50 PCWorld JULY 2020REVIEWS INTEL 10TH GEN
more like $410 on Amazon (go.pcworld.
com/r3am). The Ryzen 9 3900X comes with a
decent air cooler, too.
The only other CPU we’d compare would
be the Ryzen 9 3950X, but with a street price
of $720 on Amazon (go.
pcworld.com/395x; as of
this writing) the math
doesn’t work. So we’ll stick
with the 12-core Ryzen 9
3900X. It was tested on an
MSI X570 MEG Godlike
with 16GB of DDR4/3600
in dual-channel mode. We
typically use the same SSD
on all platforms, but we feel
that’s unfair to AMD, which
can run PCIe 4, so we used
a Corsair MP600 PCIe 4.0
drive.For the Core
i9-10900K, we used an
Asus ROG Maximus VII
Extreme board with 16GB
of DDR4/3200 in dual-
channel mode and a
Samsung 960P SSD.
Both systems used
Windows 10 1909,
identical GeForce RTX
2080 Ti Founders Edition
cards, and NZXT Kraken
X62 coolers with fans set
to 100 percent. Both
boards were run open-case, with matching
desk fans blowing cool air directly onto the
graphics cards and the boards’ socket area.
All systems used the same drivers, the latest
UEFI’s, and the latest Windows securityA new LGA1200 socket is required to run a 10th-gen Comet Lake S CPU.The 10th-gen Core i9-10900K sits in the LGA1200 socket of an Asus
ROG Maximus Extreme VII.