Reviews Intel Core i9-10900X Review

What do you mean close, 2920x is half!!! the price of this CPU, so it makes a case for itself on that alone as you can get an x399 board and 2920x chip for the price of the 10900x and have a better featured board not requiring VROC etc.

 

Looking at the CB R20 scores on multi threading it's basically identical to my 1920x. Both stock and overclocked.

And you're right Sandys, you can do much better at that price. My chip and board cost me £490. Less than this chip.

 

It is also worth stating that price difference between x299 and x399 motherboards is next to bugger all, the cheap x299 boards can only take 4 core chips, nothing more, ones you can possibly use with the chip if there is compatibility start at ~235 about £15 less than an x399 starts.

Yup the CB20 for my x2920 puts it on par at least, similar to the x2920 in the article, the 12 core Intel chip will be interesting to see though, I was considering it on the assumption that being an Intel chip I could 'clock it to 5Ghz and have better gaming performance, sounds like they are not having that sort of luck and I probably made the right choice sticking with x399 for now.

Well actually the right choice would have been to do nothing and wait for the next step of options from Intel/AMD as the 2920x is such a meagre update over my gen1 but it was only £350 quid.

The temptation to splurge on TR3xxx is still strong, if AMD release a cheaper chip I would cave.

 

Can we get the ‘higher is better’ and ‘lower is better’ added to the charts please. It works as a quick and easy reference when checking the chart data.

 

£220 cheapest board I could find. Asus Tuff X299 mark 2.

However yes it's £40 less than the X399 Aorus Pro and Asrock Fatal1ty but it also has waaaay less slots and features. Probably due to Intel's lack of lanes.

Most of the reason I upgraded my Broadwell E Xeon was for storage. The NVME part is awesome.

I also don't like that there are cheap X299 boards that don't support the higher end CPUs. That's seriously lame. This stuff is confusing enough ffs.

 

It's almost impossible because X299 is totally different. You'll get less, though. Problem is the Aorus I looked at that looked similar to mine can't run anything above 4 cores.

I would ask "what were Intel thinking?" But it's obvious. Greed and a determination to sell 4 core CPUs for maximum coin.

Looking back just makes it all look so much worse.

Edit. Jesus. £690?!?!? I thought it was like £500.

£690 is exactly what you can buy a 1920x, X399 Aorus Pro and 32gb of Corsair dom plat RGB 3200.

I think they need to cut those prices more. Much more. Like, in half.

 

It's not so much chipsets but features. How many NVME slots? Board layout? Features like usb, usb c etc.

And ultimately, lanes. As that is what it's becoming now. Cores are no longer the sticking point, you can literally buy as many as you want now.

 

Seriously, why are they bothering

 

X299 is still the only game in town if you want ITX HEDT. Even the barmy lads over at ASRock couldn't figure out how to cram the Threadripper socket and breakouts onto an ITX board (and they somehow did it with LGA3647 and 6 channel memory, so if it were possible they would have done so).

Hands up anyone actually using more than the 48x CPU lanes provided by Cascade Lake-X? That's dual x16 lane GPUs plus quad x4 lane nVME SSDs, without even touching the chipset lanes (where you'd usually hand network controllers and drive controllers to take advantage of CPU offloaded DMA).

 

Why would you even want and ITX HEDT board, the power requirements will require some serious cooling and you wouldn't have any slots to take advantage of the main benefit of HEDT platform, ultra niche.

 

quad-channel memory, x16 slot with bifurcation, and 3x x4 m.2 slots With flex risers you could have 2x x8 lane slots and 3x x4 lane slots if you wanted (I've seen a build for a virtual networking testbed drawing out multiple 10GbE NIC cards from an ITX board). Cooling is not an issue with proper cooling choice (e.g. even as small as the Dan A4 there's 92mm AIOs like the Asetek 545lc, and even a 'large' ITX case like the Ncase M1 can fit dual 240mm rads), as is power with current SFX PSUs (though I've seen at least one x299 build in the NFC S4 Mini, so you can do it with external power too).
99% of desktop cases are massively oversized for actual usage.

 

pointless, just get a better board and case if you are breaking out pci to use slots and adding external power etc surely ITX is wrong and you are just constraining the system for zero benefits, each to their own I guess.

 

Whilst x299 itx is a fantastic novelty and achievement it's pretty much very silly.

As said it flies in the face of the platform itself.

I'm hoping to put more ssds into my rig now.

 

What's the issue with having a laptop-style external power brick and flex PSU if it makes the box that sits on your desk that bit smaller and neater? Weird thing to criticise mITX builds for imho, and awesome cases like the S4 mini wouldn't be possible without it.

 

Just so it's out there. I'm not criticising ITX builds. At all. I think they're ace. I just think itx and HEDT don't go.

Why would you any way with things like the 3900x and 3950x? I mean really.

Edit actually you know what? Nail, head.

There wouldn't even be a x299 itx board unless Intel couldn't put highly threaded chips into desktop mainstream boards.

That's why it exists. Not because it's cool because Intel can't shrink.

 

I'm down with ITX, I have a small ITX NUC style build myself, but to go ITX and breakout all the slots etc, it's a nit silly, plus of course the CPU power requirements, I mean the PSU will have to be massive as the TDPs are not the mins and these mutilcore chips can use much more.

 

That's not very lice

 

Funny enough, recent stories indicate that Intel will soon start pushing for 12V only PSUs, if that takes off then PSUs will get smaller in general.