 cores is the new 6 core! Most of my usage is in e-sports titles where the X3D cache matters more than anything else. So I went for that.

 

[Mazzspeed]

Following up on this.. I just built / rebuilt a new system... 2026 and I went with 8 cores. I got the 9850X3D to replace my 11900K. Just crossed my mind as I've been setting things up for this machine that in a way, 8 cores is the new 6 core! Most of my usage is in e-sports titles where the X3D cache matters more than anything else. So I went for that.

The problem is: Can you push all cores/threads to max boost (and beyond - with a fixed, raised vcore) and hold them there indefinitely without power draw and thermals going nuclear? Sure, my old 6C/12T was an older generation CPU, but it could do so. I had all power limiters totally bypassed, and was running an overclock with no AVX offset along with an increased ring ratio, and considering that from the 8th gen to the 10th gen not a lot had changed regarding Intel CPU's, performance at the overclocked speeds I was pulling was actually impressive considering the age of the CPU combined with the fact that I was running the IMC at 3600MHz - able to keep you with CPU's four years younger than my old 8700k from AMD as well as Intel.

The system in question still continues to surprise me even though it's no longer used daily, I never even delidded the CPU and I was running a Noctua NH-D15 air cooler.

 

[housecat]

The problem is: Can you push all cores/threads to max boost (and beyond - with a fixed, raised vcore) and hold them there indefinitely without power draw and thermals going nuclear? Sure, my old 6C/12T was an older generation CPU, but it could do so. I had all power limiters totally bypassed, and was running an overclock with no AVX offset along with an increased ring ratio, and considering that from the 8th gen to the 10th gen not a lot had changed regarding Intel CPU's, performance at the overclocked speeds I was pulling was actually impressive considering the age of the CPU combined with the fact that I was running the IMC at 3600MHz - able to keep you with CPU's four years younger than my old 8700k from AMD as well as Intel.

The system in question still continues to surprise me even though it's no longer used daily, I never even delidded the CPU and I was running a Noctua NH-D15 air cooler.

Overclocking it to max fixed boost? I suppose someone could try, and I would expect great results out of a 9850X3D given it's on TSMC's best process. Mine holds 5.5 or 5.6GHz nearly constantly while in games on all 8 cores, and does it drawing 100W. Big improvement over my old 11900K to say the least.
It's cool and quiet for sure. And what really matters, FPS in Valorant went from ~300FPS to ~1000FPS on the same GPU. I'm seeing 1200FPS. It's disgustingly faster than older chips in many games. About 60C too at all-core 5.6GHz. I also use a D15 but with a thermal pad. I did add the 7mm offset brackets that Noctua offers which lowers temps a bit.

The scenario you're describing was a big deal back then or for a long time. I'm not sure it's fair to compare that, as neat as it may be, to something off the shelf today like this 9850X3D chip. To answer your question though, given the temps and output I'm seeing with it, I think it would do very well if someone wanted to run one at fixed 5.5GHz+.