Reviews Intel Core i9-10900K Review

Interesting, so more or less right where the pricing puts it. If only the motherboards weren't so expensive!!!

 

Exactly what I expected: a good CPU for a price that makes sense in the current market. And only interesting for a select few.

 

Board pricing looks fine on z490, you can get them cheaper than x570, in fact it looks quite good value if you want the best single thread perf for games etc.....never thought I would say value with respect to Intel.

 

And as expected the 3900x dropped to £414 today. With a cooler.

 

Ooooh, a second clue!

 

There is always something better around the corner though, with that sort of wait and see sentiment you'd never buy anything

It's fair to say that in some of the gaming titles AMD is still behind by double digits percentage so it has its work cut out to better this chip.never mind Intels next one If gaming is your only focus.

 

We need to wait to see how the cheaper boards fare, though. Right now the only reviews out there are for £800 boards.

There are several X570 boards available that can easily deal with an overclocked 3950x, so now we need to see if anything at that price can deliver the power it needs without burning themselves up or throttling.

 

There is little to be gained from OC'ing a 10900K anyway (while using cooling solutions suitable for 24/7 use), so it doesn't matter all that much how well boards handle it.

 

Indeed both companies are pretty much maximising what the can get out of their respective process big cpu overclocks seem to be a thing of the past.

Good in some ways as any board built to spec should be sufficient for the chips it was built for regardless of price and only the real extreme oc'ers need to give a monkeys, as you won't be seeing a more powerful revision with another 500Mhz etc any time soon.

 

I guess so. I would still want to see reviews though, which sadly there are none at the moment. Kinda grinds my gears because they pimp the expensive stuff left right and centre and MSI get to release stinkers before any one notices.

I think the days of 40% overclocks and such are long gone. We pay for that now, Intel and AMD do it for us before they even sell it to us. That said I won't complain too much, as I found overclocking on X58 to be a real chore. I loved it on AMD (Phenom and FX) but yeah X58 there were just so many sodding settings. Same goes for GPUs really. They're all pre binned and pre overclocked before you even get them in your hands these days.

 

Vast improvement on naming and where products sit in the stack, but I said many years ago, and stick by this, that the naming should be like Core iN where N is the number of cores.

 

But, apparently, odd numbers are better for marketing.

 

I really find the opening title a little confusing?
GREAT FOR GAMING, NOT SO GREAT EVERYWHERE ELSE.

This cpu is the thick part of £500, add to that the Mobo premium price for early adoption and that virtually equates to nearly £900........jeez.
I have a hard time with this notion because, with "gaming" being the systems primary function, is it not prudent to drop down on cpu and mobo a little and furnish yourself with a better GPU?
The "Gaming" performance will surely improve with a better GPU, than a better CPU.

 

Agreed. Just as an example:
I5-10600K + RTX 2070 Super costs the same as i9-10900K + RX 5600 XT yet the former combo is clearly going to perform better at gaming.

 

For unlocked desktop CPUs with 17 different turbos the base clock doesn't mean much.

If everything else was equal then you'd want to go with the one that has the highest boost clock that can be sustained for a long time.

 

And with the roughly five billion factors for boost clock and duration to compare.... quite an easy job to find the right one.