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: Strange Brigade (DX12, Vulkan)
Strange Brigade is based in 1903’s Egypt and follows a story which is very similar to that of the Mummy film franchise. This particular third-person shooter is developed by Rebellion Developments which is more widely known for games such as the Sniper Elite and Alien vs Predator series. The game follows the hunt for Seteki the Witch Queen who has arose once again and the only ‘troop’ who can ultimately stop her. Gameplay is cooperative centric with a wide variety of different levels and many puzzles which need solving by the British colonial Secret Service agents sent to put an end to her reign of barbaric and brutality.
The game supports both the DirectX 12 and Vulkan APIs and houses its own built-in benchmark which offers various options up for customization including textures, anti-aliasing, reflections, draw distance and even allows users to enable or disable motion blur, ambient occlusion and tessellation among others. AMD has boasted previously that Strange Brigade is part of its Vulkan API implementation offering scalability for AMD multi-graphics card configurations.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Strange Brigade* | FPS | Aug 2018 |
DX12 Vulkan |
720p Low |
1080p Medium |
1440p High |
4K Ultra |
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| *Strange Brigade is run in DX12 and Vulkan modes | ||||||||
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Strange Brigade DX12 | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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[words]
| Strange Brigade Vulkan | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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Strange Brigade is another game that’s hard to tease CPU results out of at default settings. We’re clearly GPU-limited at 1080p medium, and have to drop down to 720p low to spread apart the CPUs. Once we do, the 9900K takes the lead, with the 9700K right behind it. Here Intel’s latest-gen flagship is still working hard to offer more than a 5% performance advantage over last year’s 8700K. Also, did I mention that everything faster than a 7700K is delivering 400fps or better?
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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.