Intel Core i9-10850K Review: The Real Intel Flagship
by Dr. Ian Cutress on January 4, 2021 9:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core
- Z490
- 10th Gen Core
- Comet Lake
- LGA1200
- i9-10850K
Gaming Tests: Far Cry 5
The fifth title in Ubisoft's Far Cry series lands us right into the unwelcoming arms of an armed militant cult in Montana, one of the many middles-of-nowhere in the United States. With a charismatic and enigmatic adversary, gorgeous landscapes of the northwestern American flavor, and lots of violence, it is classic Far Cry fare. Graphically intensive in an open-world environment, the game mixes in action and exploration with a lot of configurability.
Unfortunately, the game doesn’t like us changing the resolution in the results file when using certain monitors, resorting to 1080p but keeping the quality settings. But resolution scaling does work, so we decided to fix the resolution at 1080p and use a variety of different scaling factors to give the following:
- 720p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1440p Max.
Far Cry 5 outputs a results file here, but that the file is a HTML file, which showcases a graph of the FPS detected. At no point in the HTML file does it contain the frame times for each frame, but it does show the frames per second, as a value once per second in the graph. The graph in HTML form is a series of (x,y) co-ordinates scaled to the min/max of the graph, rather than the raw (second, FPS) data, and so using regex I carefully tease out the values of the graph, convert them into a (second, FPS) format, and take our values of averages and percentiles that way.
If anyone from Ubisoft wants to chat about building a benchmark platform that would not only help me but also every other member of the tech press build our benchmark testing platform to help our readers decide what is the best hardware to use on your games, please reach out to ian@anandtech.com. Some of the suggestions I want to give you will take less than half a day and it’s easily free advertising to use the benchmark over the next couple of years (or more).
As with the other gaming tests, we run each resolution/setting combination for a minimum of 10 minutes and take the relevant frame data for averages and percentiles.
| AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
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Oxford Guy - Thursday, January 7, 2021 - link
Anarfox? Your reply was in response to my post.Dug - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
It's just like saying very few users download video card drivers and just use what's built into Windows. So that's how were going to test. Really?No. Very few users will buy a 10850-K because it's an enthusiasts chip meant to be overclocked. So if you are reviewing an enthusiasts chip, maybe you should benchmark it like someone that knows what they bought.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, January 7, 2021 - link
"It's just like saying very few users download video card drivers and just use what's built into Windows. So that's how were going to test. Really?"Good point.
eastcoast_pete - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
About that line on IBM's z-Series processors: I thought about that, but decided against getting one of those. The design of the z-series clashes with the design of my furniture, and the price with the size of my bank account (:boozed - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
So, what you're saying is that I should buy a Ryzen 5000?lucasdclopes - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
Is the TRUE Copper still a good cooler? How does it compares to today offerings? I mean, yeah, it is 2Kg of copper, bug there is also more than 10 years of evolution in cooler design.I'm asking because, holy shit, those temperatures are terrible.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, January 7, 2021 - link
"there is also more than 10 years of evolution in cooler design"Can't overcome the laws of physics.
lucasdclopes - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
"With the Ryzen 7 5800X, there’s no worrying about excessive power or thermals, which in of itself is perhaps peace of mind.On performance against AMD, the 5800X wins on single threaded loads by 15-20% and encoding, while the 10850K wins on rendering multithreaded workloads like Blender by up to 10%. "
Oh my god it is amazing how the tables have turned so fast.
Intel is the hotter, power hungrier, with slower but more cores at the same price point now.
Oxford Guy - Thursday, January 7, 2021 - link
Unless the power consumption is equivalent it's not a win.29a - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
"So why test it at all? Firstly, because we need an AI benchmark, and a bad one is still better than not having one at all."I can't disagree with this statement enough, bad data is worse than no data.