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: Chernobylite
Despite the advent of recent TV shows like Chernobyl, recreating the situation revolving around the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the concept of nuclear fallout and the town of Pripyat have been popular settings for a number of games – mostly first person shooters. Chernobylite is an indie title that plays on a science-fiction survival horror experience and uses a 3D-scanned recreation of the real Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It involves challenging combat, a mix of free exploration with crafting and non-linear story telling. While still in early access, it is already picking up plenty of awards.
I picked up Chernobylite while still in early access, and was impressed by its in-game benchmark, showcasing complex building structure with plenty of trees and structures where aliasing becomes important. The in-game benchmark is an on-rails experience through the scenery, covering both indoor and outdoor scenes – it ends up being very CPU limited in the way it is designed. We have taken an offline version of Chernobylite to use in our tests, and we are testing the following settings combinations:
- 360p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1080p Max
We do as many runs within 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination, and then take averages.
| AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
| Average FPS |  |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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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.