People still pushing 720p, lol. Again pointless and irrelevant.

Because some people run programs in conjunction with their games.

And the CPU tends to outlive the GPU, you will upgrade a GPU more than once per CPU, so it makes sense to get a good CPU to start with.

That's exactly right. In saying that, it's not entirely useless... Especially if you game at 720P.

It more or less shows the CPU differences in the best possible scenario, not a real world one... It's an extra datapoint to base a purchasing decision on.

Gaming at 720p is not at all realistic on desktop/home platforms. If it were portable systems like laptops then it'd be a realistic scenario because 720p would still come in handy for power constrained scenarios and the PPI density would stay similar enough so that the hit to image quality isn't as severe on bigger displays ... 

Benchmarking at 720p (especially at low settings) is a bad idea as it is since it'll mostly reveal a flaw in the game code as framerate scaling is not anywhere close to being linear in proportion to the increase in a CPUs single threaded performance! (there comes a point where measuring CPU performance can become limited by the game code itself so it then becomes inappropriate for benchmarking purposes) 

Using 720p with low settings to measure CPU performance is almost a purely academic exercise rather than a real world one because code quality then almost becomes a factor in itself at that point so bias can still manifest in the background for other reasons ... (it's very hard to purely measure CPU performance in isolation because code can also contribute as a source of bias) 

Just as I had explained before, old code is bad code for benchmarking because it is unmaintained code and likewise poorly designed code is also bade code for benchmarking as well since much of the game code out there isn't well suited for benchmarking at very high framerates so when performing tests we should always stick to realistic cases instead ... 

That means benchmarking 32-bit applications becomes a non-starter since many of them are obviously unmaintained and then benchmarking at low resolutions/quality presets may reveal more biases about the game code itself as observed in Far Cry games rather than pure CPU performance since a certain vendor's CPU may be able to optimize a couple more hot loops than the other vendor's CPU when the programmer built that into the code design ... 

We don't do game benchmarks at 480p anymore because of serious image quality issues and we shouldn't do game benchmarks at 720p anymore as well for the same reasons to a lesser extent but not especially when the new systems will be coming out to make that resolution extinct ... 

IMO when next generation comes around, 720p tests needs to be buried for good because it's not cutting it anymore for a high-end experience even for high framerates ... 

I think everyone grasps that.

What your not grasping is that it doesnt matter..... in the real world.
Also No two games are the exact same, with demands or optimisations, and you dont know how games in the future will be run (from running old games at 720p).

Also Its a bad way to "gauge cpu bottlenecks".

All you need to do, is look at the 1440p benchmarks with 1% differnce in performance.
Once CPU's reach that point, where the performance between them all is soo small, it means its not the CPU holding anything back anymore.

Eh, 8700k costs around 350€ and performs better according to those benchmarks. So cheaper and better seems to fit.
As a cooler, I use the same old crappy fan I used for the 3770k. Huehuehue

The bold is not true ... 

Having multiple applications don't matter much anymore with multiple cores when games mostly only hit a couple of the threads very hard and future CPU intensive games will likely have better code design so 720p performance today won't necessarily scale to 720p performance in the future ... 

Absolutely false. 720P is still important and used often by a chunk of the market.
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam

Often it's desktops that use integrated graphics or the lowest-rung discreet GPU's that would sit at 720P... It's not just notebooks and portable systems.

I think you need to recheck the steam hardware survey stats since only 0.4% of all displays account for a 720p resolution. The next most common resolution is 768p which is a very rare desktop supported monitor resolution and is more commonly found in Laptop supported display resolutions ... 

Also, integrated graphics is irrelevant to the topic of this discussion at hand which is about CPU performance because at that point graphics performance is more important than CPU performance ... 

720p is especially irrelevant for high-end gaming and shouldn't be used for testing purposes at all ... 

False.
The notebook before my Ryzen notebook was 1280x720 resolution. I also have an old 32" Television in the shed which is 1366x768 and I have an old 17" LCD monitor which is 1366x768.

In-fact a few years ago most low-end Twisted Nematic panels that were 21" and smaller were 1366x768... And Newegg USA itself has 230~ such 1366x768 panels verses 4x for 1280x720 panels.

Couple of 1366x768 desktop monitors as an example:
- https://www.newegg.com/lg-19m38d-b-19-wxga/p/N82E16824025394
- https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16824260378

Integrated graphics is entirely relevant. If you are running say... A Ryzen APU with 11 Vega CU's, you are not gaming at 1080P. You are gaming at 720P which these benchmarks tend to represent and the CPU can quickly become the limiting factor. - Many people also happily buy an APU for gaming purposes with the intention of dropping in a discreet GPU at a later date.

720P benchmarking is meant to place an emphasis on CPU performance discrepancies in the most extreme of scenarios, it is not going to be applicable to everyone, but they also hold some statistical value for others.

I dunno, AMD has been doing great recently but I always prefer Intel. They have never let me down since the 2 series i7 processors. Very nice PC, I am looking forward to upgrading my PC again but not for at least another year.