Core i5-8600K has performance similar to Core i7-7700K

Intel is pulling out all of the stops for its Coffee Lake-S architecture, with the flagship Core i7-8700K to be the new gaming champion with its 6C/12T of CPU performance hitting 4.8GHz on air cooling when overclocked. It also beats the 7700K by around 10% in games, and more in multi-threaded applications.

But it'll be the mid-range Core i5-8600K that will have gamers pulling the trigger finger on their orders, with Chinese site PCOnline posting benchmarks of the 8600K early. They've compared it against the Core i7-8700K, Core i7-7700K, Core i5-7500, and AMD's Ryzen 7 1800X and Ryzen 5 1600X processors in a bunch of different games.

Rise of the Tomb Raider scales beautifully between the processors, with the Core i5-8600K sliding right next to both of the Core i7 processors with 70FPS average.

Ashes of the Singularity performance on the Core i5-8600K beats out the Core i7-7700K by 4FPS, but loses to the 6C/12T power of the new Core i7-8700K.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands at 4K is hard on everything, but the Core i5-8600K manages to hold its own, with just 1FPS lower performance than the Core i7-7700K.

Power consumption across the new processors is impressive, too... with 381W total power consumption on the Core i5-8600K compared to 392W for the 7700K, and 421W on the 8700K.

Intel is providing some damn good performance with the mid-range Core i5-8600K... something that I need to test myself when it launches. Right now I'm running the Core i3-7350K with a TITAN Xp graphics card and a 3440x1440 display and I can play Battlegrounds at 100FPS average with the right graphics details and optimizations.

You really don't need a Core i7 processor to game these days, and the new Core i3 and Core i5 processors in Coffee Lake-S form are only going to prove that with an underline and highlighter at the same time.