Coffee lake articles

Today we're taking a closer look at the Gigabyte Aero 15X, launched alongside Intel's new H-series Coffee Lake processors which brought up to 6 cores and 12 threads to the laptop form factor. Gigabyte is key to stress this isn't just a gaming laptop, but a machine designed for productivity, and that shows with features like an X-Rite certified display.

Before the incoming 2nd-gen Ryzen parts arrive this shootout will let us establish how AMD and Intel currently stack up with all the latest Windows updates, BIOS updates, driver updates and new motherboards we have on hand, giving us an up to date reference point for the new CPUs.

The Core i7-8750H is one of seven new Coffee Lake H-series processors designed for performance notebooks, workstations and gaming laptops. The i7-8750H is essentially the successor to the widely popular 'Kaby Lake' Core i7-7700HQ that was used in nearly every top-end gaming laptop over the last year or so.

When Intel raced out 8th-gen Coffee Lake CPUs last year, they did so with a single chipset, the high-end Z370. Now 6 months later Intel is finally unleashing their more budget friendly chipsets which includes the B360, which we're taking a look at today. So what's there to know?

After looking at our selection of the best AMD B350 motherboards, now we're looking at our favorite Z370 motherboards meant to be coupled with Intel's latest 8th-gen Core processors a.k.a. Coffee Lake. There are loads of great Z370 motherboards to choose from and pricing starts at a little over $100. The good news is that for the most part you can't go really wrong, but as usual we hope these picks can help you narrow down your choices.

After our recent feature comparing Intel's 8th-gen Core series against AMD's Ryzen processors, many of you have been asking us to get some older chips into the mix, with particular interest in seeing how Haswell-era processors hold up against Intel's latest offerings. We're also curious to see how well the Core i7-4770K has aged – we first tested this CPU in June 2013.

You've read the reviews and now we are putting them together on a single CPU comparison. On deck for this one we tested 8 processors in 9 games at not only 1080p, but also 720p and 1440p, amounting to more than 650 benchmark passes.

For $180 the Core i3-8350K is nearly a rebadged Core i5-7600K: both are 14nm quad-cores operating at ~4GHz, but the 8350K is 25% cheaper. Meanwhile, the Core i3-8100 goes for a more appealing $120. And although it's locked at 3.6GHz, it's roughly 40% more affordable than a comparable i5 from the last generation.

Intel is hitting back with its eighth-generation Core series, which counters Ryzen with cores, lots of cores. On hand today we have the Core i7-8700K, based on Intel's new "Coffee Lake" architecture, it is designed to operate no slower than 3.7 GHz, with turbo boost taking it as high as 4.7 GHz.