Intel's 10th Gen Core Flagship Processor: A Mixed Bag for Gamers and General Users

Intel has finally released its 10th Gen Core flagship processor, codenamed i9-9900K. The CPU boasts a peak frequency of 5.8 GHz and an average temperature increase of about 20 degrees Celsius from the previous generation. This significant increase in temperature suggests that Intel had to push the limits of the 14 nanometer process node to achieve these impressive clock speeds.

When I ran my benchmarks with this overclock enabled, I saw a 5.8 percent increase in compute performance and just a 1% bump in gaming. While gaming is not typically a CPU-intensive task, Intel has made significant strides in improving its gaming performance. The company claims that the i9-9900K can maintain higher frequencies even when power limits are in place, leading to measurable increases in frame rates and overall gaming performance.

However, overclocking highlights just how careful Intel had to be to eke out this level of performance from yet another 14 nanometer chip. Push those parameters a little further, and you can get higher clocks and possibly more performance, but the trade-off when comparing the performance increase to power draw and thermals is not ideal. This combined with the out-of-the-box performance that you can expect on the AMD side right now leads me to recommend against Intel unless you're purely looking at gaming and particularly gaming at lower resolutions like 1080 where the difference between CPUs is actually measurable.

If I were to take all of my gaming tests and rerun them at 4k, probably see just about zero difference between the CPUs. We would be GPU-bound rather than CPU-bound. However, if you're looking at general use cases such as video encoding or other compute-intensive tasks, Intel's i9-9900K might still offer an advantage over AMD.

On the pro side for Intel, we have Z 490 motherboard pricing which seems to be reasonable this time around, independent of course, with any motherboard reviews. Tie-in with that, at least temporarily, we have the problems or the issues with AMD's motherboard availability which are a big issue right now, it's really hard to build something with X 570 unless you're willing to pay $350 for a board that originally cost 200.

AMD is losing some of the advantage they've had over in sell with their promise of long-term socket support. Yes, we do have news now that AMD is providing backwards compatibility now with 400 series of motherboards for their upcoming 4000 series CPUs, which was nice of them to do, but it does not negate the fact that an M4 is approaching end-of-life. So whereas before it was a little bit easier to recommend AMD because of the upgrade path, now we're seeing a little more equivalence there and if for no other reason that an M4 has been around a while and they've got to end it eventually.

Another con for Intel is the lack of PCIe 4.0 support for now and Intel hasn't really promised any, so even looking forward to something like that it's still a bit of a dubious proposition. We also have the efficiency issues and you can probably see those in my power draw charts and that's just because they're still on 14 nanometer and they're not going to get better in that area until they move on to 10nm or 5nm.

Overall, Intel has taken some steps to make their 10th Gen Core flagship processor interesting. If you're purely looking at gaming, I think it's fair to say that Intel did a pretty good job. However, for general users, the benefits may not be as clear-cut.

In conclusion, if you're interested in purchasing an i9-9900K, I would recommend waiting and checking out independent motherboard reviews before making your final decision. Keep an eye out for my video on the 10th Gen Intel launch and upcoming 10th Gen Intel processor reviews, and don't forget to subscribe to my channel as well if you haven't already.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enIntel's 10th Jan core CPUs launched today along with a slew of new LG a 1200 motherboards with 400 series chipsets so I will be sharing benchmarks so you can get a better idea of the performance there's a whole stack of 10 CPUs in this launch starting with I threes that have hyper threading now all the way up to the new core 910 900k flagship that now has 10 cores and 20 threads today I will be focusing on the flagship 10 900k but I'm also working on some benchmarks for the new 6 core 12 thread 10 600k that video should be up tomorrow so if you want to see it when it's ready I would suggest subscribing to my youtube channel that said let's get started the dark core RGB Pro is a premium wireless gaming mouse from Corsair with a long list of features like an 18,000 dpi low-power picsArt optical sensor for maximum precision with minimal power usage attractive 9 zone dynamic RGB backlighting and a comfortable contoured shape with two interchangeable side grips included connect wirelessly via Corsairs the sub 1 millisecond slipstream technology via bluetooth for convenience on-the-go or wired via USB see durable Omron switches up to 50 hours of battery life eight fully programmable buttons and more so click the sponsor link in the description for details so here's my table of contents and I will also add timestamps in the description and comment section down below if you want to jump ahead but I'm gonna cover the basic specs of these CPUs I'm testing first then some words on my test setup in methodology then I will talk you guys through the benchmarks themselves then some overclocking then some overall performance comparisons and conclusions the 10 900k though is the follow-up to the 9900 Kay from ninth gen and it now has 10 cores and 20 threads up from 8 and 16 with the 9900 k it's still going to be 500 bucks and I like that Intel is adding more cores and threads to mainstream CPUs but the competition is pretty fierce over on AMD side where I'll be comparing the 10900 K to the Rison 3900 X which has 12 cores and 24 threads which was originally $500 but can now be found for a discounted price of around 422 $450 quite easily I might add there's also the flagship 3950 X with 16 cores and 32 threads and also the best single core performance on the rise inside which was originally $750 but now goes for about 720 to sum up the 10th gen though Intel is now shipping more cores more threads and higher frequencies on all of its CPUs pretty much across the board with the 10 900k now hitting up to 5 point 3 gigahertz on one or two cores out of the box thanks to intel's turbo boost knife max 3.0 technology as well as thermal velocity boost technology which basically bumped the CPU speeds up to higher frequencies if thermals are within a set range and if power limits aren't reached unfortunately power limits get reached fairly quickly at stock but more on that in just a minute Intel is hoping that the high frequencies of these new CPUs will make up for where it's lacking vs. AMD because Intel is still manufacturing CPUs using 14 nanometer technology whereas with rise in 3000 series AMD is now on 7 nanometer which greatly benefits efficiency one other comparative point I wanted to make was about the platform and motherboards support for Intel 10th gen you'll need one of these new 400 series motherboards with the LGA 1200 chipset I was sent several of these z4 90 motherboards for lunch like this gigabyte z4 90 horas master or the asus rog Maximus 12 hero Wi-Fi right here but I can only really test with one motherboard so I went with the MSI mag z4 90 ace and I mainly did that because it was one of the first ones to arrive along with the MSI God likes but the godlike is ridiculously overpriced so I thought this would be slightly more reasonable more to the point though this is kind of a negative you need a new motherboard in order to use one of these 10th gen CPUs but on the plus side there does seem to be plenty of Z 490 options