Gadgetory

welcome back to harbor unboxed today we're gonna try and clear up the coffee like boost clock conspiracy and we're gonna do this before showing you the 300 series motherboards which you'll see very shortly but before then I have some extra information on this subject that I'd like to share with you before we get to the data though I would like to just quickly give you a bit of a backstory so in a nutshell the claim was that intel's six core coffee-like cpus couldn't hold the same clock speeds reviewers were seeing on high-end zed 370 motherboards as they would on the yet to be released budget 360 motherboards although the locked core i5 8400 and core i7 8700 have a 65 watt TDP rating the worry was that they couldn't sustain an all core Bruce frequency of 3.8 gigahertz and 4.3 gigahertz respectively at these frequencies the six core CPUs would simply be too power hungry for a budget vrm to deliver enough power causing the CPU to throttle down and run at a lower frequency at which point it could become dramatically slower than what the reviews show cooling was also a concern since most reviewers use expensive aftermarket cooling and not intel's pathetic little 73 what box cooler though I'm not sure this is entirely true for reviews that covered the locked parts we've only reviewed the core i5 8400 here at harbor unboxed and we did so using the Box cooler in addition to some aftermarket cooling anyway in a previous video we bought a few of the worst said 370 boards we could find and test them with the 8700 K using the Box cool that comes with these 65 watt locked parts and then compared them to a cheap air cooler as well as a high-end all-in-one liquid cooler the 8700 K is of course a 95 watt part so the cooler was obviously underpowered however because the Zed 370 boards I used were happy to let the 8700 case sizzle away at the maximum temperature the cores can reach before thermal throttling kicks in otherwise known as the TJ Maxx the performance drop wasn't that bad I also tested the six core six thread core i5 8400 and found that with the box cooler on budget said 370 boards it really had no trouble holding the 3.8 gigahertz all Corbeau frequency after an hour-long stress test so whether you're using the box cooler or a high-end custom liquid cooled solution on the core i5 8400 performance will be much the same the 8700 K obviously benefits from better cooling as it is a 95 watt part that's designed to be overclocked but even so a ten-dollar air cooler will have you covered at least at the stock frequencies anyway I was keen to purchase a core i7 8700 for further testing but I felt like it was probably best to wait for the budget be 360 motherboards to rock up and then retest however not that long ago as rocks sent over their new desk mini featuring a tiny STX ed 370 motherboard and for testing they also said along the core i7 8700 as luck would have it I thought what a perfect opportunity to do some additional testing and well the results are very interesting just as I was beginning my testing a longtime subscriber notified me that in my previous video I helped spread some misinformation about Intel's turbo core ratios as most of you are probably aware until made the marketing decision with their coffee like CPUs to only advertise the base and single called turbo clock speeds and this is what caused the conspiracy that these CPUs couldn't hold the all called turbo frequencies that the reviewers were seeing I myself actually made the mistake of repeating some of this information about the boost clocks without looking into it properly and as it turns out the claims aren't entirely true the two three four five and six core turbo frequencies are still publicly available and can be read from the CPUs default turbo boost multiplier table but because the Intel isn't advertising them you have to do a little bit of digging here until it's actually done this in the past though with their Sandy Bridge processors for example one way you can quickly and easily read the default turbo boost multiplier table is by downloading and installing the Intel X to you software in the right sidebar you can see a heap of useful information about your CPU and how its configured by the motherboard and you can also see the multiplier table and here the turbo boost values are marked as active cause in the case of the core i7 8700 with all six cores active Intel is indeed targeting a 43 times multiplier for a 4.3 year it's operating frequency additionally you can also see that 4.3 gigahertz is targeted with 4 and 5 cause active then with 3 cause I look up to 4.4 gigahertz and then 4.5 gigahertz with 2 cause okay so now we have that sorted out it was time to see how the core i7 8700 got on with the asrock desk mini and it's teeny tiny verum featuring some of the smallest passive cooling you're likely to ever see on a motherboard under the laughably small heat sinks is a 5 plus 1 phase VM though it proved surprisingly capable despite Azra limiting CPU support to 65 watt models if you recall in a previous video I discussed the computer base review of the media on a razor a prebuilt featuring the core i7 8700 performed around 10 to 15 percent slower than what was seen by most reviews take the cinema r15 multi-threaded score for example the 8700 managed just twelve hundred and three points in the media on PC where his computer bases own test system allowed for a score of 1389 points that's a 15 percent improvement in score at the time I put this down to the ECS motherboard that was used by that particular pre-built rather than issue with the Intel spec for the 8700 with those results in the back of my mind I moved on a test the asrock - mini and honestly I was expecting to find a much better result but what I got was a much worse result out of the box the Desmond he was scoring just eleven hundred and twenty seven points and that's a further six percent reduction from medium PC so I started to dig into why this was I quickly realized that the desk mini was configured for a maximum package TDP of 65 watts now you might think well that makes sense the core i7 8,700 is a 65 watt part after all however the TDP is calculated from the base clock not the boost clocks the 8700 has a base clock frequency of just 3.2 gigahertz and here we can see while keeping within the 65 watt envelope it can sustain an operating frequency of 3.5 gigahertz 3.5 gigahertz though is a nineteen percent drop from 3.4 gigahertz and this is why we're seeing exactly a 19 percent drop in score from computer bases 1389 points from their test system to just eleven hundred and twenty seven points in the desk so does this mean the 8700 is simply to power-hungry and will require a higher ends at 370 motherboy to achieve maximum performance well turns out the answers actually no and I'll explain why using the XTU software I decided to see what the asrock testimony could do with the limits removed and what kind of risk this would expose it to bumping the package TDP up to 85 watts had minimal impact on performance so did 95 watts 105 watts and even 135 watts even increasing the current really didn't make that much difference to the score however there was a tail