We all know that with each generation leap, performance moves forward. It is in these times, however, that we see older generations getting huge price cuts making them really attractive and, most times, really affordable.
Today, we take a look at the I7-7700HQ versus the I5-8300H. The 8th generation i5-8300H with 4GB ram, 1TB HDD and GTX1050 is priced at roughly 45K-55K while the older i7-7700HQ was priced at roughly 59,995 to 64,995 – we can now find some i7-7700HQs price at the same 54,995 after price cuts.
Now, historically, I7’s were always more powerful than their i5 counterparts, and that performance leap included a 1 generation older Corei7 beating a 1generation newer Core i5. For example, When the I5-7300HQ was released, the i7-6700HQ still beat it in most benchmarks due to the lack of hyper threading on the i5 variants of Intel’s line.
With the 8th generation update, however, Core i5 series finally get the HyperThreading technology. Let’s look at the detailed comparisons of the KBL processors and the newer CFL variants.
As you can see, on paper, the newer 8th gen is more versatile and more potential. Memory supports up to 2666mhz, has higher boosts and much bigger L3 caches. All these contribute to much better performance.
So now that we’ve cleared that, we can safely assume that the 8th Gen CFL-H Core i7 will beat the 7th Gen KBL-H Core i7, and same for the i5 counterparts. The burning question, though, is if the CFL-H i5-8300H received enough upgrades to beat a 7th gen Core i7?
The quick answer – YES.
Let’s look at the benchmark scores.
(Benchmark Results from Notebookcheck.Net) |
i5-8300H | i7-7700HQ | i5-7300HQ | i7-8550U |
| 3DMark 11 – Physics | 9360 | 8838 | 6077 | 6581 |
| 3DMark – Fire Strike Physics | 11872 | 10631 | 6758 | 8157 |
| Cinebench R15 CPU | 801 cb | 734 cb | 514 cb | 558 cb |
| Cinebench R15 CPU – Single Core | 166 cb | 159 cb | 142 cb | 164 cb |
| Cinebench R11.5 CPU | 7.73 pts | 8.1 pts | 5.8 pts | 6.2 pts |
| Cinebench R11.5 CPU – Single Core | 1.86 pts | 1.8 pts | 1.5 pts | 1.9 pts |
| Geekbench 3 32-bit – Single Core | 3740 pts | 3675 pts | 3195 pts | 3779 pts |
| Geekbench 3 32-bit – Multi Core | 15050 pts | 14102 pts | 9752 pts | 12523 pts |
| Geekbench 4.1 64-bit – Single Core | 4771 pts | 4635 pts | 4040 pts | 4877 pts |
| Geekbench 4.1 64-bit – Multi Core | 14788 pts | 14783 pts | 11039 pts | 13759 pts |
| x264 HD Benchmark 4.0 – Pass 1 | 188.3 fps | 168.4 fps | 160.8 fps | 148 fps |
| x264 HD Benchmark 4.0 – Pass 2 | 51.38 fps | 46 fps | 34.1 fps | 33.1 fps |