Intel Core i9-9900K: balance sheet and benchmark

The Core i9-9900K is not the first Core i9, but it's the first one that matters to gamers.

The Intel Core i9 platform was launched much more than a year ago, offering core counters and higher clock speeds to personal desktops. Yet, these chips were more productivity oriented because they favored basic counting on clock speed. This is not a winning combination in terms of game performance. Therefore, Core i9 chips were often not the best choice for games.

This is no longer true. Intel says the i9-9900K is the "best best game processor"In other words, a processor that the average person was supposed to own and use. So, Intel's latest and greatest are they up to the hype, or they do not spark under pressure?

Challenges

While still based on the well-known 14-nanometer Coffee Lake microarchitecture, the Core i9-9900K is indeed the launch of a whole new generation of processors. With that comes the familiar controversy around performance claims and typical landmarks of generational launches.

Intel has surpassed targets, claiming that its new Core i9 surpassed AMD's AMD Ryzen processors by up to 50 percent on some tests. This is a huge leap forward, especially since Intel has managed to catch up with the number of kernels since AMD launched the Threadripper platform there is a little more than a year. Beyond that, Intel's well-documented 10-nanometer delay is hard to monitor, especially as AMD has built its 12-nanometer platform throughout 2018.

But Intel has done it again.

Rather than compete directly with the 1900X Threadripper or Ryzen 7 1800X, the Core i9-9900K promises the best of both worlds. It has a base clock frequency of 3.6 GHz, identical to that of the Ryzen 7, but increases up to a daring 5 GHz Turbo frequency. Even the 2nd generation Threadripper has not taken this step. Its number of cores may be far behind, but the Core i9-9900K can achieve higher per-core clock speeds with default settings.

Its price is comparable to that of a Threadripper, it has the basic number of Ryzen 7 and increases faster than either. This Core i9 is not identical to the other processors we've seen before.

Record processing power

We tested the Core i9 in the new ROG Strix GL12CX office, which also included an Nvidia RTX 2080 and 32 GB of RAM. The results have not been impressive. They beat records.

We compared the Core i9-9900K to the Ryzen 7 1800X. We also compared it to AMD's Threadripper 1920X and 1950X, which both have more cores than Intel's. Nevertheless, the Core i9 is clearly the winner of all tests and tests that we could achieve.

In synthetic benchmarks such as Geekbench, Core i9 beats Threadripper 1920X by around 21% in multi-core scores. This increases to 28% in mono-core. This seems even worse for the Ryzen 7, which is nearly 40% behind Intel.

Compared to the previous generation of Core i7-8700K, the Core i9 lived up to its single-core performance, but refined its eight-core muscle by increasing its multicore score by about 25%. This is the kind of improvement that two extra cores provide.

Real-world performance testing is the core strength of Core i9. The system encoded a 4K video in Handbrake in one minute and sixteen seconds. This is the new record for the systems we tested and more than half the time that AMD's Threadripper 1920X took.

The best gaming processor, indeed

The Core i9-9900K is an attractive processor for any demanding use, but gaming is the main feature. Its impressive performance makes the difference, but only in games subject to constraints on the part of the processor.

Civilization VI, which performs many calculations of artificial intelligence simultaneously, has greatly benefited from the high clock speeds and eight cores of the 9900K. The Core i9-9990K was 40% better than the 1920X Threadripper. We have seen similar results in Assassin's Creed: Odyssey, where the waiting distance and the large number of NPCs are more demanding on the processor. In such games, the Core i9 does not stand out from other processors.

On the other hand, we found little improvement over the competition in Deus Ex: The divided humanity and Battlefield 1. Whether you're playing in 4K on Ultra or 1080p on Medium, a lot of the processing power has been wasted. The GeForce RTX 2080 does most of the work here. The performance of the game is limited by the GPU and not by the processor.

Much of the controversy around benchmarks Core i9 revolves around Threadripper's game mode, which is supposed to improve game performance at the expense of maximum CPU performance. However, it should be noted that they do not ship with the default enabled configuration, which means that players will probably not benefit in terms of performance. If you're curious, turning on the game mode reduces the advance by 40% by Civilization VI at 32 percent.

The champion without surprises

You will probably not be surprised to hear that the best gaming processor in the world has a high price. The Core i9-9900K will cost you $ 530 if you buy it at retail. This is a huge advantage over the $ 360 i7-8700K or 374 i7-9700K $ and much more expensive than a Ryzen 7 processor. Thanks to pricing, AMD's Threadripper has become the main competition.

Fortunately for Intel, the Core i9-9900K offers higher gaming performance than Threadripper and, of course, everything else. The perfect combination of respectable number of cores and heart speed processor is the secret of sauce games.

That does not mean that you have to buy the Core i9-9900K. You can enjoy an exceptional gaming experience with a much less powerful processor, such as the Intel Core i5-8400 or the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X. But if you want what's best, it's the Core i9-9900K.