Intel Respons - Comet Lake CPU Reviews

"Overall there's no denying it, this processor is fast and agile, at close to 500 USD the 10900K is fighting off that similar priced Ryzen 9 3900X, which offers two more cores at 12-cores for pretty much the same amount of money. Seen from that perspective, Intel will likely need to further lower its price for this proc to remain competitive.

Purely speaking from a game performance point of view, Intel has the lead. And you will need to acknowledge that the gaming performance is a notch better compared to the competition when you fire an enthusiast-class GPU at the platform. That all comes back towards the high-frequency Turbos Intel can apply, running up to 5.3 GHz (depending on conditions).

Processors like shown today are of course good stuff for the streamers, video editors, content creators, the developers and companies that need to run a fairly affordable multi-core server for a bit of virtualization and such. Here the Core i9-10900K performs well. But is it enough though?, well that is hard to answer question really, again the competition is very strong in threaded and single-threaded performance with applications, it's only gaming combined with 1000 USD graphics cards where they perform a notch-less. You do need to look at platform differences, AMD offers PCIe Gen4.0 throughout the eco-system, whereas with Comet-Lake-S sticks at Gen 3.0, albeit the Z490 motherboards are gen 4.0 ready, but that likely is introduced with Rocket Lake-S series desktop processors," we reads in Core i9-10900K review.

"We feel in terms of performance the Core i9-10900K is a tough sell and it's been reduced to become a niche product. Who should want to buy the 10900K? Perhaps someone who wants ultimate gaming performance and better video rendering than a 10700K, but for whatever reason doesn’t want to sacrifice some gaming performance in favor of even better video rendering, at a lower price with the 3900X.

With the Ryzen 9 3900X down around $410 -- surely no coincidence, AMD is trying to squeeze Intel here -- the CPU has been available for around that price since March, the 10900K is fetching a serious premium at $530, the current pre-order price right now. In other markets like Australia, we're seeing pricing that is ~30% more than the 3900X. That’s a massive price premium that it's simply not worth paying. If the 10900K was coming in at $410, we could certainly make an argument for purchasing it over AMD’s 3900X, especially if you’re just gaming," we read in a review.

"In terms of performance, the Intel Core i9-10900K is the new dominant force in gaming benchmarks, leading all performance metrics, but while this statement is true of it being the world's fastest gaming CPU, it seems like its competitors or even the rest of the 10th Gen processors that I got to test were not that far behind. In multi-threaded workloads, I saw a definite increase over the Core i9-9900K/KS & you do get close to a Ryzen 9 3900X but ultimately, in a majority of tests, the Ryzen 9 3900X does fair much better due to its higher core and thread count.

Now we have to talk about the elephant in the room, the thermals, and power numbers. Just like the increase in clock speeds, the TDP scales up to 125W (PL1) & 250W (PL2) and so does the total power consumption which peaks at around 400W, almost 60W higher than the Ryzen 9 3900X. It looks like the thermals aren't that great either which, as explained earlier, need much better AIO coolers to stay under optimal running frequencies. You have to keep that in mind especially if you plan on overclocking the 10900K which does yield some good results when pushed to 5.2 GHz all-core frequencies but you'd see some heavy throttling at stock configuration if you aren't keeping this chip properly cooled.

Over the Core i9-9900K, the Core i9-10900K offers a great upgrade with more cores, more threads, even faster clock speeds, and impressive gaming performance. The additional cores & threads do translate into better multi-threading performance, outperforming the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12 core CPU in many workloads. But as Intel's reliance on 14nm increases, so do the thermals which are at their worst since the first Skylake CPU back in 2015 and power consumption figures that are going to cause a huge surplus of watts in your power bills. The Core i9-10900K, especially the KF variant, offers slightly better value than the Ryzen 9 3900X in terms of overall performance so if you are in the market for a fast gaming setup with lots of cores/threads on a mainstream platform, the Core i9-10900K is the chip for you," we read.