Intel Core i5-10600K 10th Gen LGA1200 CPU Review

As much fun as flagship CPU’s are each generation, many gamers can save some serious cash with a lower-tier CPU like the new Intel Core i5-10600K and still have a great time. Since most games are still lightly threaded, a few fast cores offer a better gaming experience than several slower ones anyway. The Core i5-10600K packs 6 cores and 12 threads of high-speed gaming prowess into a modest $262 price point. With a base clock speed of 4.1Ghz and the ability to boost to 4.8Ghz out of the box, the 10600K can easily handle all of your games as well as streaming them to your fans. A 125W TDP and full unlocked overclocking support means you can dial it up a little more if needed. Is this the sweet spot for gaming? Let’s find out! We want to thank Intel for sending us over the new Core i5-10600K to try out! Intel’s take on the Core i5-10600K: Built for serious gamers, 10th Gen Intel® Core™ desktop processors bring the right balance of frequency, cores, and threads, plus support for the latest technologies and advanced tuning flexibility to help put users in control of the real-world gaming experiences that matter most to them. Obligatory Die Shot: Important features: Intel Hyperthreading Technology: Do more simultaneously across 10th Gen Intel Core i9, i7, i5, and i3 processors. Intel Quick Sync Video: Uses integrated processor graphics to optimize gameplay while gamers stream and record and provides creators with the hardware acceleration they need for the latest video codecs. Memory Support up to DDR4-2933 Memory Speeds: For smooth gameplay, immersive realism, faster multitasking, and productivity when creating. Intel Graphics Command Center: Optimizes your Intel® graphics experience.6 Enhanced Core & Memory Overclocking: Gain ultimate control when overclocking your processor and key system components with features enabled by new unlocked and overclockable 10th Gen Intel® Core™ processors.7 Per-Core Hyperthreading Control for Overclocking: allows experienced overclockers to decide which hyper threads to turn on or off on a per-core basis. Intel Ethernet Connection I225: Now available on the 10th Gen platform, 2.5G Intel Ethernet Connector I225 delivers greater than 2X the network speeds of 1GB Ethernet on existing cabling. Intel Wi-Fi 6 AX201: Now integrated into 10th Gen Intel Core desktop processors, Intel Wi-Fi 6 (Gig+) delivers responsive gameplay, nearly 3X faster downloads, and more reliable connections. Delivers best-in-class wireless experiences with the freedom and flexibility to game or create anywhere throughout the home or office. Intel Performance Maximizer: Offers an active core group tuning feature that overclocks each core group tuning feature that overclocks each core group, increasing their performance potential, for maximum gaming performance. Intel Extreme Tuning Utility: Push performance desktops in new and innovative ways with a new Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility benchmark targeted for experienced overclockers. Now with the Intel Speed Optimizer that is a one-click overclocking feature within Intel Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU). Intel Speed Optimizer will be new for 10th Gen processors and takes advantage of power delivery and thermal headroom within a given chassis or design. Intel Speed Optimizer helps more an unlocked processor’s cores reach nearer to the single-core turbo boost frequency. Intel Smart Cache: Up to 20M of shared lowest level cache allowing faster access to your data by enabling dynamic and efficient allocation of the cache to match the needs of each core, significantly reducing latency to frequently used data and improving performance. Thunderbolt 3 support: Thunderbolt 3 ports are the fastest USB-C available, so you can take Thunderbolt 3 SSDs to LAN parties and play games with lightning-fast data transfers. Intel Optane Memory H10 with SSD Support: Launch apps, games, and project files faster, and stay productive while multitasking. Quick Specs: # of Cores - 6 # of Threads - 12 Processor Base Frequency – 4.10 GHz Max Turbo Boost 2.0 Frequency – 4.80 GHz Cache - 12 MB Intel Smart Cache TDP - 125 W Max Memory Size - 128 GB Memory Speed - DDR4-2933 Max # of Memory Channels - 2 Processor Graphics - Intel UHD Graphics 630 Scalability - 1S Only PCI Express Revision - 3.0 Max # of PCI Express Lanes - 16 Sockets Supported - FCLGA1200 TJUNCTION - 100°C For full features and specs, click here: A Closer Look Our review samples showed up in a special box that retail chips won’t be in. It opens up to reveal a blue acrylic sheet with the Intel logo. You can see two smaller boxes under it. A finger hole lets you pop the clear cover off. Inside are two smaller boxes, one contains a Core i5-10600K and the other, the new flagship Core i9-10900K. Today we’ll be focusing on the i5-10600K. The new LGA1200 based CPU’s look very similar to the former LGA1151 chips at first glance. They are the same size, the only difference is the key notches are now about a quarter way up from the bottom instead