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 |
|
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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muziqaz - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
I love the price of $488 stamped all over each of the test results, while over here in UK I see price of £599 and newegg quotes $580. Even your linked amazon has it at $580. And conclusion is awesome with: "At $488 SEP, plus a bit more for 'on-shelf price'..." Since when is extra 100 bucks a bit more? :Dcompudaze - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
What was the actual vcore for your overclocks?HardwareDufus - Monday, October 22, 2018 - link
I7-9700k.... an I7 that isn't hyperthreaded.... let's totally muddy the waters now Intel.... Guess they had to save some feature for the I9's $100+ surcharge...… Good grief.bogda - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
How pointless is reviewers comment: "... World of Tanks gives the 9900K some room to stretch its legs..."?Difference between two chips in discussion is between 712fps and 681fps! Not even Neo from Matrix could note the difference.
How pointless is discussing top of the line CPU gaming performance in 720p in any game??
How pointless is marketing 8C/16T CPU for gamers???
sseyler - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
Not sure whether this has been pointed out yet, but the Threadripper prices need to be updated. For example, the 1920X is now well under $500 as advertised even on AMD's website and the 1900X goes for $350 on Newegg.dlum - Tuesday, October 23, 2018 - link
For me, listing the long-obsolete prices for AMD processors (still initial, long-outdated MSRP for 1920x $799 - whereas a simple amazon search confirms it's now for just over half of that ($431)) is clearly disrespectful and shamefull practice for a reviewer.It's very sad such dishonest practices found their way to Anandtech and they are so prominent here.
Probably that's also why no one answers nor fixes those clearly misleading figures.
(Maybe that's the cost of being able to read such anyway valuable reviews for free :)
sseyler - Thursday, October 25, 2018 - link
Well, to be fair, I'm sure the editors didn't dig this deeply through the comments. They're busy people.Also, I think I heard something mentioned before about their graphs having some semi-automatic mechanism for listing prices and the like. I don't remember exactly, but it probably has something to do with pulling MSRP data and it's difficult to change given the way the templated graphs are generated from the benchmarks.
I imagine it was done something like this for consistency across the site as well as not biasing prices according to specific vendors. Given the first reason, I don't know why it'd be difficult for individual editors to customize/tweak certain aspects, but maybe that needs to be revised to be more flexible. As for the second reason, there are clearly reasonable solutions, like finding the *current* MSRP (rather than the release MSRP), or selecting the lowest/median/average price among a pool of selected retailers.
Anyway, it doesn't make much sense to me to characterize this as an instance of dishonesty, but rather a technical detail that's important enough to invest the time in it's improvement.
sseyler - Thursday, October 25, 2018 - link
its*zodiacfml - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Meh. Intel owner could simply delidd and approach these kinds of performance.Resolution above 1080p, AMDs parts have better value.
zodiacfml - Wednesday, October 24, 2018 - link
Made the comment without reading the review. The difference is a lot smaller than I expected where the only useful difference is in Ashes where AMD usually dominates due to sheer core count.I'd be fine with that 6 core CPU from AMD.