Intel Core i7 8700K Linux Benchmarks
In my testing of the ASUS PRIME Z370-A over the past two days with the i5-8400 and i7-8700K, this Z370 motherboard has been working fine on Linux with no major issues to report -- as far as the processor itself is concerned. More compatibility details in the PRIME Z370-A review, but long story short, the system with these new processors has been running fine when tested on Ubuntu 17.10, but the graphics are a bit different. While they are effectively just rebranded HD Graphics 630 from Kabylake, the UHD Graphics 630 were not working out of the box on Ubuntu 17.10 or even when firing up a Linux 4.14 Git kernel. The i915 DRM driver was refusing to activate even though its PCI IDs for this graphics adapter (0x3e92) is present in the respective parts of the Intel Linux graphics driver stack, etc. But in just having this board for two days for benchmarking, I will have more on the Coffee Lake graphics under Linux in a follow-up article very shortly. (Update: With Linux 4.13~4.14, you need to set i915.alpha_support=1 to enable this "alpha" quality driver support for Coffee Lake.)
The processors featured in this Core i7 8700K Linux comparison include the:
- Core i5 7600K
- Core i5 8400
- Core i7 4790K
- Core i7 7700K
- Core i7 7740X
- Core i7 7820X
- Core i7 8700K
- Core i9 7900X
- Core i9 7960X
- Core i9 7980XE
- Ryzen 7 1700
- Ryzen 7 1800X
- Ryzen Threadripper 1950X
See today's Core i5 8400 Linux benchmarks for more comparison points on the low-end of the spectrum.
All of these tests were done with the systems running at DDR4-3200 with their maximum number of memory channels in use and using NVMe storage, using Ubuntu 17.10 daily with the Linux 4.13 kernel and GCC 7.2 and enforcing the "performance" CPU scaling governor. The Core i7 8700K was tested with the ASUS PRIME Z370-A motherboard, 2 x 8GB Corsair DDR4-3200 memory, Corsair Force MP500 120GB NVMe SSD, and integrated graphics.
Let's see how Coffee Lake is performing under Linux with this hexa-core Core i7 CPU. All benchmarks were run in a fully-automated manner with the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software.