Intel Core i7-9700
The i7-9700 is an older chip that doesn’t offer great value in the wider market
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PRICE £270 (£324 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk
Intel’s older Coffee Lake chips are still on sale, with price cuts to help keep them competitive. This means that the Core i7-9700 is Intel’s most affordable eight-core CPU, with its £324 price neatly ducking under the i7-9700K. Ominously for Intel, though, that price means it sits between AMD’s Ryzen 7 3700X and 3800X.
Unlike those AMD chips, the Intel part has no multithreading, and it’s clocked to 3GHz and 4.7GHz. That modest base speed is a lot lower than either AMD part, but its turbo pace is a few hundred megahertz quicker. The good news is short-lived, though, with a lesser amount of cache than all of its rivals and fewer PCI lanes than AMD’s chips. Plus no PCIe 4 support.
In testing, the i7-9700’s greater turbo speeds weren’t enough to counteract its weakness. An overall PC Pro benchmark result of 263 is slower than its AMD rivals and Intel’s newer, beefier parts. It fell far behind elsewhere: it’s slower than any rival in Geekbench, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Blender and Sandra, and it was only middling in Cinebench and Y-Cruncher’s single-core tests. And it’s only mediocre in gaming – usually an Intel stronghold.
It leaves the Core i7-9700 with no real purpose in 2020’s CPU market. For applications, the Ryzen 7 3800X is faster without costing any more, and the pricier i7-10700K offers even more pace in a handful of situations. For gaming, the i5-10600K and i7-10700K are both far better, and the former is cheaper too.
The i7-9700K was once Intel’s flagship, but now this £335 chip is looking like a footballer past his prime: overpriced and underperforming. It has eight cores but no multithreading, which puts it a step behind the £338 Ryzen 7 3800X and the new Core i7-10700K – both of which have eight cores with multithreading.
The i7-9700K has base and boost clock speeds of 3.6GHz and 4.9GHz. Intel’s new i7-10700K improves on those speeds with pace of 3.8GHz and 5.1GHz. AMD’s chip runs at 3.9GHz and 4.5GHz, so offers a better base speed but lesser turbo peak. Elsewhere, the i7-9700K has 12MB of cache – Intel’s new chip has 16MB, while AMD lines up with 32MB.
There’s little joy to be found in benchmark results. This chip does its best work in single-threaded tests, but even here it’s almost always behind the 3800X. In multicore benchmarks, AMD’s chip has a significant lead. Even the cheaper Ryzen 5 3600X and Ryzen 7 3700X are better in plenty of mainstream tools. The i7-10700K is far superior in every test – even if that chip can’t always overcome AMD, either.
Where the i7-9700K still holds its own is gaming tests, easily outpacing AMD, but note Intel’s tasty new signings of the 10600K and 10700K; both are faster still.
Like many other Coffee Lake chips, the i7-9700K feels lost. AMD’s Ryzen 7 3800X is far better in applications for no extra cost, and there are better and cheaper Intel options for gamers.
The i9-10920X is one of Intel’s most affordable Cascade Lake-X chips. This architecture boosts the existing Skylake hardware by adding quad-channel memory support, more cache and more PCIe 3 lanes, which makes it a better option for high-end workloads.
The spec hammers home its intentions: the i9-10920X has 12 multithreaded cores, even if the huge core count means relatively modest clock speeds of 3.5GHz and 4.6GHz. Note the huge TDP of 165W too.
The extra cores also mean a different socket. It uses LGA 2066, which means you’ll have to buy an X299 motherboard to use this chip. Happily, it pairs its quadchannel memory support with a whopping 48 PCI lanes – but there’s still no PCIe 4.
It faces plenty of competition. This £600 part is only £70 more than the i9-10900K, and AMD’s Ryzen 9 3950X costs £690 and includes 16 cores. Neither supports quadchannel memory, though; for this, you need to look to the Threadripper 3960X.
Despite its positive specs, the i9-10920X was underwhelming in our testing. It was slower than the 3950X in almost every test, even with quad-channel memory deployed on the Intel chip. For example, while the new i9-10900K was slower in multicore tests, it was far quicker in most singlethreaded benchmarks and better in gaming.
The i9-10920X is hardly slow, but the Ryzen 9 3950X is much better for tougher work tools, and the i9-10900K offers more single-threaded power and gaming ability.