Intel Core i9 Comet Lake i9-10900F BOX

Give HEDT processors to the masses!

Intel has long pretended that the mass market didn't need more than four cores. Say, more is already any pro-level for all sorts of renders. Then AMD came on the scene and started shooting inexpensive six- and then eight-core chips. And what do we see now? In the spring of 2020, Intel releases a 20-thread flagship Core i9 with a maximum clock speed of 5.2 GHz, which after just six months can be bought for a very limited $500. Against the backdrop of the usual Core i9 price tags and damn expensive graphics cards that NVIDIA has dotted everything around, this pricing policy will delight enthusiasts.

hello from the past

Like all other chips in the Comet Lake family, the Intel Core i9-10900 is built on the Skylake microarchitecture and is made using the 14nm process technology. And this is his Achilles heel. The fact is that with the Core i3 and Core i5, the “blues” have room for manoeuvre: you can add cores, increase frequencies, unlock the multiplier, or tighten Hyper-threading. But the higher you climb, the closer the ceiling. This was evident even in the Core i9-9900, which, being an enthusiast processor, was not particularly friendly with overclocking.

Enthusiast CPU who doesn't like overclocking

A year later, not noticing the elephant in the room is even harder. At idle, the Core i9-10900 consumes about 55 watts, with a moderate load this figure can rise to 280 watts and even higher if you decide to squeeze more than 5 GHz across all cores. Therefore, in order to disguise his hot and voracious nature, he will greatly reset the frequencies of some cores. As you can see, jokes about smart batteries from Intel and the first processor assembled in hell are not such jokes. It is not surprising that models with the F index and a locked multiplier are in great demand, for which it is not necessary to assemble an externally powered laboratory of Dr. Terrible and cooled with liquid nitrogen. A high-quality tower cooler will suffice. If this option suits you, then for the amount of around $500 you will get a serious competitor for the Ryzen 9 3900X, which clicks like seeds on any complex computing tasks.