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: Borderlands 3
As a big Borderlands fan, having to sit and wait six months for the EPIC Store exclusive to expire before we saw it on Steam felt like a long time to wait. The fourth title of the franchise, if you exclude the TellTale style-games, BL3 expands the universe beyond Pandora and its orbit, with the set of heroes (plus those from previous games) now cruising the galaxy looking for vaults and the treasures within. Popular Characters like Tiny Tina, Claptrap, Lilith, Dr. Zed, Zer0, Tannis, and others all make appearances as the game continues its cel-shaded design but with the graphical fidelity turned up. Borderlands 1 gave me my first ever taste of proper in-game second order PhysX, and it’s a high standard that continues to this day.
BL3 works best with online access, so it is filed under our online games section. BL3 is also one of our biggest downloads, requiring 100+ GB. As BL3 supports resolution scaling, we are using the following settings:
- 360p Very Low, 1440p Very Low, 4K Very Low, 1080p Badass
BL3 has its own in-game benchmark, which recreates a set of on-rails scenes with a variety of activity going on in each, such as shootouts, explosions, and wildlife. The benchmark outputs its own results files, including frame times, which can be parsed for our averages/percentile data.
| 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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dwillmore - Wednesday, January 6, 2021 - link
FWIW, your y-cruncher link goes to a file on your C drive: file:///C:/Users/admin/AppData/Roaming/Microsoft/Word/www.numberworld.org/y-cruncherShowtime - Friday, January 8, 2021 - link
What cooler was used for this review?hellocopter - Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - link
Who in their right mind would buy anything Intel over AMD? Things are getting rather embarrassing for Intel..sonicmerlin - Sunday, January 17, 2021 - link
I bought a I5-2500k for $200 back in the day when it was top of the line... when did CPUs become so expensive...?FluxApex - Monday, March 8, 2021 - link
I have an i9-10850k and have yet to see my temps go above 79c stock clock, 85c overclocked to 5.0ghz all cores. This is with a cheap $80 deepcool captain aio. My Cryorig R1 maintains lower temps than this but has more noise due to being a heat pipe air cooler.Thorough review, but I have a problem with the CPU cooler they are using. Thermalright's website even says it is meant for an i7 CPU. The Thermalright True Copper is not meant for this TDP. Also, the cooler has been documented on several occasions to have improper machining on the base.
They need to use a proper cooler, just do a quick youtube search of all the overclocking videos for the i9-10850k and none will have temps near this.
Quartz11 - Tuesday, March 23, 2021 - link
Is that 5nm “speed shift” difference, down from the 16nm of 10900K, relevant/noticeable for intensive home office type use? That graph seems to be excluded from any further discussion, and in fact 10900K is still recommended over 10850K if price is similar enough in the conclusion.In my case, the price difference is very small, and I was going to get the 10900K variant. But that Frequency Ramp graph is causing some doubts.