FEATURE // INTEL CORE I9 7980XE & I7 8700K VS . ROG APEX FAMILY
we hardly lost anything in as far as clock frequencies are concerned . In fact , we ended up with even better memory overclocking ( I ’ m unsure however which part is entirely responsible for this . Is it the motherboards , CPUs , or a combination ?). In one fell swoop INTEL managed to make this generation of Performance desktop CPUs significantly more appealing than the previous line up , while only charging a fraction more .
As it stands today in overclocking , benchmarks as we all know break down into ones that benefit from pure CPU clock frequency and others which benefit from the sheer number of cores or threads the host CPU has . Therefore , in as much as I and others appreciate the two additional cores , they by and large remain only useful to gamers , productivity workloads and the like . For competitive overclocking , speed is still king . Moreover , because HWBOT separates CPUs via core count , it is rather difficult to compare the Core i7-7700K to the 8700K in a direct way .
What one can compare are the clock frequencies achieved with liquid nitrogen . What speaks to the great work that minds at INTEL delivered is the fact that the there are at least three 7.3GHz and higher frequency validations on the Core i7-8700K , while the highest Core i7-7700K frequency is 7,157MHZ . The same applies to memory frequency as well , where the highest recorded DRAM frequency with the CPU ( or rather on the Z370 platform ) is 2,764MHz or 5,528MT / s effectively . No surprises that this frequency was achieved on the very board in question in this editorial - the ROG Maximus X APEX .
It ’ s no wonder that the Core i7- 8700K and the MAXIMUS X APEX , much like the Rampage VI APEX and the Core i9-7980XE make for , an obvious combination and more than likely the only viable configuration for competitive overclocking at the highest levels .
As with the Rampage VI APEX , the Maximus board is at present ( and for the foreseeable future ) ruling the hardware rankings and submissions , making up a solid 15,2 % of all submissions on HWBOT . Interestingly enough , a similar board , the Maximus X Hero , is the
Core i7 8700K @ 6,498MHZ
22 The OverClocker Issue 43 | 2018