Intel Core i9-10900K & i5-10600K Review: Comet Lake-S Benchmarks

by Marco Chiappetta — Wednesday, May 20, 2020, 09:00 AM EDT

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Intel Core i9-10900K And i5-10600K Review: Audio, Video, And 3D Rendering

In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular use case for many end users, to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME is an open-source MP3 audio encoder that is used widely around the world in a multitude of third party applications.

LAME MT

Audio Conversion and Encoding

In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file and converted it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT tool in single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.

This test will only whack one or two threads at a time, and the processors will rarely boost all the way to their maximum frequencies with this workload. As a result, we see the Core i9-10900K and Core i5-10600K finishing in a dead heat, near the top of the charts.

X265 Benchmark

Video Encoding Test

The multi-threaded HWBOT x265 Benchmark is based on the open source x265 encoder that leverages modern CPU instructions to speed video encoding. We tested the CPUs represented here with the 64-bit encoder using the default 1080p workload.

In this video encoding test, once again we see the 10-core Core i9-10900K nearly catching the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X, and clearly outpacing the Core i9-9900KS. The Core i5-10600K also performs well, and represents a huge upgrade over the 9th Gen Core i5.

Y-Cruncher

MT Pi Calculator

Y-Cruncher is a multi-core-capable tool that calculates the value of pi to a specified number of digits. In this case, we ran the tool on all threads and had the application calculate the value of pi to 1 billion digits. The values below are the time required to perform the calculation expressed in seconds. As a result, lower values indicate better performance.

The Core i9-10900K just barely edged out the Core i9-9900KS here, though once again we see the Core i6-10600K significantly outpacing its predecessor.

Cinebench

3D Rendering Benchmark

Cinebench rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and can utilize any number of threads, which make is an excellent gauge of computational throughput. This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders and animates 3D scenes and tracks the length of the entire process. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graphs below.

The performance trend we've seen through much of this article continued with Cinebench. Here, the Core i9-10900K offered single-thread performance in-line with the best of them, and a multi-threaded score that lands just a notch behind the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X. The Core i5-10600K lands just behind the 8-core Ryzen 7 2700X.

POV-Ray Performance

Ray Tracing Benchmark

POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

povray intel 10th gen

POV-Ray tells essentially the same story as Cinebench, for the most part at least. In this application, the Core i9-10900K pulls ahead of the Ryzen 9 3900X, but there's no catching the higher-end processors.

Blender

3D Rendering Benchmark

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. It has a built-in benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model. We used a CPU-focused BMW model for these tests here...

Once again we see a similar performance trend. In the Blender benchmark, the Core i9-10900K finishes just behind the Ryzen 9 3900X and the Core i6-10600K absolutely crushes the previous-gen Core i5.

STARS Euler3d

Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

This benchmark is multi-threaded, but is also dependent on platform bandwidth, and cache and memory latency, so the final results are not determined by compute performance alone. Cache sizes and memory bandwidth affect the score as well...

We know, we're being very repetitive, but the numbers are what they are. The same performance trend we've seen throughout this review played out again in the Fluid Dynamics benchmark, though the Core i5-10600K was also able to overtake the 8-core Ryzen 7 2700X here.