out there that allow overclocking with case Q Intel CPUs that actually start out somewhat reasonably priced at least if you're comparing it to older unlocked for overclocking motherboards from Intel about a hundred and fifty two hundred and sixty dollars is what I've seen the cheapest ones that of course motherboard reviews that withstanding we'll have to see if these entry-level ones can actually stand up to overclocking something that could send 900 K but perhaps you won't need to spend 200 plus dollars for the privilege of overclocking on until this time around there are also quite a few motherboards that have launched that say they are PCI Express 4.0 ready even though these 10th Gen Intel CPUs do not support PCIe 4.0 they're still limited to 3.0 but that does mean that even though Intel has not directly confirmed this that will probably be another family of CPUs launching for these LGA 1200 boards in the future and it is probably code rocket Lake and it will probably support PCIe 4.0 I say this all for the sake of being thorough though lots of you are probably pointing out that over on the AMD side right now you can already get PCI Express 4.0 support with horizon 3000 series CPU and a 500 series motherboard like X 570 or the upcoming B 550 which were expecting to launch June 16th however and again this might change soon if you shop for AMD motherboards right now particularly for a forward compatible X 570 board they are sold out or ridiculously overpriced also 500 series boards will probably be the last ones on socket am for with support for AMD's 3000 series and yet to be released 4000 series so both AMD and Intel are kind of in the same boat when it comes to an upgrade path at least if you're just looking at what's available right now or within the next month and especially if PCIe 4.0 is something you're after and if you're considering the next gen CPUs that are expected to launch later this year or in early 2021 there's definitely more to discuss there but I need to move on to the benchmarks so let's move on now you always want to minimize variants between tests and testing setups when benchmarking so here's the parts I used in all of my test beds for today for memory a 16 gigabyte 2 by 8 gig kit of G scale ddr4 3200 Casselton C 14 memory for the GPU we have the asus rog Strix r-tx 20 80 TI OC graphics card running at its out-of-the-box overclocked speeds for cooling that 280 millimeter NZXT kraken X 62 all-in-one CPU cooler and for comparative power draw testing and EVGA supernova g3 750 watt 80 plus gold power supply the systems were all set up with open test beds and I did my best to have the radiator fans pushing air across the motherboard VRMs just for the sake of consistency for Intel I had to test systems for eighth and ninth gen I used the azrog z3 90 tight sheet ultimate motherboard and 4/10 gen I went with the msi Meg z4 98 or M eg is what MSI wants you to say but Meg is much simpler shut up Meg for AMD we have the gigabyte X 570 or ass master motherboard and then I'm running the latest in video drivers for 45.8 7 as well as the most recent version of Windows 10 64 bit with all the updates windows high performance power plan for Intel and AMD high performance power plan for AMD and now go over the actual benchmarks starting with frequencies CPU frequency is very important and higher is better but frequencies also fluctuates here I'm showing the peak frequency each CPU hit as well as the sustained all core frequency during a blender render the ten 900k hit its 5.3 gigahertz single core turbo boost right away but while working all cores it will drop to 4.9 gigahertz that's still impressive across ten cores but Intel also has power limit settings to keep the CPU from drying too much power or overheating and it's stock these kick in after about a minute the short duration power limit provides 250 watts for the CPU but in my testing once it dropped after 56 seconds to the hundred and 25 watt cap of the long duration power limit CPU frequencies also felt anywhere from 4.2 to 4.7 gigahertz across all cores next is power draw and efficiency which is the less sexy side of CPU performance testing in my opinion but it's still very important I'm measuring the wattage drawn by the entire system during a blender render this is the new blender version 2.8 to a which does get better results from CPUs at least as far as I can tell but AMD is still winning across the board here because seven nanometer if efficiency is at the top of your list of important CPU things you should go AMD there's just no two ways about it the 3950 X and even 3900 X are just ridiculous when it comes to how much power they draw versus their CPU compute performance on Intel side though 278 watts on average for the 10900 K looks good if you're comparing it to the 8700 Kerr 9900 K especially if you're also considering the added cores and threads Intel has made improvements to their 40 nanometer process over the years but when the power limits kick in as mentioned when I was talking about frequencies power drop also drops down to about 182 watts so I guess that makes sense it's drawing less power but it's also outputting a lot less performance here are my thermal comparisons though this is the average temperature after a 10 minute I 264 burnin test measured across all cores for Intel or the CPU TDM measurement for AMD I think Intel's thin die upgrade for this gen actually is working because look how nice and cool the 10900 K is don't be misled though power limit duration was reached after one minute so the ten hundred K was running at four point six to 4.7 gigahertz during this test not four point nine and definitely not 5.3 so these three factors with the ten 900k tell us something very clearly Intel has improved thermals but they are also performing some tricks in order to stay within their somewhat arbitrary definition of what 825 watt TDP is they're compensating for the relative inefficiency of their 14 nanometer manufacturing process by limiting available CPU power throttling frequencies and leaving it up to motherboard manufacturers to enable settings that open up performance while also drastically increasing heat output and power draw I know this because I did some overclocking and I'll talk about that after we go over the stock benchmark results so let's start off with Cinebench r20 this is a multi-threaded test this is a cinema 4d render test by Maxon and i want to focus on where the ten 900k has made upgrades over the ninety nine hundred K and then how it compares of course to the 3950 x3 900 X and 3700 X bearing in mind that the 3900 X is the most close to it when it comes to price although the 3900 X should be cheaper it is also 13% faster in this particular test whereas the old 9900 K is twenty three point three percent slower the performance increase of the ten nine hundred K over the last gen part is going to be partially due to the higher frequency and then of course partially due to the fact that it has 10 cores now instead of eight now the single threaded test is where the ten nine hundred K should always win if Intel is doing what Intel is supposed to be doing and it does here in fact the five point three gigahertz frequency helps it improve over the 99 hundred K which would have been the former winner in this category by about six percent and the ten nine hundred k's five point three gigahertz frequency does help it beat out the 99 hundred K by about six percent which is nice and even manages to beat up to thirty nine fifty X which was the former champion in this test it's about 2.1 percent slower now come on 39 50 X pick up the pace next we have CPU mark this is part of the past market performance test suite version 9.0 and here with overall score the AMD chips all win in fact about 40 percent lead by the 39 50 X about a thirty four percent lead with the 3900 X and even about a four and a half percent lead with