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It is improbable, but there are many reasons why a specific 8700 might outperform a specific 8700k. There is a factor luck of the draw involved in the specific chips they test with.

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Can you name some reasons? I thought concepts like luck of the draw in this context normally translate to silicon lottery and are meant to describe overclocking potential. But there is no reason why a chip sold as one of those cpus should not be able to reach the specified turbo clock, and in that case the 8700 just has to be slower in such a test.

The only thing I can think of is maybe the 8700 has better binning and is able to hit its turbo speed while putting out less heat and so is able to maintain its turbo speeds for longer than the 8700k.

I think it is more likely to just be testing margin of error

One reason might be that manufacturer can sell chips that would qualify as 8700k as 8700 simply to meet the 8700 demand if they have more good chips than they can sell at the higher price point.

I remember this happening for chips from the first step revision of Nehalem.

When the demand for the i7 920 was way up, there were a bunch of better chips sold as such.

Savvy overclockers knew which batch numbers they were and sought the particular runs.

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