Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first made sure all firmwares were up to date, then we entered each system's respective BIOS /
UEFI and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance" defaults. We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory frequency to the maximum officially supported speed for the given platform (without overclocking). The
SSDs were then formatted, and the latest build of Windows 10 Pro x64 was installed and fully updated.
When the Windows installation was complete, we installed all of the drivers necessary for our components, disabled Auto-Updating and Windows Defender, and installed all of our benchmarking software. When that process was done, we performed a disk clean-up, cleared any temp and prefetch data, and optimized all of the SSDs using Windows' built-in utility. Finally, we enabled Windows Focus Assist to minimize any potential interruptions and let the systems reach an idle state before invoking a test.
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| HotHardware's Test Systems |
| Intel and AMD - Head To Head |
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| Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2020 |
| Synthetic Benchmarks |
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We began our testing with the latest version of SiSoftware's SANDRA 2020, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in sub-system tests that partially comprise the suite with the Core i9-10900K and Core i5-10600K (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cache and Memory, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the CPUs running at their default settings, with 16GB of DDR4 RAM running at 2,933MHz on the Core i9 and 2,666MHz with the Core i5, in dual-channel mode, on the Asus Z490 Maximus XII Hero WiFi motherboard.
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Geekbench |
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Synthetic CPU Testing |
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In the GeekBench tests, we're stressing only the CPU cores in a system (not the graphics card or GPU), with both single and multi-threaded workloads. The tests are comprised of encryption processing, image compression, HTML5 parsing, physics calculations and other general purpose compute processing workloads.
The
Core i9-10900K puts up the best single-threaded performance of the bunch and the Core i5-10600K hangs with the best AMD has to offer in the single-threaded test as well. In the multi-threaded test though, the Core i9-10900K can't quite make up for its 2-core deficit versus the Ryzen 9 3900X, but it doesn't finish too far behind. The Core i5-10600K nearly catches the 8-core Ryzen 7 2700X, but dominates the previous-gen 9600K.
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| PCMark 10 |
| System Level Benchmark |
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Next, up we have some full-system testing with
PCMark. We're reporting all test results from the PCMark 10 benchmark suite, including the Essentials, Productivity, Digital Content Creation and and total PCMark score. The Essentials test covers workloads like web browsing, video conferencing and app start-up times, while Productivity tests everyday office apps from spreadsheets to word processing. Finally, the Digital Content Creation test evaluates performance of a machine with respect to photo and video editing, as well as rendering and visualization.
The Core i9-10900K and Core i5-10600K put up some strong numbers in PCMark 10. The 10900K led the pack overall, and the Core i5-10600K landed just a notch behind the Ryzen 9 3950X, but ahead of the 9900K, thanks to a particularly strong Productivity score.
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| Speedometer 2.0 |
| Web App Performance Testing |
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Next up, we have some numbers from the Speedometer 2.0 test available at browserbench.org. The Speedometer Benchmark Suite uses a wide array of latency and throughput benchmarks to evaluate web application performance, and all of the results are tabulated into a final score. The benchmark measures performance of an array of browser-based technologies used on modern, rich web applications. Scores in this benchmark are an indicator of the performance users would see when browsing and running advanced web apps.
All of the systems were tested using the latest version of Microsoft's
Edge browser, with default browser settings, on a clean install of Windows 10 Professional x64.
The fastest of the processors here are all tightly grouped, with the Core i9-10900K scoring a second place finish, missing the mark set by the
Ryzen 9 3950X by the slimmest of margins. The Core i5-10600K once again blows past its previous-gen cousin and it ultimately lands right about on-par with the Core i9-9900K.