a 3700 X at least in this particular test the ten nine hundred K did manage to beat at the ninety nine hundred K by about 14% here is once again the single threaded version of this test and once again the 39 50 X was the former champ here it scored 3150 10900 k beat it by four points 3,154 and that did manage to give it like a point two three percent lead so on the one hand you could look at this as intel doing what they set out to do and on the other hand you could look at it as well once AMD manages to squeeze out some more single thread performance they're really pretty close to Intel at least again in this test next we have blender which is an actual application that people actually use for things rendering in particular this is the BMW 27 test but we have upgraded blender to the new version 2.8 to a which from my testing does actually get better scores out of the CPUs and actually does run them a little bit hotter as well once again the ten 900k does beat the 9900 k with a combination of more cores and higher frequency however the 3950 x kind of stops in this one with the 51.5% lead and an overall time of 90 2.4 seconds remember lower is better when it comes to the amount of time it takes to run through the test the 3900 X also came out on top it's about 17 percent faster than its a 900 K and this one next we have handbrake one point three point two this software also saw a bit of an update recently but we're doing a three minutes 4k to 1080p in the fast preset you're looking at time in seconds and then I've also listed the actual encoding speed and fps so I'm comparing the encoding speeds here because that should scale based on the length of the video that you're transcoding but an FPS we saw the 30 m50x with about a 4.4 percent lead over the 10 900k whereas the 3900 X is pretty much neck-and-neck next we have v-ray version 4 1007 which is a computer-generated imagery rendering application developed by a Kaos group here the square renders out in case samples so a higher score is better once again the 39 50x dominating about 40 1.4 percent faster than the 10 900k in this test the 3900 X managed to break 20k and that also let it beat out the 10 900k by about 8.4 percent here are our results for Corona 1.3 this is high-quality physically based shading software which is used for production rendering again time in seconds so lower is better with a crazy low time of 56 seconds the 39 50 X is once again about 33 point nine percent faster than the 10 nine okay meanwhile that 9900 K is about twenty three and a half percent slower so you can see until making some gains over the previous generation there and then again the 3900 X is very close but still beating the ten nine hundred K by about one point three percent my final pure CPU compute test is 7-zip and this does zipping and unzipping file compression and decompression and you're seeing both sets of numbers here 7-zip spits out an overall score so once again higher is better it doesn't seem like the ten nine hundred K was keeping up a little bit better with the compression test with its overall score of sixty thousand seven hundred and eighty nine this makes it about fourteen percent faster than the ninety nine hundred K and this test although once again all of the AMD CPUs beat the ten nine hundred K when it comes to compression even the 3700 X the story changes a little bit with decompression though the 3950 X though with that astounding score of one hundred and seventy seven thousand four hundred thirty that's sixty three point five percent faster than the ten nine hundred K let's switch over to some gaming specific tests and here we're gonna run 3d mark test starting with firestrike extreme this is a DirectX 11 test running at 2560 by 1440 you can see the overall graphics and physics scores here the graphics score is relevant to what kind of performance the CPU is able to get out of the graphics card whereas the physics tests is more of a direct cpu test and this can be equated more to a lot of the CPU compute tests that we just went over when it comes to graphics though there's not a whole lot of variance chip-to-chip in fact we're looking at about a 1% difference overall which means that in this test we were GPU bound most of the time the physics test is a little bit better of a comparison and here the 3950 X did win by about eleven point three percent and perhaps noteworthy here that even though it's about a one-percent victory the 10900 K did beat out to 3900 X next to 3d mark x pi this is a DirectX 12 test and once again we're looking at overall graphics and CPU scores focusing on the graphics and CPU scores once again though GPU scores again we're within about a 1% difference of each other so we're GPU band in those tests that's just fine the interesting thing about the CPU test here is that the 10900 K wins like wins straight up across the board 13100 91 beats even the 3950 X which would indicate that the CPU test in this particular benchmark is benefiting more from the high-frequency and they reduce latency that the ten 900k is bringing to the table here shadow of the Tomb Raider and I'm running this at 1920 by 1080 as I am most of the rest of these gaming tests and that is because at lower resolutions we become more CPU bound the GPU bound and that will actually show difference or variance from test to tests when using the same GPU and different CPUs shadow of the Tomb Raider in particular is good at showing variance especially at this lower resolution which hopefully is evident because of 10 900k pretty much dominated this test overall frame rate of 167 FPS the 9900 K and 8700 K coming in just below that 145 and 138 but all these are besting the AMD CPUs the best they could do was the 3950 X's frame rate of a hundred and twenty seven point nine next we have Total War three kingdoms and other DirectX 12 tests this is using the ultra setting and the campaign benchmark here again we're seeing variants from chip to chip but not quite as exaggerated as we were with shadow of the Tomb Raider the 9900 K comes in second behind the ten nine hundred K it's about 2.7 percent slower but here again the 10 900 K is seeing some decent measurable gains over the AMD chips they're all about 9 to 10 percent slower here's GTA 5 DirectX 11 and this has been a go-to benchmark for quite some time again a good one is showing variants especially at lower frame rates like 1920 by 1080 or even 720 when comparing different CPUs and the 10900 K gets the best score I've seen out of a stock CPU with 178 frames per second that is again about 6 to 7% faster than the 9900 K and again the AMD CPUs 3950 X included can't quite keep up it is about 8.5% slower here is overwatch because I wanted to include a fast paced FPS ad to run this at 2560 by 1440 otherwise the awesome xx atti spits out way too many frames and it goes over the 300 frame rate cap that said we are still a bit GPU bound in this test as you can tell from the Intel numbers they're all hitting a max frame rate of about 258 although there is some variance in the 1% low so you can see a little bit of a benefit with the 10900 K there but the RAM for the X is the best out of the AMD CPUs with the frame rate of 254 FPS and I do find these really high frame rate tests to be a little bit more valid now than they used to be because we're actually seeing monitors that can hit 240 Hertz or even 280 Hertz which is actually helpful for gameplay and response as well our final test though a civilization 6 Gathering Storm we're using the new Gathering Storm AI benchmark which tests the amount of time it takes for the AI to run through a bunch of turn turns on a very complex high-level map I was expecting the AMD CPUs to kind of come back a little bit here because this is not necessarily all about how many frames the GPU can spit out but the 10900 K was actually able to win once again with a turn of 30 point 4 seconds again lower