Core blimey. 2017 is proving to be a landmark year for desktop PC CPUs. There has been more innovation this year than the preceding five, driven by AMD coming back into the enthusiast market with a range of price-to-performance champions based on the all-new Zen architecture. Known to you as Ryzen, these chips have, for the last six months, offered more cores, threads and overall performance for your buck than the incumbent Intel Core series.

Yet it is foolish to think Intel would take the AMD arrivals lying down. It has hurried along the ultra-enthusiast Core X series to stave off the threat from AMD's Ryzen Threadripper, while the traditional base has been augmented by 8th Generation Core processors built on what is known as the Coffee Lake architecture.

Chips based on Coffee Lake take a leaf out of the AMD playbook by upping the cores and threads whilst keeping pricing in check. Let's dive a little deeper to see how it all plays out.