Intel Core i5 Comet Lake i5-10600KF BOX

The old horse does not spoil the furrow

The Core i5-10600KF processor is not yet a couple of years old, but there is no free space for awards and medals on its chest for a long time. It belongs to the 10th generation of Intel Core chips that brought Intel back into the big game and closed the gap on AMD Ryzen. A key role in Intel's success was played by military stratagems and the use of enemy weapons against himself. Simply put, Intel turned greed into generosity by raising the performance of Core i5 chips to the same level as Core i7 while cutting prices at the same time. As a result, we got the first ever Core i5 with multithreading, turbo boost and an unlocked multiplier. And it's under $300!

6 + 6 cores up to 4.8GHz

After several generations, the Core i5-10600KF has fallen in price a little and has not lost its relevance at all. It offers customers 6 physical 6 virtual cores with clock speeds from 4.1 to 4.8 GHz and 12 MB of L3 cache. Due to the unlocked frequency multiplier, you can manually raise it a little, but we would not count on serious overclocking. Nevertheless, the processor is made according to the outdated 14-nm process technology from which Intel has already squeezed all the juice. But this is not so important, because compared to the ninth generation, support for Hyper-Threading technology has seriously increased the performance of the processor, allowing it to compete almost on equal terms with the flagship of the previous generation Core i7-9700K.

The rival of the people's Ryzen 5 3600

However, both then at the time of release, and now, when this article is being written, the direct competitor of the Core i5-10600K is the popular Ryzen 5 3600, which also does not lose ground. In terms of raw performance, AMD's brainchild provides a slight edge in resource-intensive programs, while Intel comes out slightly ahead when it comes to gaming. However, the difference rarely exceeds 5%, so when choosing, we would rather pay attention to the price and relevance of the platform. If we compare the tenth and eleventh generation of Core i5 chips (note: both work on the LGA 1200 socket), the newer Core i5-11600K has an overclocking frequency of up to 4.9 GHz, but the price is just a little higher.