is better here again we're looking at a pretty small variance here this is less than 2 seconds difference between all these CPUs that said time is money when you're playing a game at sub 6 and it's super late at night and you just want to play one more turn so I guess if that is your goal that's in 900 K it might help you out because it's between 2 and 8 percent faster than all of the competition so that was a lot of benchmarks but what I've done now is I've taken all of the CPU compute benchmarks the workload benchmarks and that I've taken all of the gaming benchmarks and I've waited them all and I've added them all up so I can give you guys something of a summary starting here with overall CPU compute performance I'm using the 10 900 K as a baseline so that represents a hundred percent performance and as you can see when measured across all tests the 3900 X is about nine point one percent more performance whereas the 3950 X is about twenty-seven point three percent more performance the 3900 X is selling for less than what the ten nine hundred K is supposed to be selling right out of the gates although the ten hundred K does beat out the 3700 X so you could potentially call that something of a win because if you look at the 99 hundred K's overall performance that was previously coming in below the 3700 X and this is a big part of the reason why I've been recommending AMD for some time now for the same price or often less money you can get more CPU compute performance which may or may not be important to you if gaming is your focus if gaming is your focus here's the overall gaming performance and this one might be a little bit more telling please bear in mind here I did not do an exhaustive amount of tests when it comes to gaming these are going to be somewhat subjective to the resolution I was testing at which is mostly 1080 and it's also going to vary from game to game so if you have a particular favorite game that you know you're gonna be spending 95% of your time playing it's well worth your while to go and check out benchmarks for that specific game rather than just relying on my overall boiled down numbers that said the 10 900k wins in fact the 10 900 he wins the 9900 wins the 8700 k wins even against the 3950 x the overall difference is between about 6% and 9% so it is demonstrable here that intel has at least achieved their goal of creating what you can once again call the best processor purely for gaming and I would suggest even though I didn't do gaming and streaming testing that with the 10 cores and 20 threads that this would probably also be a good processor for gaming and streaming at the same time but desktop computers are typically used for more than just gaming so here is the price versus performance with all the prices listed as well as the performance and this is sorted by gaming performance but you can see there the relative performance for CPU compute as well I've also used updated pricing for the 3900 X and the 3950 X since prices have dropped a bit and they don't seem to be just short-term sales these are prices that have been there for at least a month or so but I think the most striking matchup here is going to be the 10 900k versus the 3900 X because they're both current generation top-of-the-line chips for their respective platforms now the 3950 X is pretty impressive especially when it comes to that overall CPU compute performance but it's also at least a couple hundred dollars more than a ten nine hundred K for example so I think the 10 900 K versus the 3900 X is the real head-to-head performance comparison here and especially with that 3900 X is lower price PCIe 4.0 support and the fact that you're gonna gain nine or ten percent performance increase when it comes to CPU compute tasks while you're giving up maybe seven or eight percent when it comes to gaming in specific situations that's the decision that you need to make is that trade-off worth it for you and then of course consider the other details and ins and outs of the platform whether or not you need PCIe 4.0 and and that's how you make your cpu buying decision my personal preference would be the 3900 X with this comparison but obviously you are you in person and you can make your own decision but let's talk about overclocking since I did have a chance to do that I wish I had spent more time on this but I have a finite amount of time but I wanted to quickly show how the 10900 K performs when we make it perform the way we would want to make it perform as enthusiasts desktop users which means no silly power limits and stuff since we have a nice big 280 mm meter all in one liquid cooler for cooling and I just did a quick and dirty OC to do this I removed or maxed out the power limits I maxed out the wattage for power limit one in Parliament - max current amperage max time limit for the short duration power and just a small plus 0.06 voltage offset for good measure with these settings in place Intel's thermal velocity boost said thank you for releasing me from bondage and pushed the peak single core frequency to five point four gigahertz as well as then maintaining 5.1 gigahertz across all 10 cores pretty nice results are as follows average power draw jumped about hundred watts from 280 to 380 Max and average temperatures increased about 20 degrees Celsius from 69 to 91 degrees peak and from 52 to 69 degrees on average I ran about half of my benchmarks with this overclock enabled and I saw a 5.8 percent increase in compute performance and just a 1% bump in gaming so as you can hopefully see Intel has taken some steps to make their tenth Jena flagship and interesting CPU and I think it's fair to say that if you're purely looking at gaming they have done a pretty good job gaming usually taxes a CPU less than tasks like video encoding so even with power limits in place higher frequencies can be maintained that lead to measurable increases in frame rates and overall gaming performance overclocking however shows just how careful Intel has had to be to eke this level of performance out of yet another 14 nanometer chip push those parameters a little and you can get higher clocks and maybe a bit more performance but the trade-off when comparing the performance increase to power draw and thermals leaves a lot to be desired this combined with the out-of-the-box performance that you can expect on the AMD side right now leads me to recommend against Intel unless you really are just all about gaming and particularly gaming at lower resolutions like 1080 where the difference between CPUs is actually measurable if you were to take all of my gaming tests and rerun them at 4k you probably see just about zero difference between the CPUs I'm testing because we would be GPU bound rather than CPU bound I will sum up though by listing some overall pros and cons for Intel and this launch on the pro side for Intel we have Z 490 motherboard pricing which actually seems to be reasonable this time around independent motherboard reviews notwithstanding of course you should wait and check those out to see if those entry-level cords are actually horrible tie-in with that at least temporarily we have the problems or the issues with AMD's motherboard availability which are a big issue right now it's really hard to build something with X 570 unless you're willing to pay $350 for a board that originally cost 200 AMD is also losing some of the advantage they've had over in sell with their promise of long-term socket support and yes we do have news now that AMD is providing backwards compatibility now with 400 series of motherboards for their upcoming 4000 series CPUs that was nice of them to do I appreciate that but it does not negate the fact that a m4 is approaching end-of-life so whereas before it was a little bit easier to recommend AMD because of the upgrade path now we're seeing a little bit more equivalence there and if for no other reason that a m4 