of very near the top. The bottom itself is also very similar, with a ton of micro-sized SMT components in the middle, and a grid of gold contacts around it. Let’s strap it in the test bench and move on to testing! Synthetic Testing Test Platform: CPU – Intel Core i5-10600K Mobo – Aorus Z490 Master RAM – 32GB (4x8GB) HyperX Fury RGB 3200MHz C16 GPU – Nvidia RTX 2080 Founders Edition SSD – Kingston KC1000 1TB PSU – Thermaltake Toughpower Grand RGB Gold 750W Chassis – Open BenchTable Cooling – Custom Liquid Loop (EKWB Velocity CPU Block, EKWB PE240 Rad, 1x DDC Pump) All testing is performed at stock settings except for enabling XMP (Profile 1: 3200MHz 16-18-18-38 1.35V) and Aorus’s Multicore Enhancement disabled in the BIOS. Super PI Modded 1.5 “In August 1995, the calculation of pi up to 4,294,960,000 decimal digits was succeeded by using a supercomputer at the University of Tokyo. The program was written by D.Takahashi in collaboration with Dr.Y.Kanada at the computer center. This record should be the current world record. (Details are shown in the windows help.) This record-breaking program was ported to personal computer environments such as Windows NT and Windows 95. In order to calculate 33.55 million digits, it takes within 3 days with a Pentium 90 MHz, 40 MB main memory, and 340 MB available storage.” With clock speeds hitting 4.8Ghz, it’s not a surprise to see the Core i5-10600K land in the middle of previous-gen flagship territory in this single-threaded test. CINEBENCH R15 "CINEBENCH is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer's performance capabilities. CINEBENCH is based on MAXON's award-winning animation software CINEMA 4D, which is used extensively by studios and production houses worldwide for 3D content creation. MAXON software has been used in blockbuster movies such as Iron Man 3, Oblivion, Life of Pi or Prometheus, and much more. CINEBENCH is the perfect tool to compare CPU and graphics performance across various systems and platforms (Windows and OS X). And best of all: It's completely free." Multi-threaded performance, as expected, leads previous-gen 6-core chips thanks to the increased clock speeds 10th gen offers. Single-Threaded performance shows it landing closer to previous i9 chips than i5 chips. CINEBENCH R20 Cinebench is a real-world cross-platform test suite that evaluates your computer's hardware capabilities. Improvements to Cinebench Release 20 reflect the overall advancements to CPU and rendering technology in recent years, providing a more accurate measurement of Cinema 4D's ability to take advantage of multiple CPU cores and modern processor features available to the average user. Best of all: It's free. In the newer Cinebench R20, we see a similar pattern with the 6-core i5-10600K leading the previous 6-core champion, the Core i7-8700K. Passmark Performance Test - CPU Mark “Fast, easy to use, PC speed testing, and benchmarking. PassMark Performance Test ™ allows you to objectively benchmark a PC using a variety of different speed tests and compare the results to other computers.” Passmark’s Performance Test 10 enjoys the clock speed increase with the i5-10600K and it holds a commanding lead over the previous 6-core chip. SiSoft Sandra – Cryptographic Bandwidth “SiSoftware Sandra provides a robust package of diagnostic tools for testing your system and teasing out its problems--or potential headaches.” SiSoft’s CPU Cryptographic Bandwidth really favors team red’s architecture here but some of Intel’s HEDT chips hold the top spot. We do see a pretty significant increase over the last-gen parts. Y-Cruncher Written by Alexander J. Lee “From a high-school project that went a little too far...” y-cruncher, (y for gamma) is a number-crunching program that can compute various mathematical constants. It was originally a small program specialized for computing the Euler-Mascheroni Constant. (Which uses gamma as its symbol, hence the name). It has since gained the ability to compute other constants. It is the first of its kind that is multi-threaded and scalable to multi-core systems. Ever since its launch in 2009, it has become a common benchmarking and stress-testing application for overclockers and hardware enthusiasts. We tested using the built-in benchmarks to compute Pi to 1 Billion Digits in both single and multi-threaded mode and recorded the Total Computation time at the end of the run. Y-Cruncher is also able to take advantage of AVX512 instructions in compatible CPU’s. Due to the thermal load of running Intense AVX workloads, Intel has implemented and AVX offset clock that may scale the CPU’s clock speed back, even below stock speeds when running intense AVX loads. For this reason, we note the CPU’s clock speed in both single and multi-threaded test modes. It’s interesting to see the 6-core 10600K hang with the 9th gen i9’s on single-threaded and then turn around and stomp the 9900K in multi-threaded testing. Black Hole 4.2 Let the beast run and benchmark your system in three different tests (Multithreaded, Single-threaded & 4-Threaded) that will test your CPU to the very limit, and score you among hundreds of other systems that have tested. Multithreaded will test your CPU's efficiency of running more than one thread without major system lag. The higher you score on this one, the more threads your CPU can handle with a comfortable speed. High multithreaded scores generally mean you can render things faster. 