Intel Core i9-10850K Review: The Real Intel Flagship
by Dr. Ian Cutress on January 4, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core
- Z490
- 10th Gen Core
- Comet Lake
- LGA1200
- i9-10850K
Gaming Tests: Civilization 6
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civilization series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer underflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but I have played every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, and it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
For this benchmark, we are using the following settings:
- 480p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1080p Max
For automation, Firaxis supports the in-game automated benchmark from the command line, and output a results file with frame times. We do as many runs within 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination, and then take averages and percentiles.
AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
Average FPS | ||||
95th Percentile |
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
126 Comments
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dwillmore - Wednesday, January 6, 2021 - link
FWIW, your y-cruncher link goes to a file on your C drive: file:///C:/Users/admin/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Word/www.numberworld.org/y-cruncherShowtime - Friday, January 8, 2021 - link
What cooler was used for this review?hellocopter - Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - link
Who in their right mind would buy anything Intel over AMD? Things are getting rather embarrassing for Intel..sonicmerlin - Sunday, January 17, 2021 - link
I bought a I5-2500k for $200 back in the day when it was top of the line... when did CPUs become so expensive...?FluxApex - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
I have an i9-10850k and have yet to see my temps go above 79c stock clock, 85c overclocked to 5.0ghz all cores. This is with a cheap $80 deepcool captain aio. My Cryorig R1 maintains lower temps than this but has more noise due to being a heat pipe air cooler.Thorough review, but I have a problem with the CPU cooler they are using. Thermalright's website even says it is meant for an i7 CPU. The Thermalright True Copper is not meant for this TDP. Also, the cooler has been documented on several occasions to have improper machining on the base.
They need to use a proper cooler, just do a quick youtube search of all the overclocking videos for the i9-10850k and none will have temps near this.
Quartz11 - Tuesday, March 23, 2021 - link
Is that 5nm “speed shift” difference, down from the 16nm of 10900K, relevant/noticeable for intensive home office type use? That graph seems to be excluded from any further discussion, and in fact 10900K is still recommended over 10850K if price is similar enough in the conclusion.In my case, the price difference is very small, and I was going to get the 10900K variant. But that Frequency Ramp graph is causing some doubts.