has been around a while and they've got to end it eventually also of course the gaming performance you can't deny that Intel was like this is about gaming and a 5.3 gigahertz clock speed and they did do both of those things on the cons side though for Intel we have of course no PCIe 4.0 support for now and Intel hasn't really promised any so even looking forward to something like that it's still a bit of a dubious proposition we also have the efficiency issues and you can probably see those in my power draw charts and that's just because they're still on 14 nanometer and they're not going to get better in that area until they move on to 10 7 or 5 nanometer and then of course you've got that CPU compute performance that's just all AMD across the board especially when you combine compute performance with efficiency but there it is so hopefully I've given you guys all the data you need to make an assessments and maybe even a purchase decision on whether or not you're interested in this new stuff that Intel has to offer of course I've only been looking at the flagship 10 900k so stay tuned for that 10 600k keverage I'm kind of interested to see how those eye 3s perform at some point - although I don't think Intel sampled those so you guys might have to wait a few days for that I really hope you've enjoyed this video though I will put very important links that you should click down in the video's description and also if you can let me know in the comments what you think of this 10th Gen Intel launch are any of you just ready to dive in and purchase an LG 8 1200 motherboard and maybe a 10 900 K - I would be curious to know subscribe to my channel as well if you haven't already check out my store at pulsar Burnett for shirts mugs pint glasses and other cool stuff you can buy hit the thumbs up button on your way out if you like benchmarks don't forget to keep an eye out for my video on the 10 600 K coming out real soon and we'll see you guys in the next oneIntel's 10th Jan core CPUs launched today along with a slew of new LG a 1200 motherboards with 400 series chipsets so I will be sharing benchmarks so you can get a better idea of the performance there's a whole stack of 10 CPUs in this launch starting with I threes that have hyper threading now all the way up to the new core 910 900k flagship that now has 10 cores and 20 threads today I will be focusing on the flagship 10 900k but I'm also working on some benchmarks for the new 6 core 12 thread 10 600k that video should be up tomorrow so if you want to see it when it's ready I would suggest subscribing to my youtube channel that said let's get started the dark core RGB Pro is a premium wireless gaming mouse from Corsair with a long list of features like an 18,000 dpi low-power picsArt optical sensor for maximum precision with minimal power usage attractive 9 zone dynamic RGB backlighting and a comfortable contoured shape with two interchangeable side grips included connect wirelessly via Corsairs the sub 1 millisecond slipstream technology via bluetooth for convenience on-the-go or wired via USB see durable Omron switches up to 50 hours of battery life eight fully programmable buttons and more so click the sponsor link in the description for details so here's my table of contents and I will also add timestamps in the description and comment section down below if you want to jump ahead but I'm gonna cover the basic specs of these CPUs I'm testing first then some words on my test setup in methodology then I will talk you guys through the benchmarks themselves then some overclocking then some overall performance comparisons and conclusions the 10 900k though is the follow-up to the 9900 Kay from ninth gen and it now has 10 cores and 20 threads up from 8 and 16 with the 9900 k it's still going to be 500 bucks and I like that Intel is adding more cores and threads to mainstream CPUs but the competition is pretty fierce over on AMD side where I'll be comparing the 10900 K to the Rison 3900 X which has 12 cores and 24 threads which was originally $500 but can now be found for a discounted price of around 422 $450 quite easily I might add there's also the flagship 3950 X with 16 cores and 32 threads and also the best single core performance on the rise inside which was originally $750 but now goes for about 720 to sum up the 10th gen though Intel is now shipping more cores more threads and higher frequencies on all of its CPUs pretty much across the board with the 10 900k now hitting up to 5 point 3 gigahertz on one or two cores out of the box thanks to intel's turbo boost knife max 3.0 technology as well as thermal velocity boost technology which basically bumped the CPU speeds up to higher frequencies if thermals are within a set range and if power limits aren't reached unfortunately power limits get reached fairly quickly at stock but more on that in just a minute Intel is hoping that the high frequencies of these new CPUs will make up for where it's lacking vs. AMD because Intel is still manufacturing CPUs using 14 nanometer technology whereas with rise in 3000 series AMD is now on 7 nanometer which greatly benefits efficiency one other comparative point I wanted to make was about the platform and motherboards support for Intel 10th gen you'll need one of these new 400 series motherboards with the LGA 1200 chipset I was sent several of these z4 90 motherboards for lunch like this gigabyte z4 90 horas master or the asus rog Maximus 12 hero Wi-Fi right here but I can only really test with one motherboard so I went with the MSI mag z4 90 ace and I mainly did that because it was one of the first ones to arrive along with the MSI God likes but the godlike is ridiculously overpriced so I thought this would be slightly more reasonable more to the point though this is kind of a negative you need a new motherboard in order to use one of these 10th gen CPUs but on the plus side there does seem to be plenty of Z 490 options out there that allow overclocking with case Q Intel CPUs that actually start out somewhat reasonably priced at least if you're comparing it to older unlocked for overclocking motherboards from Intel about a hundred and fifty two hundred and sixty dollars is what I've seen the cheapest ones that of course motherboard reviews that withstanding we'll have to see if these entry-level ones can actually stand up to overclocking something that could send 900 K but perhaps you won't need to spend 200 plus dollars for the privilege of overclocking on until this time around there are also quite a few motherboards that have launched that say they are PCI Express 4.0 ready even though these 10th Gen Intel CPUs do not support PCIe 4.0 they're still limited to 3.0 but that does mean that even though Intel has not directly confirmed this that will probably be another family of CPUs launching for these LGA 1200 boards in the future and it is probably code rocket Lake and it will probably support PCIe 4.0 I say this all for the sake of being thorough though lots of you are probably pointing out that over on the AMD side right now you can already get PCI Express 4.0 support with horizon 3000 series CPU and a 500 series motherboard like X 570 or the upcoming B 550 which were expecting to launch June 16th however and again this might change soon if you shop for AMD motherboards right now particularly for a forward compatible X 570 board they are sold out or ridiculously overpriced also 500 series boards will probably be the last ones on socket am for with support for AMD's 3000 series and yet to be released 4000 series so both AMD and Intel are kind of in the same boat when it comes to an upgrade path at least if you're just looking at what's available right now or within the next month and especially if PCIe 4.0 is something you're after and if you're considering the next gen CPUs that are expected to launch later this year or in early 2021 there's definitely more to discuss