Right, so Coffee Lake. I think its safe to say that Coffee lake has some good things to offer, but that the launch has been far from perfect. If you want to buy a i7-8700k or an i5-8400, good luck.
There are a few places that “claim” to have stock on pcpartspicker, but really only have pre-orders. And dear god, the prices! I haven’t seen price inflation like this since the last time AMD launched a graphics card. You can pre-order a i7-8700k from B&H that’ll get to you eventually, and it’ll cost you $50 over MSRP (plus shipping ofc). I even heard mentions of microcenter appearantly selling units for $499!!! For a $350~ MSRP part that is ridiculous. And its not even miners buying stock up either; its the biggest fangirls in the intel camp inflating prices.
And don’t even get me started on X299. I won’t do a deep dive into that lineup because, well, I already did that here:
And that all brings me to the question, does intel even have a product on the shelves that makes sense to buy, today? X299 is garbage and you can’t actually buy Coffee Lake without paying a ludicrous mark-up and getting stuck waiting for pre-orders to fill.
Well, surprisingly, there is.
The original DDR4 platform from August 2014 is still surprisingly kicking around, in mid-October, and the value proposition is actually better than Coffee Lake or X299. Yes, X99. It’s not quite EOL yet; actually quite far from it.
Three-Hundred and Thirty Dollars. It doesn’t get you a 6 Core Coffee Lake I7, but it does get you a 6 core Broadwell I7. I7-8700k is fundamentally a consumer chip. You can dual channel memory, and 16 pcie lanes. 6850k is a very, very different beast. Quad channel memory and 40 pcie lanes, for less money.
https://www.superbiiz.com/detail.php?name=I7-6850KBX&c=CJ
($328.99 at time of posting)
Honestly I don’t know why anyone would go Coffee Lake or god-forbid 7800XE (or 7740X) over the older 6850k. X99 is a cheaper platform that offers more expansion capabilities than either of the new intel platforms, and at what cost? 5% ipc and less dollars. Oh yeah, and its got a soldered heat spreader.
Not to mention motherboard cost. I lampooned X299 for the price of a motherboard compared to the small-socket offerings, and now, the prices of a X99 board is routinely less than the price of a Z370 or X299 board. Go right now and search eBay for 2011-v3 motherboards. There are good, really good, boards on eBay for a hell of a lot less than X299 and even Z370 boards are selling for.
SO. Where does that leave us?? Intel’s most compelling skew is the fire-sale leftovers from last year, and even 6850k is not the be-all end-all option. R7 1700 is cheaper and has better multi-threaded performance to offer, allbeit on a platform that does not compete with X99’s capacity for expansion cards. Even still, R5 1600 at an even bigger price advantage, is neck and neck with the 6850k’s computational power (with the same caveat as r7 1700).
Intel? Hello?