The Intel Core i9-9900KS Review: The 5 GHz Consumer Special
by Dr. Ian Cutress on October 31, 2019 10:45 AM ESTCPU Performance: Web and Legacy Tests
While more the focus of low-end and small form factor systems, web-based benchmarks are notoriously difficult to standardize. Modern web browsers are frequently updated, with no recourse to disable those updates, and as such there is difficulty in keeping a common platform. The fast paced nature of browser development means that version numbers (and performance) can change from week to week. Despite this, web tests are often a good measure of user experience: a lot of what most office work is today revolves around web applications, particularly email and office apps, but also interfaces and development environments. Our web tests include some of the industry standard tests, as well as a few popular but older tests.
We have also included our legacy benchmarks in this section, representing a stack of older code for popular benchmarks.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
WebXPRT 3: Modern Real-World Web Tasks, including AI
The company behind the XPRT test suites, Principled Technologies, has recently released the latest web-test, and rather than attach a year to the name have just called it ‘3’. This latest test (as we started the suite) has built upon and developed the ethos of previous tests: user interaction, office compute, graph generation, list sorting, HTML5, image manipulation, and even goes as far as some AI testing.
For our benchmark, we run the standard test which goes through the benchmark list seven times and provides a final result. We run this standard test four times, and take an average.
Users can access the WebXPRT test at http://principledtechnologies.com/benchmarkxprt/webxprt/
WebXPRT 2015: HTML5 and Javascript Web UX Testing
The older version of WebXPRT is the 2015 edition, which focuses on a slightly different set of web technologies and frameworks that are in use today. This is still a relevant test, especially for users interacting with not-the-latest web applications in the market, of which there are a lot. Web framework development is often very quick but with high turnover, meaning that frameworks are quickly developed, built-upon, used, and then developers move on to the next, and adjusting an application to a new framework is a difficult arduous task, especially with rapid development cycles. This leaves a lot of applications as ‘fixed-in-time’, and relevant to user experience for many years.
Similar to WebXPRT3, the main benchmark is a sectional run repeated seven times, with a final score. We repeat the whole thing four times, and average those final scores.
Speedometer 2: JavaScript Frameworks
Our newest web test is Speedometer 2, which is a accrued test over a series of javascript frameworks to do three simple things: built a list, enable each item in the list, and remove the list. All the frameworks implement the same visual cues, but obviously apply them from different coding angles.
Our test goes through the list of frameworks, and produces a final score indicative of ‘rpm’, one of the benchmarks internal metrics. We report this final score.
Google Octane 2.0: Core Web Compute
A popular web test for several years, but now no longer being updated, is Octane, developed by Google. Version 2.0 of the test performs the best part of two-dozen compute related tasks, such as regular expressions, cryptography, ray tracing, emulation, and Navier-Stokes physics calculations.
The test gives each sub-test a score and produces a geometric mean of the set as a final result. We run the full benchmark four times, and average the final results.
Mozilla Kraken 1.1: Core Web Compute
Even older than Octane is Kraken, this time developed by Mozilla. This is an older test that does similar computational mechanics, such as audio processing or image filtering. Kraken seems to produce a highly variable result depending on the browser version, as it is a test that is keenly optimized for.
The main benchmark runs through each of the sub-tests ten times and produces an average time to completion for each loop, given in milliseconds. We run the full benchmark four times and take an average of the time taken.
3DPM v1: Naïve Code Variant of 3DPM v2.1
The first legacy test in the suite is the first version of our 3DPM benchmark. This is the ultimate naïve version of the code, as if it was written by scientist with no knowledge of how computer hardware, compilers, or optimization works (which in fact, it was at the start). This represents a large body of scientific simulation out in the wild, where getting the answer is more important than it being fast (getting a result in 4 days is acceptable if it’s correct, rather than sending someone away for a year to learn to code and getting the result in 5 minutes).
In this version, the only real optimization was in the compiler flags (-O2, -fp:fast), compiling it in release mode, and enabling OpenMP in the main compute loops. The loops were not configured for function size, and one of the key slowdowns is false sharing in the cache. It also has long dependency chains based on the random number generation, which leads to relatively poor performance on specific compute microarchitectures.
3DPM v1 can be downloaded with our 3DPM v2 code here: 3DPMv2.1.rar (13.0 MB)
x264 HD 3.0: Older Transcode Test
This transcoding test is super old, and was used by Anand back in the day of Pentium 4 and Athlon II processors. Here a standardized 720p video is transcoded with a two-pass conversion, with the benchmark showing the frames-per-second of each pass. This benchmark is single-threaded, and between some micro-architectures we seem to actually hit an instructions-per-clock wall.
235 Comments
View All Comments
Spunjji - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
172W for 8 cores at 5Ghz with the 9900KS142W for 12 cores at ~4.2Ghz for the 3900X.
The X570 chipset TDP is around 15W, 6W for Z390. There's simply no aspect of power efficiency where Intel come out on top here.
Sivar - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
Please read the first couple of sentences before criticizing.No one is saying the 9900KS is a power efficiency winner. Indeed, when running compute-intense tasks, AMD's larger CPUs are likely the winner most of the time, but you cannot post one set of measurements with one specific configuration and draw broad conclusions. Other measurements differ, and most pit the idle power draw (where most PCs remain most of the time) as lower for Intel. For example,
https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/amd-ryzen-7-...
Korguz - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
thats funny.. cause before zen.. thats what people were saying about amd.. and the power those chips use. now its the opposite, and its ok for intel to use so much power ??? come onvMax65 - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
Just to add to this...der8aur just tested the 9900KS and it runs games all core 5GHz all the time at between 98w and 126w....Video showing this starts at 3:50..the only time it uses more power is if you are doing high compute loads and or with AVX workloads...but for gaming, it will stay well below...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWSn0cHauJ4
Korguz - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
well, this review, says other wise. maybe different test setups ??Jorgp2 - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
That's because AMDs CPUs were woefully underpowered.Intel is still more efficient in the mobile space
evernessince - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
Humans find ways to defend their purchases. RTX 2080 Ti owners have 1,200 reasons to defend theirs.AshlayW - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
If I only I could upvote this post...vMax65 - Friday, November 1, 2019 - link
Surprising that it seems to hurt some that others might want to buy a RTX 2080Ti or a 9900K or a Ferrari for whatever reason. Are we now all to be lambasted for buying anything that maybe costs more?...or heaven forbid they want the best!!! Oh no...run!!! You might as well start on all those that buy better shoes, cookers, microwaves, TV's, bread, cars, chocolates, phones etc, etc ad infinitum or for that matter any branded products period as they cost more than there non branded counter parts...Hold on, we are not going far enough, here's an idea, lets all wear the same clothes, live in the same houses, watch the same TV, eat the same gruel, have only one manufacturere of all products.......so no one can be different and most importantly we certainly do not want any choice, creativity, design et all....Madness......
Midwayman - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
I'm mostly reading its a bad time to buy a 9900K since intel will have binned out all the golden samples.