The Intel 9th Gen Review: Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700K and Core i5-9600K Tested
by Ian Cutress on October 19, 2018 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Coffee Lake
- 14++
- Core 9th Gen
- Core-S
- i9-9900K
- i7-9700K
- i5-9600K
Gaming: World of Tanks enCore
Albeit different to most of the other commonly played MMO or massively multiplayer online games, World of Tanks is set in the mid-20th century and allows players to take control of a range of military based armored vehicles. World of Tanks (WoT) is developed and published by Wargaming who are based in Belarus, with the game’s soundtrack being primarily composed by Belarusian composer Sergey Khmelevsky. The game offers multiple entry points including a free-to-play element as well as allowing players to pay a fee to open up more features. One of the most interesting things about this tank based MMO is that it achieved eSports status when it debuted at the World Cyber Games back in 2012.
World of Tanks enCore is a demo application for a new and unreleased graphics engine penned by the Wargaming development team. Over time the new core engine will implemented into the full game upgrading the games visuals with key elements such as improved water, flora, shadows, lighting as well as other objects such as buildings. The World of Tanks enCore demo app not only offers up insight into the impending game engine changes, but allows users to check system performance to see if the new engine run optimally on their system.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| World of Tanks enCore | Driving / Action | Feb 2018 |
DX11 | 768p Minimum |
1080p Medium |
1080p Ultra |
4K Ultra |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| World of Tanks enCore | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Being a game that’s not especially GPU limited – at least not at Low image quality settings – World of Tanks gives the 9900K some room to stretch its legs. The game isn’t especially sensitive to core counts, so it’s all about high per-thread performance. And in this case the 9900K with its 5.0GHz turbo speed pulls ahead. In fact I’m surprised by just how far ahead of the 8086K it is (16%); this may be one of the big payoffs from the 9900K being able to turbo to 5.0GHz on two cores, versus a single core on the 8086K.
The 9700K also puts up a strong showing in this situation, second only to the 9900K. We have a few theories on this – including whether the lack of hyper-threading plays a benefit – but it’s none the less notable that the new CFL-R CPUs are taking the top two spots.
The flip side however is that any CPU-based performance lead melts away with higher image quality settings. By the time we reach High quality, it’s purely GPU bottlenecked.
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0ldman79 - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
There are certainly occasions where more cores are better than clock speed.Just look at certain mining apps. You can drop the power usage by half and only lose a little processing speed, but drop them to 2 cores at full power instead of 4 and it is a *huge* drop. Been playing with the CPU max speed in Windows power management on my various laptops. The Skylake i5 6300HQ can go down to some seriously low power levels if you play with it a bit. The recent Windows updates have lost a lot of the Intel Dynamic Thermal control though. That's a shame.
Makaveli - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
Power consumption rules on mobiles parts why would they release an 8 core model?notashill - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
Because you get more performance at the same power level using more cores at lower clocks. The additional cores are power gated when not in use.evernessince - Saturday, October 20, 2018 - link
Not judging by the power consumption and heat output displayed here.mkaibear - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
9700K is definitely the way to go on the non-HEDT. 9900K is technically impressive but the heat? Gosh.It's definitely made me consider waiting for the 9800X though - if the 7820X full load power is 145W ("TDP" 140W) at 3.6/4.3, then the 9800X isn't likely to be too much higher than that at 3.8/4.5.
Hrm.
Cooe - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
"9700K is definitely the way to go on the non-HEDT."I think you meant to say "Ryzen 5 2600 unless your GPU's so fast, it'll HEAVILY CPU-bind you in gaming" but spelt it wrong ;). The 9700K is a vey good CPU, no doubt, but to claim it the undisputed mainstream champ at it's currently mediocre bang/$ value (so important for the mainstream market) doesn't make any sense, or accurately represent what people in the mainstream are ACTUALLY buying (lots of Ryzen 5 2600's & i5-8400's; both with a MUCH saner claim to the "best overall mainstream CPU" title).
mkaibear - Saturday, October 20, 2018 - link
No, I meant to say "9700K is definitely the way to go on the non-HEDT".Don't put words in people's mouth. I don't just game. The video encoding tests in particular are telling - I can get almost a third better performance with the 9700K than I can the r5 2600x.
>"best overall mainstream CPU" title
Please don't straw man either. Nowhere did I say that it was the best overall mainstream CPU (that's the R7 2700X in my opinion), but for my particular use case the 9700K or the 9800X are better suited at present.
koaschten - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
Uhm yeah... so where are the 9900k overclocking results the article claims are currently being uploaded? :)watzupken - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
The i9 processor is expected to be quite impressive in performance. However this review also reveals that Intel is struggling to pull more tricks out of their current 14nm and Skylake architect. The lack of IPC improvement over the last few generations is just forcing them to up the clockspeed to continue to cling on to their edge. Considering that they are launching the new series this late in the year, they are at risk of AMD springing a surprise with their 7nm Zen 2 slated to launch next year.SquarePeg - Friday, October 19, 2018 - link
If the rumored 13% IPC and minimum 500mhz uplift are for real with Zen 2 then AMD would take the performance crown. I'm not expecting very high clocks from Intel's relaxed 10nm process so it remains to be seen what kind of IPC gain they can pull with Ice Lake. It wouldn't surprise me if they had a mild performance regression because of how long they had to optimize 14nm for clock speed. Either way I'm all in on a new Ryzen 3 build next year.