there but I need to move on to the benchmarks so let's move on now you always want to minimize variants between tests and testing setups when benchmarking so here's the parts I used in all of my test beds for today for memory a 16 gigabyte 2 by 8 gig kit of G scale ddr4 3200 Casselton C 14 memory for the GPU we have the asus rog Strix r-tx 20 80 TI OC graphics card running at its out-of-the-box overclocked speeds for cooling that 280 millimeter NZXT kraken X 62 all-in-one CPU cooler and for comparative power draw testing and EVGA supernova g3 750 watt 80 plus gold power supply the systems were all set up with open test beds and I did my best to have the radiator fans pushing air across the motherboard VRMs just for the sake of consistency for Intel I had to test systems for eighth and ninth gen I used the azrog z3 90 tight sheet ultimate motherboard and 4/10 gen I went with the msi Meg z4 98 or M eg is what MSI wants you to say but Meg is much simpler shut up Meg for AMD we have the gigabyte X 570 or ass master motherboard and then I'm running the latest in video drivers for 45.8 7 as well as the most recent version of Windows 10 64 bit with all the updates windows high performance power plan for Intel and AMD high performance power plan for AMD and now go over the actual benchmarks starting with frequencies CPU frequency is very important and higher is better but frequencies also fluctuates here I'm showing the peak frequency each CPU hit as well as the sustained all core frequency during a blender render the ten 900k hit its 5.3 gigahertz single core turbo boost right away but while working all cores it will drop to 4.9 gigahertz that's still impressive across ten cores but Intel also has power limit settings to keep the CPU from drying too much power or overheating and it's stock these kick in after about a minute the short duration power limit provides 250 watts for the CPU but in my testing once it dropped after 56 seconds to the hundred and 25 watt cap of the long duration power limit CPU frequencies also felt anywhere from 4.2 to 4.7 gigahertz across all cores next is power draw and efficiency which is the less sexy side of CPU performance testing in my opinion but it's still very important I'm measuring the wattage drawn by the entire system during a blender render this is the new blender version 2.8 to a which does get better results from CPUs at least as far as I can tell but AMD is still winning across the board here because seven nanometer if efficiency is at the top of your list of important CPU things you should go AMD there's just no two ways about it the 3950 X and even 3900 X are just ridiculous when it comes to how much power they draw versus their CPU compute performance on Intel side though 278 watts on average for the 10900 K looks good if you're comparing it to the 8700 Kerr 9900 K especially if you're also considering the added cores and threads Intel has made improvements to their 40 nanometer process over the years but when the power limits kick in as mentioned when I was talking about frequencies power drop also drops down to about 182 watts so I guess that makes sense it's drawing less power but it's also outputting a lot less performance here are my thermal comparisons though this is the average temperature after a 10 minute I 264 burnin test measured across all cores for Intel or the CPU TDM measurement for AMD I think Intel's thin die upgrade for this gen actually is working because look how nice and cool the 10900 K is don't be misled though power limit duration was reached after one minute so the ten hundred K was running at four point six to 4.7 gigahertz during this test not four point nine and definitely not 5.3 so these three factors with the ten 900k tell us something very clearly Intel has improved thermals but they are also performing some tricks in order to stay within their somewhat arbitrary definition of what 825 watt TDP is they're compensating for the relative inefficiency of their 14 nanometer manufacturing process by limiting available CPU power throttling frequencies and leaving it up to motherboard manufacturers to enable settings that open up performance while also drastically increasing heat output and power draw I know this because I did some overclocking and I'll talk about that after we go over the stock benchmark results so let's start off with Cinebench r20 this is a multi-threaded test this is a cinema 4d render test by Maxon and i want to focus on where the ten 900k has made upgrades over the ninety nine hundred K and then how it compares of course to the 3950 x3 900 X and 3700 X bearing in mind that the 3900 X is the most close to it when it comes to price although the 3900 X should be cheaper it is also 13% faster in this particular test whereas the old 9900 K is twenty three point three percent slower the performance increase of the ten nine hundred K over the last gen part is going to be partially due to the higher frequency and then of course partially due to the fact that it has 10 cores now instead of eight now the single threaded test is where the ten nine hundred K should always win if Intel is doing what Intel is supposed to be doing and it does here in fact the five point three gigahertz frequency helps it improve over the 99 hundred K which would have been the former winner in this category by about six percent and the ten nine hundred k's five point three gigahertz frequency does help it beat out the 99 hundred K by about six percent which is nice and even manages to beat up to thirty nine fifty X which was the former champion in this test it's about 2.1 percent slower now come on 39 50 X pick up the pace next we have CPU mark this is part of the past market performance test suite version 9.0 and here with overall score the AMD chips all win in fact about 40 percent lead by the 39 50 X about a thirty four percent lead with the 3900 X and even about a four and a half percent lead with a 3700 X at least in this particular test the ten nine hundred K did manage to beat at the ninety nine hundred K by about 14% here is once again the single threaded version of this test and once again the 39 50 X was the former champ here it scored 3150 10900 k beat it by four points 3,154 and that did manage to give it like a point two three percent lead so on the one hand you could look at this as intel doing what they set out to do and on the other hand you could look at it as well once AMD manages to squeeze out some more single thread performance they're really pretty close to Intel at least again in this test next we have blender which is an actual application that people actually use for things rendering in particular this is the BMW 27 test but we have upgraded blender to the new version 2.8 to a which from my testing does actually get better scores out of the CPUs and actually does run them a little bit hotter as well once again the ten 900k does beat the 9900 k with a combination of more cores and higher frequency however the 3950 x kind of stops in this one with the 51.5% lead and an overall time of 90 2.4 seconds remember lower is better when it comes to the amount of time it takes to run through the test the 3900 X also came out on top it's about 17 percent faster than its a 900 K and this one next we have handbrake one point three point two this software also saw a bit of an update recently but we're doing a three minutes 4k to 1080p in the fast preset you're looking at time in seconds and then I've also listed the actual encoding speed and fps so I'm comparing the encoding speeds here because that should scale based on the length of the video that you're transcoding but an FPS we saw the 30 m50x with about a 4.4 percent lead over the 10 900k whereas the 3900 X is pretty much neck-and-neck next we have v-ray version 4 1007 which is a computer-generated imagery rendering application developed by a Kaos group here the square renders out in