O
ne main reason why Intel’s CPUs
haven’t been that competitive
recently is their price. The Core
i5-10600K and Core i9-10900K were good
CPUs, but they were just too expensive, with the
latter not leaving you with any change from £500,
while the Ryzen 9 5900X offered two more cores for
the same money. Intel’s
answer is the Core i9-10850K –
a 10-core CPU at a lower price.
What’s more, it’s in stock in the
shops, which is more than you can
say for AMD’s Ryzen 9 5900X.
In the Core i9-10850K’s favour,
it has the same ten cores and 20
threads as its more expensive
siblings and surprisingly hefty
frequencies, despite coming from
lower-binned rungs of Intel’s
production line. It has a 5.2GHz
peak boost frequency, which is
only 100MHz short of the flagship,
with the same deficit on the base
frequency and Turbo Boost Max 4
and 2 speeds.
At stock speed, the Core
i9-10900K’s all-core boost sat
at 4.9GHz in our water-cooled
test system, and again it was a
100MHz deficit with the CoreREVIEWS / PROCESSORS
LGA1200 CPU
INTEL CORE i910850K /£378 inc VAT
SUPPLIER ebuyer.com
i9-10850K
installed, which
sat at 4.8GHz in Prime
with AVX instructions disabled.
Temperatures didn’t top 75°C here,
although our system was water-cooled.
We’re still dealing with a 14nm CPU here, though, and
there haven’t been any significant changes under the hood.
By the time you read this, Intel’s new Rocket Lake CPUs
will be approaching too. You also get the same 20MB
of L3 cache as the 10900K, with 256KB of L2 cache for
each core.
In short, apart from the possibility of a slightly higher
overclock thanks to preferential binning, the Core
i9-10900K doesn’t offer any benefit on paper that will
result in noticeably more performance. In terms of price,
its main competitors are AMD’s Ryzen 5 5600X at around
£340 and the Ryzen 7 5800X at £420.Performance
At stock speed, the Core i9-10850K largely performed
as expected, with scores nearly identical to the Core
i9-10900K. The image editing score was within a few
hundred points, and the video editing scores of 730,
and 726,017 were neck and neck, as were the overall
system scores. There were barely 200 points between theSPEC
Base frequency
3.6GHz
Max boost frequency
5.2GHz
Core
Comet Lake
Manufacturing process
14nm
Number of cores
10 x physical (20 threads)
Cache
20MB L3, 10 x 256KB L
Memory controller
Dual-channel DDR4, up to 2933MHz
Packaging
LGA
Thermal design power (TDP)
125W
Features
Thermal Velocity Boost, Turbo Boost Max 3,
Turbo Boost 2, FMA3, F16C, SHA, BMI / BMI
+ BMI2, AVX-512, AVX2, AVX, AES, SSE4a,
SSE4, SSSE3, SSE3, SSE2, SSE, MMXc
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