[The Exiled]

The Intel Comet Lake Core i9-10900K, i7-10700K, i5-10500K CPU Review: Skylake We Go Again

Intel has pushed Comet Lake and its 14nm process to new heights, and in many cases, achieving top results in a lot of our benchmarks, at the expense of power. There’s something to be said for having the best gaming CPU on the market, something which Intel seems to have readily achieved here when considering gaming in isolation, though now Intel has to deal with the messaging around the power consumption, similar how AMD had to do in the Vishera days. The one issue that Intel won’t escape from is that all this extra power requires extra money to be put into cooling the chip. While the Core i9 processor is around the same price as the Ryzen 9 3900X, the AMD processor comes with a 125 W cooler which will do the job – Intel customers will have to go forth and source expensive cooling in order to keep this cool. Speaking with a colleague, he had issues cooling his 10900K test chip with a Corsair H115i, indicating that users should look to spending $150+ on a cooling setup. That’s going to be a critical balancing element here when it comes to recommendations.