i7-9700k

Walden Systems Geeks Corner i7-9700k review benchmarks, comparison Rutherford NJ New Jersey NYC New York North Bergen County
In a single-core computer, you’ll immediately notice when the CPU is being used completely by some other process, because the system bogs down. On a multiple-core machine, it’s not uncommon to have a processor-intensive task take up one core and it not impact your other usage at all.

When AMD launched the Ryzen CPU's, it started a core-vs-core showdown that led to the need for this CPU. The Core i7 9700K has eight-cores, doubling that of the Skylake i7 6700K, although holds fast at the same eight threads. Despite doubling the actual processing silicon within the die itself Intel has left Hyper-Threading out, tacking it onto the i9 9900K's specs list instead.

With theCore i7-9700K, we get 8 cores and 8 threads. The chip features 12 MB of L3 cache. It has lower threads than the Core i7-8700K but comes with higher core count. That along with the higher clock speeds will definitely help reduce the difference between the higher threaded model and the new part. In terms of clock speeds, the chip has a base clock of 3.6 GHz and boosts up to 4.9 GHz in single, 4.8 GHz in dual-core, 4.7 GHz in four core and 4.6 GHz in 6/8 core operations. The TDP the same 95W.


When it comes to performance, it meets expectations. The Core i7-9700K is the fastest Core i7 chip in both single and multi-core performance benchmarks. When compared to AMD's Ryzen, the chip faster in single core performance. Rven with a lower thread count, it manages to outperform the Core i7-8700K and manages to close the gap with the Ryzen 7 2700X in some rendering workloads except Cinebench R15 and wPRIME. This is understandable since the Ryzen has 8 more threads.

When it comes to gaming Intel CPUs and their Core i7 again dominates the charts with the best in class performance. In all games tested which include Battlefield 1, Rise of the Tomb Raider, DOOM, Far Cry 5, Resident Evil 7 and Total War: Warhammer 2, the Core i7-9700K easily outclassed all other CPUs.

So is it Hyper-Threading or two extra cores that makes the most difference to gaming performance? Unsurprisingly, more cores equals more performance. There’s just no substitution for stuffing even more processing power onto a chip. There is a caveat, performance gains aren't that dramatic. During gaming benchmarks across Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, Total War: Warhammer 2, Far Cry 5, and Civilization VI, the i7 9700K tops the i7 8700K’s six cores by only a couple of frames per second. All in all that accounts to a roughly 4% increase in overall performance across compared to the i7 8700K.