Equally expected, Intel officially announced their new 9th-gen Core processors this week along with the Z390 chipset. Nosotros wrote all about information technology here with some brief commentary on what to expect because the embargo for benchmarks and full reviews is not lifted until October nineteen.

Although we're technically non spring by this equally we didn't sign an NDA to become our sample, for a number of reasons we are going to wait, out of professionalism and respect for other reviewers who will be sinking days upon days of work into their day-one review.

Nonetheless, when PCGamesN published early Core i9-9900K results today we were a little surprised. The title read "Intel'south Core i9 9900K is up to 50% faster than AMD'southward Ryzen 7 2700X in games," sounded bogus to me, but I read on...

"Intel has now officially announced its new Core i9 9900K processor, proclaiming it as the "globe'due south best gaming processor." It's non just some marketing bluster either… well, non entirely. Intel has deputed Principled Technologies to do a benchmarking sesh on its newest ninth Gen chips, and their competition, across 19 of the most popular PC games."

So Intel can become and publish their own "testing" done suspiciously through a third party ten days before reviews, while reviewers are prohibited from refuting the claims due to the NDA. First bad sign.

Scrolling downwards PCGamesN says the following when looking over Intel's commissioned benchmarks...

"But the real indicate of all this is for Intel to exist able to agree out the 9900K as easily down the best gaming processor compared with the AMD contest, and in that it seems to have excelled. On some games, such equally Civ vi and PUBG, the operation delta isn't necessarily that great, merely for the most part you're looking at betwixt 30 and fifty% higher frame rates from the 9900K versus the 2700X."

Right away many of the results looked very suspect to me, having spent countless hours benchmarking both the 2700X and 8700K, I accept a good idea of how they compare in a broad range of titles and these results looked very off. Having spotted a few dodgy looking results my next idea was, why is PCGamesN publishing this misleading data and why aren't they not fierce the paid benchmark study apart? Do they simply non know improve?

Over at the Principled Technologies website you tin observe the full report which states how they tested and the hardware used. Official memory speeds were used which isn't a peculiarly big deal, though they have gone out of their way to handicap Ryzen, or at the very least expose its weaknesses.

Ryzen doesn't perform that well with fully populated memory DIMMs, two modules is optimal. However timings are as well important and they used Corsair Vengeance retentivity without loading the extreme memory profile or XMP setting, instead they simply set the memory frequency to 2933 and left the ridiculously loose default memory timings in identify. These loose timings ensure compatibility so systems will boot upwardly, merely after that point you lot need to enable the retentiveness profile. It's misleading to conduct benchmarks without executing this crucial pace.

Still, it would almost be off-white if they had washed the same for Intel, only they didn't. For all Intel platforms they first set up the retentivity to XMP and so adjusted the frequency manually, handling Intel a significant performance reward, especially for games.

The next step in their manipulation of the results was to but test at 1080p with a GTX 1080 Ti using quality presets that were a step or two downwards from the maximum level. In many cases this simulates the kind of performance we see when testing at 720p using ultra quality presets. Of course, we also test at 1080p and 1440p as well to give readers the full picture.

1 of the worst results picked by PCGamesN to evidence was from Ashes of the Singularity. Let's ignore the 9900K for now since I tin't show you those results, instead let's focus on the 8700K and 2700X. Here the 8700K was 29% faster than the 2700X, that'due south a much bigger margin than I would await to find. Principled Technologies are using the congenital-in benchmark, the CPU focused criterion with the game running in the DirectX 12 mode with the high quality preset.

Then, I installed 2 Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR4-3200 modules, loaded the XMP contour on both the AMD and Intel platforms and ran the tests using the exact same settings. I also re-ran the tests with the XMP memory timings just at the official retentiveness speeds for each CPU. I'm simply going to betrayal three of the game results, I didn't feel the need to spend more than time on this test afterward a couple of hours was enough to brand a betoken...

Hither are the results for Ashes of the Singularity, let'south talk near them. Compared to the paid results produced by Principled Technologies using the stock memory my 2700X was 18% faster, that'south a shocking outcome already.

The 8700K, on the other hand, was 4% slower and this meant compared to the 2700X it was 4% faster and up to 9% faster with the higher clocked memory. That still is null like the 29% performance reward Intel enjoyed in the paid testing.

Next I looked at Far Weep 5 and hither the modify wasn't quite every bit extreme for the 2700X, it was just 3% faster in my test and x% faster with 3200 spec memory. However the 8700K was slower again, 7% slower with the 2666 retentivity that Principled Technologies used. Even with 3200 memory I couldn't friction match their outcome.

This means while they claim the 8700K is 26% faster in Far Cry 5, in reality it'due south more similar 14% or 12% with 3200 retention, still a clear win for Intel but not virtually every bit extreme every bit the Principled Technologies benchmarks would atomic number 82 you to believe.

The last set of results that I looked into were for Assassin's Creed: Origins and again they used the congenital-in benchmark with the tertiary highest quality preset at 1080p with a GTX 1080 Ti. Here the 8700K was 36% faster according to Principled Technologies when in reality it'due south more like eight% with stock memory speeds and 10% with overclocked memory.

So it's quite obvious that the Principled Technologies results are a load of rubbish and no one should exist reproducing them. Of course, the focus here for Intel was to highlight how dandy the Core i9-9900K is and unfortunately right now I tin can't show the real results for that CPU. Needless to say though, it won't be 50% faster than the 2700X in games.

The 9900K will be faster than the 2700X for gaming, no dubiousness about it, but it's also going to price twice as much one time you cistron in the motherboard price. On average nosotros found when using tuned retentiveness for both the 2700X and 8700K, the Intel CPU was ~9% faster at 1080p using a GTX 1080 Ti. Realistically, we're expecting the 9900K to be a few percentage faster when compared to the 8700K, at least in games as most titles aren't coming close to tapping out the 6-core/12-thread processor.

I don't have too much of an event with Intel commissioning the report itself, and the Principled Technologies report is very transparent as they conspicuously state how they tested the games and configured the hardware. The results and testing methods are heavily biased, but they oasis't attempted to hide their dodgy methods. You tin dig into the specs and find all the details, it'due south still dodgy but information technology's a paid study, so it'south somewhat expected.

The misleading benchmarks from Nvidia regarding their GeForce twenty serial launch was pretty bad, this though is on some other level and I seriously hope we don't see these results published anywhere else with the intention of promoting the 9900K. Intel is under pressure, we go that, but ultimately this kind of movement is making the visitor a disservice.

We expect more on this subject to popular up in the coming days and it goes without proverb, delight wait for our independent i9-9900K review and the reviews of other trusted media outlets to go far late next week. Tomorrow we also expect to follow upward with our thoughts on the new unlocked 28-cadre Xeon workstation CPU and Intel Core X-series processors, see where those stand against Threadripper.