here using the stock 65 watt configuration the XTU software detected power limit throttling not surprising as the 8700 currently reached 3.5 gigahertz under these conditions and that's clearly because the motherboards power limiting it increasing the package TDP to just 75 watts still saw power limit throttling but interestingly it also introduced a thermal throttling as well and we are of course still using the Intel Box cooler then with the 85 watt configuration where mostly thermal throttling and by the time we hit 95 Watts were thermal throttling exclusively and this is with the case panel removed so the Box cooler has direct access to cool air outside of the case in a 21 degree room the desk Mini is configured to allow for a maximum CPU package temperature of 82 degrees so the second the Box cool hits that which pretty much takes one second under load the clock speed starts to rapidly decline at this point I started to wonder what the core i5 8400 would do using the 95 watt configuration so I threw it into the desk Mini with the Box cooler and ran some tests the 8400 was able to maintain 3.8 gigahertz on all calls after an hour long stress test and delivered the exact same Cinebench r15 multi throat score as it does in our liquid cooled coffee like test rig the reason for this was that the Intel Box cooler kept the 8400 below the 82 degree threshold it maxed out at just 77 degrees the next step then was to take the 8400 out of the desk mini and then reinstall the 8700 but do so with a cheap tower style air cooler to see if the limit really was the entire box cooler with the ultra cheap deep cooled gamax 200 T strapped on our cinnamon jar 15 with the TDP set to 130 watts and the current set to 138 amps to my surprise the 8700 instantly sped out a score of thirteen hundred and sixty-one points which is within the margin of error when compared to what we see on a high-end test system using a liquid cooler to confirm all of this I installed the Intel Core i7 8700 with the Intel Box cooler on a high and ZEB 370 desktop motherboard and with the same limits in the XTU software we get the same results and with the limits basically removed but with an 82 degree thermal limit in place we were limited to around 1200 points again this is with the Intel Box cooler so the limiting factor here is the Intel Box cooler and asrock has deliberately turned down the package TDP and set an 82 degree thermal limit to avoid winding the thing up to deafening levels not to save their vrm in fact with the game ax 210 installed the 8700 K cranking out big numbers the desk minis vrm never went above 50 degrees even after an extensive stress test with a packaged TDP of 65 watts the fan on the Intel Box cooler spun at 2100 rpm and here it was clearly audible but not outrageous however increasing the package TDP to just 75 what saw the fan spin right up to 3100 rpm and here it was a screeching Banshee sorry the entire Intel con Lake conspiracy can be blamed on the Intel Box cooler which is funny because in my last video I said this if Intel should be accused of anything it's that their lock CPUs come with complete not a garbage to cool them their box coolers have almost always been a joke and the cool that comes with their 65 watt TDP models is a complete joke at least when paired with their expensive six core models that being said I should note there really isn't a conspiracy here it's certainly no con job yes the Box cooler sucks there's no arguments from me about that however even with the Box cooler the 8700 does exactly what it's advertised to do it exceeds the 3.2 gearheads base frequency at all times for non AVX workloads and 4.6 gigahertz on a single core is also achieved what it can't do is reach the 4.3 gigahertz old core boost frequency using the Box cooler at least under reasonable operating conditions if you let the 8700 hit 100 degrees Celsius with the Box cooler it will deliver optimal performance it just does so at a sub optimal temperature I can kind of already imagine the comments on this one but Steve that's the con job Intel's not advertising the old core frequency because the 8700 can't do it with the Box cooler well yeah I kind of get that but unless they're specifically telling reviewers by the 8700 and then test it with anything but lebackes cooler it's kind of not a con job as you've seen intel states the six five four three and two core ratios and their XTU software they just don't advertise them however even if they did this really doesn't change anything Intel just like AMD only states that these frequencies can be achieved when the processor is conforming to its temperature voltage power delivery and current control limits so in short Intel doesn't guarantee boost clock speeds barely guarantee that worst case the CPU will run at its base clock frequency even the single core boost clock which is advertised isn't guaranteed as all the parameters that we just mentioned have to be in check I never reviewed the core i7 8700 because I couldn't actually get one when the series was first released had I got one though and only tested it with an aftermarket cooler then that would have been well pretty much on me and my review would have been misleading to properly review the 8700 you really need to do so with the Box cooler and then maybe also show some aftermarket cooling performance as well because a lot of people are willing to spend ten dollars to improve cooling performance and well performance in short there all this drama over the TDP ratings and motherboard power delivery has probably been for nothing the real issue here is the underwhelming Intel Box cooler at least on the 8700 and nothing's going to change that for the upcoming be 360 motherboards as a side note I should also mention that this was a best-case scenario for the Intel Box cooler as it was fed plenty of cool air in a room with an ambient air temperature of just 21 degrees so it's likely that you probably see worse results with the 8700 in a warmer environment that's what I strongly believe budget parts like the core i3 8100 and Core i5 84 for example our going to deliver the exact same performance with the Box cooler on B 360 boards as they do on the expensive Zed 370 motherboards and I'm 99.9% certain that this will also be true for the 8700 at least within reason I mean there will be some 50 to 60 dollar boards that might not be up to the task especially those without any kind of vrm cooling at all of course this is true for any motherboard or certainly any motherboard on a mainstream platform for example the ultra cheap asrock a B 350 M HD v and this is an a m4 motherboard it doesn't support rise and 7 1800 X 1700 X or even the 1600 X processor as the vrm features no form of cooling and can't handle those parts anyway you can rest assured that will have all the answers for you when it comes to the Intel budget B 360 motherboards in another video very soon and that's going to do it for this one if you enjoyed the video be sure to hit the like button subscribe for more content if you appreciate the work we do here to have our own box then consider supporting us on patreon thanks for watching I'm your host Steve see you next time