Intel Coffee Lake Core i7-8700K review
Somewhat related, I wonder why the PC gaming ecosystem has always focused on the extreme high end for <i>everyone</i>. I very rarely see anyone trying to get into PC gaming considering a very reasonable $600 budget that would in real world performance get them 90% of the way to a system twice as expensive.<p>Back in, say, 2008 the diminishing returns threshold was much higher. But builders have never adapted to how good cheap parts are - games are being designed for the average hardware, and nowadays that is <i>extremely</i> old relative to how it would have been ten years ago.<p>The real winners of Coffee Lake and Ryzen for me are the 8100 and 1200. Quad cores with, respectively, high frequencies or an unlocked multiplayer on almost all motherboards that come in under $120. These chips beat the pants off an i5 2500k and until this year that kind of performance was barely trickling down when suddenly it just windfalled as soon as AMD was competitive again.<p>Same way the winners in the GPU market are either the 1060 or 580. At least before the mining boom, they were both available under $200 and delivered performance comparable to $500+ cards three years ago.<p>The real advent of recent years has not been pushing the envelope in terms of tech - even the most ludicrous builds still cannot handle 4k and VR is still in its infancy - it has been in driving the cost of admission to great looking 3d games at 1080p down to a fraction what it was five years ago.<p>I&#x27;m not sure what it will take to break that 4k barrier. Maybe once we are near a <i>mature</i> 5nm node we will be able to stuff enough transistors onto a die to push that many pixels. But until then we should appreciate how affordable PC gaming is becoming for anyone just getting into it. At least when GPU prices come back down to Earth...