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
Gaming: Grand Theft Auto V
The highly anticipated iteration of the Grand Theft Auto franchise hit the shelves on April 14th 2015, with both AMD and NVIDIA in tow to help optimize the title. GTA doesn’t provide graphical presets, but opens up the options to users and extends the boundaries by pushing even the hardest systems to the limit using Rockstar’s Advanced Game Engine under DirectX 11. Whether the user is flying high in the mountains with long draw distances or dealing with assorted trash in the city, when cranked up to maximum it creates stunning visuals but hard work for both the CPU and the GPU.
For our test we have scripted a version of the in-game benchmark. The in-game benchmark consists of five scenarios: four short panning shots with varying lighting and weather effects, and a fifth action sequence that lasts around 90 seconds. We use only the final part of the benchmark, which combines a flight scene in a jet followed by an inner city drive-by through several intersections followed by ramming a tanker that explodes, causing other cars to explode as well. This is a mix of distance rendering followed by a detailed near-rendering action sequence, and the title thankfully spits out frame time data.
There are no presets for the graphics options on GTA, allowing the user to adjust options such as population density and distance scaling on sliders, but others such as texture/shadow/shader/water quality from Low to Very High. Other options include MSAA, soft shadows, post effects, shadow resolution and extended draw distance options. There is a handy option at the top which shows how much video memory the options are expected to consume, with obvious repercussions if a user requests more video memory than is present on the card (although there’s no obvious indication if you have a low end GPU with lots of GPU memory, like an R7 240 4GB).
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| AnandTech | IGP | Low |
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Boshum - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
I generally agree, but I'm not so certain AMD will be in 2nd place within 5 years (from a best CPU architecture point of view). They should be considering the difference in resources, but Intel is so spread out and AMD seems so focused.poohbear - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
OK i'll bite. Why would anyone buy this generation of Intel processors when AMD's is just as powerful and yet more efficient being on 7nm? Especially with Ryzen 4000 coming out this fall.dguy6789 - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
AMD is ahead in a few key areas- price vs performance, total number of cores/threads, power.Intel is still ahead in the per core/per thread area. An Intel 8 core 16 thread will beat an AMD 8 core 16 thread in absolutely everything because of just how high Intel chips can clock to. In short, Intel is a higher performing albeit more expensive option for low thread count workloads.
Boshum - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
I don't think the power and heat are too big a deal until you hit the 8 and 10-core K chips. The people that buy those are enthusiast gamers who want the highest possible FPS in games (whether they are able to perceive it or not, but I am sure they can in certain scenarios). A lot of those ultra-enthusiasts have a lot of fun with overclocking too, and Intel gets more out of that.Ryzen 4000 will undoubtedly be a better overall chip, but Rocket Lake should be coming to the LGA 1200 platform in the not too distant future. It may pass up Ryzen 4000 in gaming for those benchmark enthusiasts. It will be no match for Ryzen 4000 in heavy multi-core scenarios.
gagegfg - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
At the end of the day, AMD continues to have the performance crown at a price premium (3950X).Also, it seems to me a bad ANANTECH policy for many graphics that do not have an AMD equivalent CPU and only put the 3600.
mandoman - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
I can't imaging anyone being the slightest bit concerned about power on the HEDT! It's simply ludicrous to even bring it into the discussion. Frankly the whole emphasis in this review smacks loudly of "tree hugger" philosophy which has no place in the high end computing arena at all.Beany2013 - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
Some of us actually care about good engineering rather than pushing an old, inefficient process node as hard as technically possible.Enjoy dropping an extra £100 just to cool your CPU.
Hxx - Wednesday, May 20, 2020 - link
WHAAT? U think this is not good engineering? this is BALLS engineering, they basically achieved a miracle on the 14nm platform. You are basically standing in front of a miracle. Step back and think about it. A 5 yo technology that competes and beats in many tests the competitor's 7nm process. Yes overall AMD may be the better purchase but again that not what im saying.Just think about that. On top of that they added good overclocking, controlled temps, plenty features, etc . Cant say im impressed with the Z490 platform itself since its the same old z390/70/270/170 with better connectivity but the CPU themselves will make history I mean the 14nm process sure is effing OLD but man what these guys did with this, the refinement it went through to achieve this performance on this OLD tech is amazing in my opinion and for that I applaud them. I want them to hurry up and wrap up Rocket Lake but this is definitely for sure no doubt definitely great engineering.
alufan - Thursday, May 21, 2020 - link
so what exactly do you think would happen if AMD did the same thing threw the power limits out the window and used a 14++++++ node with the extra thermal headroom available with the 3000 series chips, Intel has not released its new process node chips because they cant make them work AMD has and the limitations are simply due to the node size and physics, they have engineered a way round the issue Intel even now is talking about backporting designs it stinks, this is a "new" chip from Intel with more top end period AMD has released 3 nodes in 3 years and has a new version coming up in a few months with a rumored 20% uplift in IPC but lets wait and see, not to mention 5nm is designed and being sampled and 3nm is in design, that is EngineeringHxx - Thursday, May 21, 2020 - link
ROFL AMD? AMD struggles with getting a BIOS right let alone fine tuning a platform ? Nah they are too busy now supposedly giving us a beta bios for the 4xx series and that's a very scary thought given AMD's track record. In case you didn't know, AMD doesn't make their own chips. If tsmc moves to a different node then so will AMD, that's how it works. So yes I applaud TSMC for good engineering, AMD not so much.