4-Threaded tests your CPU's performance in games since most games currently run on 4 threads. Single-threaded evaluates how fast the CPU can handle a single, dedicated thread for processing. We see AMD’s architecture holding a pretty noticeable advantage but the Core i5-10600K lands where we expect it to here. Workstation & Productivity Testing Blender Benchmark 2.82 – BMW27 A new platform to collect and display the results of hardware and software performance tests. Aimed at an optimal comparison between system hardware and installations using open source software and testing content in the public domain. For real-world productivity, there is zero substitutes for raw core count, and this is no exception. We still see the faster clock speeds help the i5-10600K edge out the 8700K though. POV-Ray 3.7 Standard Benchmark – CPU The POV-Ray standard benchmark shows similar results with the i5-10600K obliterate it’s older but higher-tier counterpart. x265 HD Benchmark A benchmark that measures how fast your computer can encode HD (1080p) video in the new H.265 / HEVC format. Encoding video to HEVC is not that uncommon these days, and the i5-10600K handles it well. 7-Zip The benchmark shows a rating in MIPS (million instructions per second). The rating value is calculated from the measured speed, and it is normalized with the results of the Intel Core 2 CPU with a multi-threading option switched off. So if you have modern CPU from Intel or AMD, rating values in single-thread mode must be close to real CPU frequency. There are two tests, compression with the LZMA method and decompression with the LZMA method. Once the total passes reach 50, the score is taken Zipping and unzipping files to send is another frequent task that is even more common in this ‘work-from-home’ world this year. The 10600K handles this readily and edges out previous 6-core parts by around 50%. Memory & Cache Testing AIDA64 Engineer Edition “FinalWire Ltd. today announced the immediate availability of AIDA64 Extreme Edition 1.50 software, a streamlined diagnostic and benchmarking tool for home users; and the immediate availability of AIDA64 Business Edition 1.50 software, an essential network management solution for small and medium scale enterprises. The new AIDA64 update implements AVX-optimized benchmarks for the upcoming Intel Sandy Bridge processors, adds a brand-new video encoding benchmark, and supports the latest AMD and NVIDIA graphics processors.” Internal cache performance is pretty well on par with the previous 6 core parts, so no surprises here since they are all the same family after all. Actual memory bandwidth to the system ram is actually a hair better than it’s i9-10900K sibling here. Interesting. The new Core -5-10600K has a little bit lower latency overall to system memory than it’s i9 sibling. Passmark Performance Test - Memory Mark - Threaded “Fast, easy to use, PC speed testing, and benchmarking. PassMark Performance Test ™ allows you to objectively benchmark a PC using a variety of different speed tests and compare the results to other computers.” Passmark again shows us with the i5-holding a slight performance advantage over the new i9. SiSoft Sandra – Memory Bandwidth - Aggregate. “SiSoftware Sandra provides a robust package of diagnostic tools for testing your system and teasing out its problems--or potential headaches.” While we expect quad-channel enabled HEDT chips to score higher as we see, most of the Dual-channel parts here all stack up within margin of error. Synthetic Game Testing 3DMark – Fire Strike "Fire Strike is a showcase DirectX 11 benchmark designed for today's high-performance gaming PCs. It is our most ambitious and technical benchmark ever, featuring real-time graphics rendered with detail and complexity far beyond what is found in other benchmarks and games today" In this synthetic physics test, the increased clock speed on the 10th gen i5-10600K does well here, even against team red’s 8-core parts. 3DMark – Time Spy "3Dmark Time Spy is a new DirectX 12 benchmark test for Windows 10 gaming PCs. Time Spay is one of the first DirectX 12 apps to be built “the right way” from the ground up to fully realize the performance gains that the new API offers. With DirectX 12 engine, which supports new API features like asynchronous compute, explicit multi-adapter, and multi-threading, Time Spy is the ideal test for benchmarking the latest graphics cards.” The more modern Time Spy test shows the same trend with an even wider lead on the 8700K and even Ryzen 7 2700X. Game Testing Sid Meier’s Civilization VI Originally created by legendary game designer Sid Meier, Civilization is a turn-based strategy game in which you attempt to build an empire to stand the test of