4GHZ CPU Battle

IPC (instructions per cycle) provides a good indicator of how fast a processor is and having both a high IPC with a high operating frequency is the best combination for maximum performance. Such is the case for Intel's 8th-Gen Coffee Lake CPUs, and although AMD is clearly trailing when it comes to frequencies, the company appears to have really closed in on Intel's IPC performance. That's likely the reason why so many of you have been asking for this kind of test.

To see how much headway AMD has made here, we're going to limit as many variables as we can, while also keeping things as realistic as possible. The first and most obvious step is to remove core frequency from the equation and to do this we've locked all of the CPU cores at 4GHz. Any type of boost technology has been disabled and the cores cannot go past 4GHz.

The second-gen Ryzen CPUs were tested on the Asrock X470 Taichi Ultimate and the Coffee Lake CPUs were on the Asrock Z370 Taichi. Both configurations used the same G.Skill FlareX DDR4-3200 memory with the 'Xtreme' memory profile and the same MSI GTX 1080 Ti Gaming X Trio for all the testing.

The Coffee Lake CPUs have a clear clock speed advantage. For real-world performance, please refer to our recent Ryzen 5 2600, 2600X and 2700X reviews.

For this test we've included results for the Intel Core i7-8700K, 8600K, Ryzen 7 2700X, 2600X and Ryzen 7 1800X along with the 1600X. Now, the 1600X, 2600X and 8700K all have the same CPU resources: 6 cores with 12 threads.

The 1800X and 2700X have an advantage being that they are 8-core/16-thread CPUs while the 8600K is at a disadvantage as it's a 6-core/6-thread CPU, so please keep all that in mind as we proceed. Let's get to the results.

Benchmarks - 

Starting with the sustained memory bandwidth test we see that the first and second-gen Ryzen CPUs are similar with a bandwidth of about 39GB/s. Meanwhile, using the exact same memory, the Coffee Lake CPUs are limited to around 33GB/s and this is a 15% reduction in bandwidth when compared to the Ryzen CPUs.