Test Setup
For testing, we used the latest Intel 10th Gen CPUs which were sent to us by Intel. The Intel 10th Gen Comet Lake family comes with a higher core count on the mainstream platform but prices are close to the predecessors in the same segment. We were also sent three Z490 motherboards from ASUS, ASRock, and Gigabyte which will be featured in this review.
Intel 10th Gen Comet Lake Test Setup:
| Processors | Intel Core i9-10900K (Retail Chip) Intel Core i7-10700K (ES Chip) Intel Core i5-10600K (Retail Chip) Intel Core i9-10980XE Intel Core i9-9900KS Intel Core i9-9900K Intel Core i7-8700K Intel Core i5-8600K AMD Ryzen 9 3950X AMD Ryzen 9 3900X AMD Ryzen 7 3700X AMD Ryzen 5 3600X AMD Ryzen 7 2700X |
|---|---|
| Motherboard | ASUS ROG Maximus XII HERO WIFI (Intel 10th Gen) ASRock Z490 Taichi (Intel 10th Gen) Gigabyte Z490 Vision G (Intel 10th Gen) MSI X299 Creator (Intel 10th Gen X Series) Z390 AORUS Master (Intel 8th/9th Gen) MSI MEG X570 Unify (AMD Ryzen 3000) ASRock X470 Taichi Ultimate (AMD Ryzen 2000) |
| Power Supply | ASUS ROG THOR 1200W |
| Solid State Drive | Samsung SSD 960 EVO M.2 (512 GB) |
| Memory | G.SKILL Trident Z RGB Series 32 GB (4 x 8GB) CL16 3600 MHz |
| Video Cards | MSI GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Lightning Z |
| Cooling Solutions | ASUS ROG Ryujin 240 |
| OS | Windows 10 64-bit |
Our test rig includes the Samsung 960 EVO 512 GB SSD that boots up our main OS while a 2 TB Seagate HDD is used for demonstration purposes for the Intel Optane memory. In addition to these, we are running an MSI GeForce GTX 2080 Ti Lightning Z graphics card, an ASUS ROG Thor 1200W power supply and 16 GB of G.Skill provided Trident Z Royal series memory which runs with a clock speed of DDR4-4000 MHz. For cooling, we used the ASUS Ryujin 240.
We won't be focusing on Intel 14m architecture in this review since it is entirely the same chip as Skylake along with minor improvements. The Skylake / Kaby Lake architecture analysis can be seen in detail here. For overclocking, I made the following tweaks to the CPUs on the respective boards:
Intel Core i9-10900K 10 Core CPU:
- ASUS ROG Maximus XII HERO: 52 x 100 at 1.37V
- ASRock Z490 Taichi: 52 x 100 at 1.37V
- Gigabyte Z490 Vision G: 52 x 100 at 1.37V
Intel Core i7-10700K 8 Core CPU:
- ASUS ROG Maximus XII HERO: 52 x 100 at 1.35V
- ASRock Z490 Taichi: 52 x 100 at 1.35V
- Gigabyte Z490 Vision G: 52 x 100 at 1.35V
Intel Core i5-10600K 6 Core CPU:
- ASUS ROG Maximus XII HERO: 52 x 100 at 1.22V
- ASRock Z490 Taichi: 52 x 100 at 1.22V
- Gigabyte Z490 Vision G: 52 x 100 at 1.22V
Contents
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About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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