time. Become Ruler of the World by establishing and leading a civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age. Wage war, conduct diplomacy, advance your culture, and go head-to-head with history’s greatest leaders as you attempt to build the greatest civilization the world has ever known. Civilization VI offers new ways to engage with your world: cities now physically expand across the map, active research in technology and culture unlocks new potential, and competing leaders will pursue their own agendas based on their historical traits as you race for one of five ways to achieve victory in the game. Intel bills the new Core i9-10900K as the world's fastest gaming processor and its smaller i5-10600K sibling isn’t far behind. Only the previous special edition 9900KS can fight it’s way into the 10th gen range here. Far Cry 5 Anything can happen. Everything will. Welcome to Hope County, Montana, land of the free and the brave, but also home to a fanatical doomsday cult—known as The Project at Eden’s Gate—that is threatening the community's freedom. Stand up to the cult’s leaders, Joseph Seed, and the Heralds, as you spark the fires of resistance that will liberate the besieged community. Far Cry 5 hits modern multi-core CPU’s pretty hard, and can take advantage of more than a couple of cores. Here we see the i5-10600K match up to last gen’s flagship i9-9900K almost perfectly. Shadow of the Tomb Raider Experience Lara Croft’s defining moment as she becomes the Tomb Raider. In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Lara must master a deadly jungle, overcome terrifying tombs, and persevere through her darkest hour. As she races to save the world from a Maya apocalypse, Lara will ultimately be forged into the Tomb Raider she is destined to be. The latest Tomb Raider also sees a benefit from more CPU power and the i5-10600K delivers a great experience out of the box. Ashes of the Singularity Planet by planet, a war is raging across the galaxy. The technological singularity has given humanity the power to expand further than they ever have before. Now, they compete with each other and their sentient artificial intelligence adversaries for control of newfound worlds. The Core i9-10600K again fights its way into the middle of the 9th gen’s flagship pile and leaves previous 6-core parts well behind. Overclocking, Power & Thermals For Power usage, we will be using a FLIR CM78 DC Amp clamp directly monitoring the 12V EPS connections to the motherboard. This gives us a real-world accuracy of +/- 2 Watts across our entire measuring range from 0W to more than enough to melt both 8-pin EPS plugs. At stock, we peg out at 4.8Ghz on a couple of cores. Thermals are great in the low 70C range, with power draws around 150W. We’ll enable Aorus’s Multi-Core Enhancement which pegs all cores at maximum Turbo, which is 4.8Ghz. We see a decent jump in score, and power only climbs to around 181W under full load. Temps hover in the upper 70C range with the hottest core hitting 78C. From here we’ll take over manually and go up to 4.9GHz on all cores. Something weird happens here as the voltage jumps, scores drop slightly and power usage is pretty much the same. We went ahead and tried for 5GHz and whatever weirdness happened at 4.9Ghz is gone. Temps are back in the mid 70C range with core voltage at 1.356V. Power usage climbs slightly to around 190W. 5.1Ghz is pretty easy to get stable on the i5-10600K but requires a bit more voltage. We ended up going up about 0.05V to just over 1.4V, which kicked temps into the low 80C range. Power usage jumped to around 214W. We tried for 5.2Ghz on all cores, but our particular CPU just wasn’t having it. We pushed voltage up to 1.45V and still couldn’t get it fully stable and temps were crashing into the 100C range pretty much instantly at that voltage. Sometimes you win the silicon lottery, sometimes you don’t. Your mileage may vary but our particular slice of silicon hit a wall above 5.1Ghz all core. Conclusion Intel’s Core i5 tier of chips are often a favorite of gamers. They provide solid performance at a price that still lets you invest in a good GPU to go with it. 6 cores at these clock speeds is plenty of power for high frame rate gaming, or a bit less competitive gaming while streaming. The street price of around $275 is pretty much on par with previous offerings in this tier but lands a decent chunk of change above a similarly positioned red offering. In most of our gaming tests, it did fight toe to toe with previous-gen 8-core chips that bring $500+ still, so it’s a decent leap forward. This is the lowest tiered offering this generation that is still unlocked, but given the modest overclocking headroom we found, a more competitive selection might be the locked i5-10600 for around $225 for those on a budget. If you score well in the silicon lottery, 6 cores at 5.2Ghz are certainly a force to be reckoned with though if our testing is any indication. All in all, this is a great choice for many gamers and the platform as a whole makes it pretty easy to recommend. Good job Intel!