Intel Core i9-10900K CPU Review

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!