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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zodiacfml - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
While it is true that AMD's current available Ryzen mobile at 7nm is superior to the M1 at 5nm, you have to consider that M1 is Apple's entry level. Things will get more interesting once AMD gets into 5nm and Apple releases bigger M1Alistair - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
That is not true at all. Everything works on the M1, I have an M1 Mac Mini and a PC and have no problems. The issue is Apple's lack of expansion and lack of GPU performance. Games for example that are not on the Mac, not because of M1's performance (which is excellent) but because of M1's lack of GPU performance vs a basic video card, and the lack of the basic GPU expansion options. Also Mac OS sucks compared to Windows imo, but the Mac Mini hardware and M1 CPU performance are A+. Hopefully Apple doubles the GPU options and performance quickly.Meteor2 - Thursday, January 7, 2021 - link
Yes, I thought that a very strange statement too. Rosetta2 exists and it works.JayNor - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
compared to the competition that can't respond to the WFH and educational demand?Qasar - Tuesday, January 5, 2021 - link
still better then a company that fell asleep, and stagnated the cpu industry. intels lack of innovation, and reliance on its process tech, is what has caused intel to be in the position it is now in.powerarmour - Tuesday, January 5, 2021 - link
Can you actually buy an Intel motherboard at the moment?, shortages are very apparent there too.regsEx - Thursday, January 7, 2021 - link
Apple doesn't have any high performance CPU.JessNarmo - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
420mm AIO with bare die liquid metal here we come!But jokes aside good 360 AIO with liquid metal should keep it quite easily under 80C at all times.
Anytime you see significant temperatures liquid metal helps disproportionately more, because it's thermal conductivity grows with temperature unlike thermal pastes. It drops 20C from 80C on paste and 30C from 100C on paste.
Still I'd rather wait for 5900x
Deicidium369 - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
Did you see the cooler?http://thermalright.com/product/true-copper/
passive design
lopri - Monday, January 4, 2021 - link
I have been looking for that cooler. Does anyone know where to find one?