The latest CPU from Intel is here at last, and it’s built to be a full-on fire-breathing beast when it comes to performance figures. Firstly, this is the counter-attack from Intel we’ve been waiting for, as the battle of the cores rages on. We saw Intel leap to 6 cores with their previous release on Z370 motherboards, and now they’re pushing the core count up to 8, putting it on par with that of the high-end Ryzen solutions. However, Intel has already won the GHz battle, as this chip runs up to 5 GHz Turbo. Of course, we’ve already seen stories of extreme overclockers pushing past that figure.

How is that Possible?
When you up the clock speeds by so much, you naturally increase the heat the CPU produce. Couple that with cramming 8 cores into the standard 1151 chip form factor, and you’ve got more heat. With that in mind, this chip is rated by Intel with a thermal specification of 100c. I don’t normally discuss heat before the benchmarks, but we had seen this CPU run pretty toasty before we got our own sample. As far as we can tell, that’s normal for it, and doesn’t seem to impact the performance negatively. However, we’ll have to get it underwater in the coming weeks and see if we can really push some bigger performance figures.