The Intel Core i9-9900K at 95W: Fixing The Power for SFF
by Ian Cutress on November 29, 2018 8:00 AM ESTCPU Performance: Rendering Tests
Rendering is often a key target for processor workloads, lending itself to a professional environment. It comes in different formats as well, from 3D rendering through rasterization, such as games, or by ray tracing, and invokes the ability of the software to manage meshes, textures, collisions, aliasing, physics (in animations), and discarding unnecessary work. Most renderers offer CPU code paths, while a few use GPUs and select environments use FPGAs or dedicated ASICs. For big studios however, CPUs are still the hardware of choice.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Corona 1.3: Performance Render
An advanced performance based renderer for software such as 3ds Max and Cinema 4D, the Corona benchmark renders a generated scene as a standard under its 1.3 software version. Normally the GUI implementation of the benchmark shows the scene being built, and allows the user to upload the result as a ‘time to complete’.
We got in contact with the developer who gave us a command line version of the benchmark that does a direct output of results. Rather than reporting time, we report the average number of rays per second across six runs, as the performance scaling of a result per unit time is typically visually easier to understand.
The Corona benchmark website can be found at https://corona-renderer.com/benchmark
When we apply a full-fat rendering test, the 9900K at 95W scores around the i7-9700K which is a similar CPU with no hyperthreading.
Blender 2.79b: 3D Creation Suite
A high profile rendering tool, Blender is open-source allowing for massive amounts of configurability, and is used by a number of high-profile animation studios worldwide. The organization recently released a Blender benchmark package, a couple of weeks after we had narrowed our Blender test for our new suite, however their test can take over an hour. For our results, we run one of the sub-tests in that suite through the command line - a standard ‘bmw27’ scene in CPU only mode, and measure the time to complete the render.
Blender can be downloaded at https://www.blender.org/download/
Similar scenes with Blender, where the 9900K at 95W is actually 50% slower, and performs around the mark of the 9700K.
LuxMark v3.1: LuxRender via Different Code Paths
As stated at the top, there are many different ways to process rendering data: CPU, GPU, Accelerator, and others. On top of that, there are many frameworks and APIs in which to program, depending on how the software will be used. LuxMark, a benchmark developed using the LuxRender engine, offers several different scenes and APIs.
In our test, we run the simple ‘Ball’ scene on both the C++ and OpenCL code paths, but in CPU mode. This scene starts with a rough render and slowly improves the quality over two minutes, giving a final result in what is essentially an average ‘kilorays per second’.
The drop in our Luxmark test isn't as severe as what we see in blender, but the 95W mode causes the 9900K to be again around the level of a 9700K.
POV-Ray 3.7.1: Ray Tracing
The Persistence of Vision ray tracing engine is another well-known benchmarking tool, which was in a state of relative hibernation until AMD released its Zen processors, to which suddenly both Intel and AMD were submitting code to the main branch of the open source project. For our test, we use the built-in benchmark for all-cores, called from the command line.
POV-Ray can be downloaded from http://www.povray.org/
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Rukur - Monday, December 3, 2018 - link
9900K comes out of the box with 5Ghz so its going to win on games. The prize it a game stopper but.woggs - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
"This rises to 44.2 if the processor is fixed to 95W" but there is no data point on the plot at that spot. A mouse-over labeling of that plot would be very-helpful.romrunning - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
I don't understand - the article title says "Fixing the Power for SFF", and yet no motherboards with the form factor typically used in SFF systems were actually tested. The motherboards listed were all ATX; no mini-ITX or even micro-STX boards were used.Why not? Wouldn't this have provided valuable insight for those looking to purchase a SFF system, custom or DIY, to see which mfgs cap the TDP usage or let it go full range?
The author said he tested a MSI Vortex G3 small form factor desktop last year. Well, why not get some comments from ASRock, Gigabyte, ASUS, and MSI as to whether it's standard practice for them to limit CPUs to a specific power limit in their BIOS for those SFF boards.
Fro example, I'd love to know if that sweet-looking ASRock DeskMini GTX Z390 that was recently reviewed can take the i9-9900k rated at 95W to the full "unlimited" power settings. I can put 450-600W SFX/SFX-L PSUs into a SFF system, so I'd like to know if I can get the full performance out of the CPU or if the mfg locks the power draw in the BIOS.
SaturnusDK - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Why is this article, and Anandtech in general, using 1000 unit OEM prices for Intel products which are typically 15-20% less than the lowest retail price you can find. But use the highest you can find retail prices for AMD products? It seems like Anandtech is deliberate trying to make people think Intel products have any value when the reality is that they don't.Rezurecta - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
Good re-review. Although, Ian doesn't seem to want to call Intel out. This is OBVIOUSLY something initiated by Intel. If the 9900k were to run in spec it would be slower than the 2700x in a LOT of benchmarks. Intel couldn't have that for such a massive hot monolithic die. That's why all the shady sponsored benchmarks and having the processor way out of spec.It's obvious Intel is hurting. Let's hope this brings about a competitive landscape again.
kernel-panic - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
it would be nice if somewhere you let readers know what TDP, PL1 and PL2 mean. I enjoy this kind of articles but I'm not related with the terminology.Icehawk - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
It's in the (by now) linked article at the very beginningMr Perfect - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
How do motherboards treat the non-k versions of these CPUs? When I built my mITX machine, I bought the non-K processor since there wouldn't be any overclocking going on. Just how locked is a locked CPU? Technically, this could be considered turboing ratehr then overclocking and could be applied to the non-Ks.Targon - Sunday, December 2, 2018 - link
It is possible that Intel won't release a non-k version of these chips, just because there won't be a significant enough performance benefit vs. the AMD 2700X if the chips were not being pushed to their absolute limit.stux - Thursday, November 29, 2018 - link
An interesting point that you make is that a 9900K constrained to 95W performs like an unconstrained 9900K for single threaded loads and an unconstrained 9700K for multithreaded loads.The 9700K has half the threads, so that is an interesting claim, and I think the key is how does the 9700K perform when constrained to 95W.
Hyperthreading is supposed to be a big win to perf/W, thus I’d expect 9900K at 95W to be more efficient than the 9700K for the same perf, which is a definitive win too.
How does the 9700K at 95W perform in the multi threaded benchmarks?