Intel 10th Gen i5-10600K & i9-10900K Review

How Much Does it Cost?

Both the Intel Core i5-10600K and the Intel Core i9-10900K launch today and should be hitting retailers right now. Of course, with COVID lockdown stuff, it may be a bit more erratic than your typical launch, but early suggestions are that stock is plentiful. You can expect to pay around £637.98 for the i9-10900K and £274.99 for the i5-10600K. That’s a big price difference, but they’re very different CPUs at the end of the day.

Regardless, the 3950X Ryzen 9 is about £50 more expensive than the new i9, but then again the 3900X is about £200 cheaper, and they’re all very good high-end options, as are the current/previous 9900K options.

Overview

Let’s get the easy one out of the way first, with the Intel Core i5-10600K. It’s a perfectly competent CPU, the price is good, and the single core clock speeds are appealing too. However, it’s also not particularly exciting. It’s in a sea of competitive CPUs at that price range, and it may sink or swim still. However, I don’t think it’ll be the one many consumers focus on right now.

The Intel Core i9-9900K was a big hit for Intel when it launched. I reviewed it and I was impressed with the raw performance. Albeit, I wasn’t impressed with the extreme temperatures and power usage. Intel has been on the back foot ever since, with AMD gaining ground on them and even beating them in quite a few key areas.

Cores

The 10900K feels a like everything the 9900K should have been, and honestly, that’s no bad thing. It has more cores, each core is faster than before, clock speeds are improved, and still the temperatures are much lower than before despite all these advancements. It’s everything we hope to see in a CPU launch.

Gaming & Beyond

There’s no beating around the bush, Intel is king again when it comes to gaming. It wasn’t even close, with Intel pulling a clear and confident lead over their previous generations, as well as their AMD rivals. For the enthusiast gaming market, the 10900K is clearly the one to get. However, while it lacked the processing grunt of its big brother, the i5 10600K also delivered some killer gaming performance too.

For rendering and other core-intensive tasks, these new CPUs do have a big advantage over the predecessors. However, per-core performance and price is AMD’s party trick and the AMD Ryzen 9 3950X may still be a bigger draw for those running heavy workloads instead of playing games. That being said, the new Intel offers are no slouch, do don’t feel you’ll be left waiting much longer on those rendering timers.

Should I Buy One?

The new Intel CPUs launched alongside their new Z490 motherboard series. We’ve tested a LOT of boards today, and you can check out there reviews here. The only thing we didn’t get with these CPUs in PCIe Gen 4, albeit pretty much all of the motherboards are ready for it when the Rock Lake CPUs launch. Honestly though, short of SSDs and a few AMD GPUs, there’s not a huge range of Gen 4 hardware anyway, so that’s really down to the consumer to choose.

The CPUs are more expensive than the last gen, but not by a huge amount (launch vs launch price) but they are a LOT more CPU too. The i5 is a good middle ground, but I think we can all admit, we’re pleasantly surprised by the temperature and thermal gains of both of them.