Intel Core i9-10900K CPU Review

Intel’s new Core i9-10900K CPU is an interesting product. While some of the more vocal fans of a certain red competitor may give Intel some flak about reusing their 14nm node yet again, Intel has learned how to really polish a product and extract every bit of benefit from the silicon. This is Intel’s first 10-core mainstream product, with previous 10+ core chips locked entirely in the server and HEDT realm. The i9-10900K also boasts the highest stock Turbo clocks ever released at 5.2Ghz. If that wasn’t enough speed, the new Thermal Velocity Boost can kick the clocks up a bit higher yet to 5.3Ghz, pending your cooler can handle it. All this speed did require a small boost in TDP, up to 125W from the past ~95W ceiling the previous gens have tried to stay at. With more core, more clock speed, and more power, you would think this chip is destined to melt right? No. To help with cooling such concentrated performance, Intel took a page out of “I-void-warranties” extreme over-clockers book of tricks and shaved the actual silicon die down about as thin as it can go. With less physical silicon between the actual transistors and the heat spreader, every watt can get out as fast as possible. A new socket, LGA 1200, houses Intel 10th gen chips and paves the way for some exciting things slated for the next generation. Even though there are few more pins, all of your existing coolers will work with the new socket, which is great news to anyone with a beefy aftermarket cooler. We want to thank Intel for sending us over the new Core i9-10900K to test out! Intel’s take on the Core i9-10900K: The new 10th Gen Intel Core i9-10900K leads our new family of processors and takes the crown as the world’s fastest gaming processor, delivering speeds of up to 5.3GHz. New overclocking controls allow gamers to get more from their unlocked 10th Gen Intel® Core processor and get the best overclocking experience. 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 Thermal Velocity Boost: Gamers and creators get an opportunistic and automatic boost across single-core and multi-core workloads, up to a blazing 5.3GHz, right out of the box. Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0: Get an automatic performance boost on lightly threaded applications with Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0. 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 - 10 # of Threads - 20 Processor Base Frequency - 3.70 GHz Max Turbo Boost 3.0 Frequency - 5.20 GHz Intel® Thermal Velocity Boost Frequency - 5.30 GHz Cache - 20 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: Intel 10th Gen SKU Table 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. During this review we’ll be focusing on the i9-10900K. 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 i9-10900K 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.” As this test is entirely single-threaded, it’s no surprise the Core i9-10900K lands a win here with single thread clock speeds able to hit a staggering 5.3GHz. 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." Again we see single thread speeds pull in a decent win here with multi-core testing only loosing out to the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X as expected. 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 10-core i9-10900K only falling behind the 12 and 16-core chips in our testing. 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 really scales with thread count rather than raw clock speed, so you see almost perfect scaling from 6 to 8 to 10 to 12 cores here with the i9-10900K almost reaching 25K points. 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’s 8-core 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. Core counts matter here and the i9-10900K only falls behind the mainstream 3900X and HEDT parts that sport AVX512 support in multi-threaded. The new chip lands the fastest non-AVX512 single-threaded speed in our lineup by a fair margin though. 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. This is another test that shows decent scaling from prior 8-core parts, but again see’s AMD’s architecture holding a pretty noticeable advantage, even with fewer cores. 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. In something a little more real-world, the Core i9-10900K smokes through the BMW benchmark render in a touch over 2 minutes, nearly matching the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X, dusting the 10-core HEDT segmented i9-7900X and laying waste to every other lower core count chip from both teams. POV-Ray 3.7 Standard Benchmark – CPU The POV-Ray standard benchmark shows similar results with the i9-10900K more than able to hold its own in workstation tasks 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 i9-10900K just screams through it, even whipping the 12-core 3900X by a fair margin. 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 10900K handles this readily and leaves even last-gen HEDT chips in the dust. 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.” Part of the success story of the 10900K is the 20MB of Intel's smart cache. Not only is it flexible, but it is extremely fast, clearing the 3TB/s mark on L1 cache reads. Actual memory bandwidth to the system ram is largely the same with most Dual-channel setups running this speed and latency. Nothing really stands out here, good or bad. Interestingly, we see the new Core -5-10600K has a little bit lower latency overall to system memory. How boards handle XMP sub timings can affect this, so we are more looking for something that stands out, which nothing does here. 