Intel Core i9-10900K vs i9-10980XE (2024)

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4,959 User Benchmarks

Best Bench: 96% Base clock 3 GHz, turbo 4.85 GHz (avg)
Worst Bench: 74% Base clock 3 GHz, turbo 1.2 GHz (avg)

Poor: 74%Great: 96%

SPEED RANK: 87th / 1464

While it's good for Intel to cut the prices of top end i9-x980XE in half (from $1979 to $979), it was unfortunately positioned in an awkward position against the competing AMD Ryzen 9 3950X and Threadripper 3960X. This CPU offer better value than the preceding i9-9980XE while offering nearly similar performance as the preceding ones but would prefer paying less for Ryzen 9 3950X, Threadripper 2950X or more for mighty Threadripper 3960X instead. ^{[Dec '19ColdSpy]}

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Intel’s Comet Lake flagship, the i9-10900K, is the fastest gaming and desktop CPU currently available. This ten-core hyperthreaded processor can easily be overclocked so that all twenty threads run at an eye-watering 5.2 GHz. Whilst its stellar performance is second to none, it comes with a premium price tag of $488 USD. The 10900K also requires a new (Z490) LGA1200 motherboard, which Intel has indicated will remain compatible with Rocket Lake CPUs which are due later this year. Whilst AMD’s competing $420 USD Ryzen 3900X and $675 USD Ryzen 3950X do have a greater number of cores, their lower clock speeds and higher memory latency handicap them in non-rendering use cases. Overall, the 10900K has a 16% effective speed advantage over both the 3900X and 3950X. Users that do a lot of rendering should investigate dedicated hardware encoders such as NVENC and Quick Sync as these are far more efficient than CPU based rendering. Comparing the 10900K and 10700K shows that, when paired with a 2060S, the 10700K offers comparable gaming performance for 20% less money.^{[Jun '20CPUPro]}

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