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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Deicidium369 - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
And TSMC is really killing the fabrication front with the inability to ship anything in meaningful numbers - due to a extremely fragile supply chain - other than Apple - everything else in still on some variation of TSMC's 10nm class process - they call "7nm"sadick - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
You are right, but Intel desktop CPUs are manufactured on the 14nm process since 2014!!! Ok, it's 14++++ now, but what an evolution, I'm very impressed ;-)I'm not an AMD fan boy, actually using a i7-9700k!
regsEx - Thursday, January 7, 2021 - link
At least they are much cheaper. 10-core 10850K cost same as 6-core 5600X.Impostors - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
So is apple? Lmfao you thought they were making the chips? TSMC isn't behind on production, they are the production for literally everyone, from PC to mobile.name99 - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
"you could argue that was the right call given the state of the market"Only if you drank your own koolaid about the end of Moore's Law...
Remember a book called _Only the Paranoid Survive_? About how in High Tech there are *constant* upsets and changes, nothing ever stays the same?
Hmm, if only someone at Intel had read that book and though "Gee, this seems to describe an industry very much like the one in which we operate"...
0ldman79 - Saturday, January 9, 2021 - link
Playing it safe would have been fine if they had a product to release afterwards.Thing is they didn't. They got so cocky they screwed up their fabs, reached too far while physics are only getting tougher to overcome.
TSMC made 7nm work, whether it hit their target density and speed goals or not it works. Intel had a goal and rather than back off as needed to release a product they kept fighting to hit an ego check-mark. When 10nm didn't work they should have backed off the density and tried again in order to release a product. Ultimately that's what they had to do but they did it 3 years too late.
WaltC - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
M1 has very little in software and hardware compatibility to recommend it, however. Those are the #1 reasons people buy computer systems--raw performance is merely icing on the cake. AMD blows the M1, and Intel CPUs, away, imo. As it sits today, the M1 is not competitive with AMD (or even Intel, actually) in terms of multithreaded performance desktops & enterprise-level offerings. I very much doubt Apple will be going there--but we shall see...M1 as it sits is a good beginner's start...let's see where it goes from there.Great_Scott - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
The techie rant from the early 2000's is coming to pass, finally.So many programs are either mobile or browser-based that the M1 is going to get a pass on compatibility.
Apple got lucky on the timing, in other words.
name99 - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
Geniuses (and genius companies) make their own timing...Seems kinda bizarre to consider the rise of mobile computing as an exogenous factor when discussing Apple!
Calin - Tuesday, January 5, 2021 - link
Just read an article about Flash no longer being supported... and it was instead replaced by HTML5 and the like...Guess that genius companies really are lucky indeed ;)