case samples so a higher score is better once again the 39 50x dominating about 40 1.4 percent faster than the 10 900k in this test the 3900 X managed to break 20k and that also let it beat out the 10 900k by about 8.4 percent here are our results for Corona 1.3 this is high-quality physically based shading software which is used for production rendering again time in seconds so lower is better with a crazy low time of 56 seconds the 39 50 X is once again about 33 point nine percent faster than the 10 nine okay meanwhile that 9900 K is about twenty three and a half percent slower so you can see until making some gains over the previous generation there and then again the 3900 X is very close but still beating the ten nine hundred K by about one point three percent my final pure CPU compute test is 7-zip and this does zipping and unzipping file compression and decompression and you're seeing both sets of numbers here 7-zip spits out an overall score so once again higher is better it doesn't seem like the ten nine hundred K was keeping up a little bit better with the compression test with its overall score of sixty thousand seven hundred and eighty nine this makes it about fourteen percent faster than the ninety nine hundred K and this test although once again all of the AMD CPUs beat the ten nine hundred K when it comes to compression even the 3700 X the story changes a little bit with decompression though the 3950 X though with that astounding score of one hundred and seventy seven thousand four hundred thirty that's sixty three point five percent faster than the ten nine hundred K let's switch over to some gaming specific tests and here we're gonna run 3d mark test starting with firestrike extreme this is a DirectX 11 test running at 2560 by 1440 you can see the overall graphics and physics scores here the graphics score is relevant to what kind of performance the CPU is able to get out of the graphics card whereas the physics tests is more of a direct cpu test and this can be equated more to a lot of the CPU compute tests that we just went over when it comes to graphics though there's not a whole lot of variance chip-to-chip in fact we're looking at about a 1% difference overall which means that in this test we were GPU bound most of the time the physics test is a little bit better of a comparison and here the 3950 X did win by about eleven point three percent and perhaps noteworthy here that even though it's about a one-percent victory the 10900 K did beat out to 3900 X next to 3d mark x pi this is a DirectX 12 test and once again we're looking at overall graphics and CPU scores focusing on the graphics and CPU scores once again though GPU scores again we're within about a 1% difference of each other so we're GPU band in those tests that's just fine the interesting thing about the CPU test here is that the 10900 K wins like wins straight up across the board 13100 91 beats even the 3950 X which would indicate that the CPU test in this particular benchmark is benefiting more from the high-frequency and they reduce latency that the ten 900k is bringing to the table here shadow of the Tomb Raider and I'm running this at 1920 by 1080 as I am most of the rest of these gaming tests and that is because at lower resolutions we become more CPU bound the GPU bound and that will actually show difference or variance from test to tests when using the same GPU and different CPUs shadow of the Tomb Raider in particular is good at showing variance especially at this lower resolution which hopefully is evident because of 10 900k pretty much dominated this test overall frame rate of 167 FPS the 9900 K and 8700 K coming in just below that 145 and 138 but all these are besting the AMD CPUs the best they could do was the 3950 X's frame rate of a hundred and twenty seven point nine next we have Total War three kingdoms and other DirectX 12 tests this is using the ultra setting and the campaign benchmark here again we're seeing variants from chip to chip but not quite as exaggerated as we were with shadow of the Tomb Raider the 9900 K comes in second behind the ten nine hundred K it's about 2.7 percent slower but here again the 10 900 K is seeing some decent measurable gains over the AMD chips they're all about 9 to 10 percent slower here's GTA 5 DirectX 11 and this has been a go-to benchmark for quite some time again a good one is showing variants especially at lower frame rates like 1920 by 1080 or even 720 when comparing different CPUs and the 10900 K gets the best score I've seen out of a stock CPU with 178 frames per second that is again about 6 to 7% faster than the 9900 K and again the AMD CPUs 3950 X included can't quite keep up it is about 8.5% slower here is overwatch because I wanted to include a fast paced FPS ad to run this at 2560 by 1440 otherwise the awesome xx atti spits out way too many frames and it goes over the 300 frame rate cap that said we are still a bit GPU bound in this test as you can tell from the Intel numbers they're all hitting a max frame rate of about 258 although there is some variance in the 1% low so you can see a little bit of a benefit with the 10900 K there but the RAM for the X is the best out of the AMD CPUs with the frame rate of 254 FPS and I do find these really high frame rate tests to be a little bit more valid now than they used to be because we're actually seeing monitors that can hit 240 Hertz or even 280 Hertz which is actually helpful for gameplay and response as well our final test though a civilization 6 Gathering Storm we're using the new Gathering Storm AI benchmark which tests the amount of time it takes for the AI to run through a bunch of turn turns on a very complex high-level map I was expecting the AMD CPUs to kind of come back a little bit here because this is not necessarily all about how many frames the GPU can spit out but the 10900 K was actually able to win once again with a turn of 30 point 4 seconds again lower is better here again we're looking at a pretty small variance here this is less than 2 seconds difference between all these CPUs that said time is money when you're playing a game at sub 6 and it's super late at night and you just want to play one more turn so I guess if that is your goal that's in 900 K it might help you out because it's between 2 and 8 percent faster than all of the competition so that was a lot of benchmarks but what I've done now is I've taken all of the CPU compute benchmarks the workload benchmarks and that I've taken all of the gaming benchmarks and I've waited them all and I've added them all up so I can give you guys something of a summary starting here with overall CPU compute performance I'm using the 10 900 K as a baseline so that represents a hundred percent performance and as you can see when measured across all tests the 3900 X is about nine point one percent more performance whereas the 3950 X is about twenty-seven point three percent more performance the 3900 X is selling for less than what the ten nine hundred K is supposed to be selling right out of the gates although the ten hundred K does beat out the 3700 X so you could potentially call that something of a win because if you look at the 99 hundred K's overall performance that was previously coming in below the 3700 X and this is a big part of the reason why I've been recommending AMD for some time now for the same price or often less money you can get more CPU compute performance which may or may not be important to you if gaming is your focus if gaming is your focus here's the overall gaming performance and this one might be a little bit more telling please bear in mind here I did not do an exhaustive amount of tests when it comes to gaming these are going to be somewhat subjective to the resolution I was testing at which is mostly 1080 and it's also going to vary from game to game so if you have a particular favorite game that you know you're gonna be spending 