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, we see the extra few cores and increased clock speed hold a solid lead here, even against team red’s 12-core part. 3DMark – Time Spy "3Dmark Time Spy is a new DirectX 12 benchmark test for Windows 10 gaming PCs. Time Spy 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 bench-marking the latest graphics cards.” The more modern Time Spy test shows the same trend with an even wider lead on the 10900K. 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 that appears to hold true right out of the gate with Civilization 6’s Ai test completing rounds in just under 6.7ms. 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 10900K pull the crown off the special edition 9900KS’ head. The new i5-10600K is hot on its heels here as well. 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 10900K delivers the best experience out of the box of anything on the market, albeit only a fraction of an FPS ahead of the former champion. 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. Ashes of the Singularity is more of a playable benchmark, but the Core i9-10900K holds a commanding lead here. If you scrolled past everything to here, the i9-10900K took 1st place in every gaming test we put it against. 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. Out of the box, the Core i9-10900K runs at up to 5.2Ghz on 2 cores, or up to 5.3Ghz if cooling permits via Thermal Velocity Boost. Thermal Velocity Boost ONLY applies these increased clocks to the two best cores, selected by Intel at the factory and denoted in red in CPUID’s latest CPU-Z tool. In our case, this happens to be Core 8 and Core 9 (or 9 and 10 if you start counting at 1 instead of zero). From there, we see 5100Mhz with 3 cores active, 5GHz with 4 or 5 cores active, and a still impressive 4900MHz with 6 to 10 cores active. At stock, we see temps hit a tepid 68C on the hottest core. This is 10 cores, at 4.9Ghz folks. Less than 70C! the new thin die and Solder Thermal Interface Material is doing its job and doing it well. When we first tested the i9-9900K, we were in the mid to upper 80C range here. More cores, more threads, faster clocks, and significantly cooler temps. We’ll take that any day of the week! Voltage is reading about 1.224V here, so that has a fair amount to do with it. You can try to bash Intel for re-using the 14nm node yet again, but it is WELL refined at this point. Power usage lands at a pretty hefty 246W though. Remember that TDP is THERMAL Design Power, NOT actual power usage. From here, we’ll bump the multiplier up to 51 on all cores. We get a nice jump in performance, with a modest jump in voltage to 2.84V which gives us temps landing around 80C on average with the hottest hitting 84C. You can clearly see our two good cores here sitting at 71C and 75C. Power draw jumps to 308.4W under load. At 5.2Ghz on all cores, we are starting to bump thermal limits, with the hottest core hitting 96C and the package bumping the 100C limit. Power jumps to nearly 380W at this point and the voltage has to come up quite a bit to keep it stable under AVX loads. With a little lengthier fine-tuning, this can probably be trimmed back, but 5.1Ghz on 10 cores is a pretty killer system as it is and 5.2Ghz is certainly doable. Conclusion Intel bills the new Core i9-10900K as the ‘Worlds Fastest Gaming Processor’ and we have to say, it’s not a tall tale. The crown did indeed transfer from the retiring champion i9-9900K. The 10900K just pwned every gaming benchmark we threw at it, synthetic or real world. As far as productivity, well, it does a sporting job there as well. While it’s hard to argue against raw core count in productivity, something team red is currently maintaining the lead on, Intel is able to make up a fair amount of that core count discrepancy with raw clock speed. It wasn’t very many years ago that 4Ghz was a hard mountain to summit. More recently overclocking to 5Ghz took some effort. Now, it’s hard to get this chip to run UNDER 5GHz. While we all want to see that new node, that new 10nm process, it’s hard to argue with the results of a well-refined product. Give the core count, the stock clock speeds, and the raw power on tap, we have to say we are VERY impressed with what Intel has done for keeping this monster cool. Given today’s use cases are pretty much guaranteed to include heavy multitasking with more than one heavy-hitting application, a few more cores are always welcome. Especially when it doesn’t come at the cost of clock speeds. If you are purely a gamer looking for the absolute best, the roughly $500 price tag is pretty fair, even more so when you can throw a few cores at streaming your rounds and still have the best experience money can buy. If you work and play, the Core i9-10900K is still a very compelling option in most use cases. Its gaming performance is epic and edges out the closest red chip, the 3900X in many real-world productive use cases. If you purely work and can saturate every core you can find, you may be better off with a red product given the core count per price that side offers. Gone are the days of black and white ‘product X is better than product Y’. That grey line is rather blurry. Can we recommend this? For the serious gamer, 100%. For gaming and streaming, that’s still a yes. If you get things done and only play here and there, well, then your specific use case and budget are going to have to guide you. Great job Intel!