Intel Core i9-9900K
A once great chip, but it’s now too expensive and too slow when compared to competitors
SCORE
PRICE £407 (£488 inc VAT) from amazon.co.uk
The i9-9900K is one of Intel’s older chips, but its Core i9 designation means that it still has plenty of power – at least on paper. This £488 chip has eight cores and, unlike most other Intel chips that use the Coffee Lake architecture, it’s multithreaded – so it matches its rivals by supporting 16 threads. Mix in clock speeds of 3.6GHz (base) and 5GHz (turbo), alongside 16MB of cache, and we can see why many people might still be tempted by its charms.
However, it faces plenty of competition. It’s just been superseded by the Core i9-10900K below, which includes two more cores and better clock speeds alongside a higher – but not that much higher – £530 price.
Intel’s latest Core i9 is a curious chip. This flagship processor relies on a relatively old architecture, but Intel has loaded new tech on top to try and keep this CPU competitive. And, in many ways, it succeeds.
As the “10” at the start of its name indicates, this is one of Intel’s new Comet Lake chips (tenth-generation Core) and these still rely on the Skylake architecture, which debuted back in 2015. That means no wholesale architectural changes, and a 14nm manufacturing process that looks dated alongside AMD’s 7nm Zen 2.
Intel attempts to bridge that gap by making improvements to core counts and clock speeds. The i9-10900K has ten multithreaded cores – two more
The h i9-9900K also lines up against the h AMD Ryzen 9 3900X ( see p78), which is less impressive in terms of pure clock speed but more formidable elsewhere thanks to a 12-core, multithreaded design, a 64MB L3 cache and a £440 price.
Our first test for the i9-9900K:
PC Pro’s own benchmarks. While an overall result of 402 is rather tasty in isolation, the new i9-10900K scored 488 and AMD’s 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X scored 552 in the same tests.
The i9-9900K’s best application results came in single-threaded tests, but even here it never managed to completely overhaul the AMD chip – Intel’s part was faster in Geekbench and Y-Cruncher, for instance, but than the i9-9900K chip – along with a mighty 3.7GHz base clock and several levels of boosting ability. It uses existing Turbo Boost 2 tech to reach a single-core peak of 5.1GHz, and then Intel activates Turbo Boost 3 Max and Thermal Velocity Boost to improve that figure to 5.2GHz and 5.3GHz if the CPU has the thermal headroom.
Intel’s additions have required thermal tweaks. This chip has a hefty TDP of 125W, and Intel has made the die thinner, added a thicker heatspreader and improved its thermal compound to help those cores cope.
As this is a new Comet Lake chip, you’ll have to buy a new motherboard – and a cooler too, because Intel still doesn’t include them. There’s also a the Ryzen part took the lead in Cinebench, both of Adobe’s tools and in SiSoftware Sandra.
It’s best to politely look away during the multithreaded tests, where the i9-9900K often fell behind the AMD part by significant margins. And, across both single-core and multicore benchmarks, the new i9-10900K outpaced its predecessor.
You can look ahead again now: in games, the i9-9900K often beat the AMD chip in our in-game tests. The i9-10900K was a step ahead, though, thanks to its improved clock speeds.
The Intel Core i9-9900K is still on sale, but unless the price drops there’s no reason to buy this chip when there are so many compelling alternatives around. If you need multicore power for content creation and other productivity tools then the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X is both better and cheaper, and if you require singlethreaded pace for photo-editing, everyday computing and gaming, the i9-10900K is superior.
KEY SPECS
3.6GHz/5GHz base/peak clock speed 8 cores 16 threads 16MB L3 cache Intel UHD 630 graphics Intel Coffee Lake architecture Intel LGA 1151 socket 95W TDP new chipset, which includes support for 2.5Gbits/sec Ethernet and Wi-Fi 6 but no PCIe 4 connectivity.
But the competition is fierce. The i9-10900K lines up against AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900X, which has 12 cores, speeds of 3.8GHz and 4.6GHz, 64MB of cache and a lower £440 price.
Intel’s improvements help the i9-10900K outpace AMD’s chip in the majority of single-threaded and lowcore applications, and it’s quicker in both Adobe applications too. It’s fantastic in gaming – the best chip in the Labs when it comes to 3DMark Time Spy and real-world speeds.
Elsewhere, the i9-10900K falters. It’s slower than the 3900X in almost every test that requires multicore power and is far more power-hungry. That lack of multicore ability is the big issue – while it’s powerful in singlecore applications and games, that’s not why most people shell out for a ten-core CPU. If you need a CPU for productivity, AMD’s chip is cheaper and better in most scenarios.
3.7GHz/5.3GHz base/peak clock speed 10 cores 20 threads 20MB L3 cache Intel UHD 630 graphics Intel Comet Lake architecture Intel LGA 1200 socket
125W TDP