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: Civilization 6 (DX12)
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Civilization VI | RTS | Oct 2016 |
DX12 | 1080p Ultra |
4K Ultra |
8K Ultra |
16K Low |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Civilization 6 | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Continuing the theme we’ve seen thus far, Civilization 6 is another game where the 9900K does provide some benefits, but not under all circumstances. The game is not particularly GPU-intensive to begin with, so at just 4K Ultra we’re still not entirely GPU limited; but past a Ryzen 7 2700X or so, all the CPUs start running together. We have to drop to 1080p Ultra to really pull the CPUs off of the dogpile, at which point the 9900K comes out in the lead.
This is another game that doesn’t seem to care about core counts so much as it does frequencies. So the 9900K has the strongest position here, while the 9700K brings up second place. But neither are very far from the 8700K, with Intel’s latest coming in at just 12% faster than their former flagship even at these CPU benchmarking sympathetic settings.
Curiously we also see the 9900K fall behind the 9700K at 4K and higher. The difference is easily close enough to be noise, but it might be a very slight impact of the lower-tier chips not having to share their cores with hyper-threading.
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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.