Intel Core i9-10900K CPU Review

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Application Benchmarks

We are going to start with application and system benchmarks for comparisons, these are the kind of benchmarks that provide an overall performance score to compare with.  These are also benchmarks that may either test the system as a whole, including many different real-world workloads or stress the CPU in ways real-world everyday workloads are performed to produce a performance result.

PCMark 10

This is the latest version of PCMark 10. We are using the standard benchmark and not the express or the extended. The latter of which utilizes GPU performance metrics that aren’t relevant to what we are looking at today.

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Unfortunately, for whatever reason the PCMark 10 test would not complete on our MSI MPG Z490 and Intel Core i9-10900K test system. Sadly, these launch reviews leave us very little time to troubleshoot individual benchmarks. However, in the interest of full disclosure, we wanted to document our issue with this test. More interestingly, this is something that only effected my test system and not Brent’s.

Geekbench 5

Geekbench 5.1.1 was used for this test. It is a multi-platform test that is comparable across different CPU architectures.

Single Core

Intel Core i9-10900K Geekbench Single-Core Score

Testing single core performance oddly, while overclocked to 5.1GHz, the 10900K was actually slower. This is due to the fact that the 10900K actually boosts higher than that when running a test like this. As a result, an all-core overclock of 5.1GHz, actually hurt performance. However, the 10900K is faster than both the 9900K and AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900X.

Multi-Core Score

Intel Core i9-10900K Geekbench Multi-Core Score

In this test, it’s unsurprising that the overclocked Intel Core i9-10900K was faster than the same CPU at stock clocks was. However, I actually expected AMD’s Ryzen 9 3900X to achieve a better score here. Interestingly, the difference between the 10900K and the 9900K is massive. I’m uncertain what changes would have had such an impact on this test.

AIDA64 CPU Queen

The CPU Queen test tests branch prediction penalties for a given CPU architecture. It tends to favor shorter pipelines as a result of this.

Intel Core i9-10900K Aida64 CPU Queen

As we can see, this test heavily favors Intel’s 10th generation Core architecture. There are also some decent gains from a manual overclock.

Dan Dobrowolski
Dan has been writing motherboard reviews for the past 15 years, with the first decade or so writing for [H}ard|OCP. Dan brings his depth of knowledge about motherboards and their components to his reviews here at The FPS Review to help you select the best one for your needs.

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