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: Gears Tactics
Remembering the original Gears of War brings back a number of memories – some good, and some involving online gameplay. The latest iteration of the franchise was launched as I was putting this benchmark suite together, and Gears Tactics is a high-fidelity turn-based strategy game with an extensive single player mode. As with a lot of turn-based games, there is ample opportunity to crank up the visual effects, and here the developers have put a lot of effort into creating effects, a number of which seem to be CPU limited.
Gears Tactics has an in-game benchmark, roughly 2.5 minutes of AI gameplay starting from the same position but using a random seed for actions. Much like the racing games, this usually leads to some variation in the run-to-run data, so for this benchmark we are taking the geometric mean of the results. One of the biggest things that Gears Tactics can do is on the resolution scaling, supporting 8K, and so we are testing the following settings:
- 720p Low, 4K Low, 8K Low, 1080p Ultra
For results, the game showcases a mountain of data when the benchmark is finished, such as how much the benchmark was CPU limited and where, however none of that is ever exported into a file we can use. It’s just a screenshot which we have to read manually.
If anyone from the Gears Tactics team 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 benchmarks, we do as many runs until 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination has passed. For this benchmark, we manually read each of the screenshots for each quality/setting/run combination. The benchmark does also give 95th percentiles and frame averages, so we can use both of these data points.
| 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.