95% of your time playing it's well worth your while to go and check out benchmarks for that specific game rather than just relying on my overall boiled down numbers that said the 10 900k wins in fact the 10 900 he wins the 9900 wins the 8700 k wins even against the 3950 x the overall difference is between about 6% and 9% so it is demonstrable here that intel has at least achieved their goal of creating what you can once again call the best processor purely for gaming and I would suggest even though I didn't do gaming and streaming testing that with the 10 cores and 20 threads that this would probably also be a good processor for gaming and streaming at the same time but desktop computers are typically used for more than just gaming so here is the price versus performance with all the prices listed as well as the performance and this is sorted by gaming performance but you can see there the relative performance for CPU compute as well I've also used updated pricing for the 3900 X and the 3950 X since prices have dropped a bit and they don't seem to be just short-term sales these are prices that have been there for at least a month or so but I think the most striking matchup here is going to be the 10 900k versus the 3900 X because they're both current generation top-of-the-line chips for their respective platforms now the 3950 X is pretty impressive especially when it comes to that overall CPU compute performance but it's also at least a couple hundred dollars more than a ten nine hundred K for example so I think the 10 900 K versus the 3900 X is the real head-to-head performance comparison here and especially with that 3900 X is lower price PCIe 4.0 support and the fact that you're gonna gain nine or ten percent performance increase when it comes to CPU compute tasks while you're giving up maybe seven or eight percent when it comes to gaming in specific situations that's the decision that you need to make is that trade-off worth it for you and then of course consider the other details and ins and outs of the platform whether or not you need PCIe 4.0 and and that's how you make your cpu buying decision my personal preference would be the 3900 X with this comparison but obviously you are you in person and you can make your own decision but let's talk about overclocking since I did have a chance to do that I wish I had spent more time on this but I have a finite amount of time but I wanted to quickly show how the 10900 K performs when we make it perform the way we would want to make it perform as enthusiasts desktop users which means no silly power limits and stuff since we have a nice big 280 mm meter all in one liquid cooler for cooling and I just did a quick and dirty OC to do this I removed or maxed out the power limits I maxed out the wattage for power limit one in Parliament - max current amperage max time limit for the short duration power and just a small plus 0.06 voltage offset for good measure with these settings in place Intel's thermal velocity boost said thank you for releasing me from bondage and pushed the peak single core frequency to five point four gigahertz as well as then maintaining 5.1 gigahertz across all 10 cores pretty nice results are as follows average power draw jumped about hundred watts from 280 to 380 Max and average temperatures increased about 20 degrees Celsius from 69 to 91 degrees peak and from 52 to 69 degrees on average I ran about half of my benchmarks with this overclock enabled and I saw a 5.8 percent increase in compute performance and just a 1% bump in gaming so as you can hopefully see Intel has taken some steps to make their tenth Jena flagship and interesting CPU and I think it's fair to say that if you're purely looking at gaming they have done a pretty good job gaming usually taxes a CPU less than tasks like video encoding so even with power limits in place higher frequencies can be maintained that lead to measurable increases in frame rates and overall gaming performance overclocking however shows just how careful Intel has had to be to eke this level of performance out of yet another 14 nanometer chip push those parameters a little and you can get higher clocks and maybe a bit more performance but the trade-off when comparing the performance increase to power draw and thermals leaves a lot to be desired this combined with the out-of-the-box performance that you can expect on the AMD side right now leads me to recommend against Intel unless you really are just all about gaming and particularly gaming at lower resolutions like 1080 where the difference between CPUs is actually measurable if you were to take all of my gaming tests and rerun them at 4k you probably see just about zero difference between the CPUs I'm testing because we would be GPU bound rather than CPU bound I will sum up though by listing some overall pros and cons for Intel and this launch on the pro side for Intel we have Z 490 motherboard pricing which actually seems to be reasonable this time around independent motherboard reviews notwithstanding of course you should wait and check those out to see if those entry-level cords are actually horrible tie-in with that at least temporarily we have the problems or the issues with AMD's motherboard availability which are a big issue right now it's really hard to build something with X 570 unless you're willing to pay $350 for a board that originally cost 200 AMD is also losing some of the advantage they've had over in sell with their promise of long-term socket support and yes we do have news now that AMD is providing backwards compatibility now with 400 series of motherboards for their upcoming 4000 series CPUs that was nice of them to do I appreciate that but it does not negate the fact that a m4 is approaching end-of-life so whereas before it was a little bit easier to recommend AMD because of the upgrade path now we're seeing a little bit more equivalence there and if for no other reason that a m4 has been around a while and they've got to end it eventually also of course the gaming performance you can't deny that Intel was like this is about gaming and a 5.3 gigahertz clock speed and they did do both of those things on the cons side though for Intel we have of course no PCIe 4.0 support for now and Intel hasn't really promised any so even looking forward to something like that it's still a bit of a dubious proposition we also have the efficiency issues and you can probably see those in my power draw charts and that's just because they're still on 14 nanometer and they're not going to get better in that area until they move on to 10 7 or 5 nanometer and then of course you've got that CPU compute performance that's just all AMD across the board especially when you combine compute performance with efficiency but there it is so hopefully I've given you guys all the data you need to make an assessments and maybe even a purchase decision on whether or not you're interested in this new stuff that Intel has to offer of course I've only been looking at the flagship 10 900k so stay tuned for that 10 600k keverage I'm kind of interested to see how those eye 3s perform at some point - although I don't think Intel sampled those so you guys might have to wait a few days for that I really hope you've enjoyed this video though I will put very important links that you should click down in the video's description and also if you can let me know in the comments what you think of this 10th Gen Intel launch are any of you just ready to dive in and purchase an LG 8 1200 motherboard and maybe a 10 900 K - I would be curious to know subscribe to my channel as well if you haven't already check out my store at pulsar Burnett for shirts mugs pint glasses and other cool stuff you can buy hit the thumbs up button on your way out if you like benchmarks don't forget to keep an eye out for my video on the 10 600 K coming out real soon and we'll see you guys in the next one\n"