The Intel Comet Lake Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10600K CPU Review: Skylake We Go Again
by Dr. Ian Cutress on May 20, 2020 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Skylake
- 14nm
- Z490
- 10th Gen Core
- Comet Lake
CPU Performance: Synthetic Tests
As with most benchmark suites, there are tests that don’t necessarily fit into most categories because their role is just to find the peak throughput in very particular coding scenarios. For this we rely on some of the industry standard tests, like Geekbench and Cinebench.
GeekBench4: Synthetics
A common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench 4 is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.
I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic, and a lot of users often put a lot of weight behind the test due to the fact that it is compiled across different platforms (although with different compilers).
We record the main subtest scores (Crypto, Integer, Floating Point, Memory) in our benchmark database, but for the review we post the overall single and multi-threaded results.
LinX: LINPACK
The main tool for ordering the TOP500 computer list involves running a variant of an accelerated matrix multiply algorithm typically found from the LINPACK suite. Here we use a tool called LinX to do the same thing on our CPUs. We scale our test based on the number of cores present in order to not run out of scaling but still keeping the test time consistent.
This is another of our new tests for 2020. Data will be added as we start regression testing older CPUs.
Cinebench R20
The Cinebench line of tests is very well known among technology enthusiasts, with the software implementing a variant of the popular Cinema4D engine to render through the CPU a complex scene. The latest version of Cinebench comes with a number of upgrades, including support for >64 threads, as well as offering a much longer test in order to stop the big server systems completing it in seconds. Not soon after R20 was launched, we ended up with 256 thread servers that completed the test in about two seconds. While we wait for the next version of Cinebench, we run the test on our systems in single thread and multithread modes, running for a minimum of 10 minutes each.
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UltraWide - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Intel's 10th gen is a hard pass for me.I'll wait patiently with my 4770K.
Spunjji - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link
Haswell was the last time I remember being excited about an Intel CPU.AnarchoPrimitiv - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Why is the article stating that the 10900k is "around the same price" as the 3900x when its literally around $100 more (3900x currently goes for $417 and the 10900k has listed at $522, $488 is only the tray price when you buy 1000 or more CPUs)? In my opinion a 25% more expensive CPU isn't "around the same price"dirkdigles - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Same thoughts - I commented on that earlier. Quite misleading IMO.drothgery - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
comparing retail prices of something just released vs something that's been out for months is silly, so they went by MSRP (which for CPUs is the tray price)?GreenReaper - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Don't see how that works. You buy based on the performance available now, that is what the charts are based on - so why not the price now?duploxxx - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
perhaps a reviews site should start testing with the defaults…. so put a default cooler on this system and test again in a case and heating next to it and see how much is reall left from this marketing turbo and theoretical benchmarking....jameslr - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
What's a "default cooler"? None of these CPUs come with a "cooler" or HSF unit.GreenReaper - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
So test it anyway, see what happens when you don't include a vital bit of kit in the comparison price.Spunjji - Tuesday, May 26, 2020 - link
The AMD ones do. They could throw in a known-equivalent cooler on the Intel side and repeat a few of the tests with it to see how it fares - one of those $30 Coolermaster jobs should do the trick.At least that way you'd get an idea of the extremes - "properly" cooled with a water loop vs. cooled the way most people used to do home builds.