Intel's i9-9900K Is Only 12% Faster than AMD's 2700X at Gaming, but 66% Pricier

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Principled Technologies has published a revised report comparing the performance of the Core i9-9900K processor with various competitors, and according to TechPowerUp, Intel’s latest and greatest only offers a marginal improvement compared to the Ryzen 2700X despite being priced much higher. “The bottom-line of PT's new data is this: the Core i9-9900K is roughly 12 percent faster than the Ryzen 7 2700X at gaming, while being a whopping 66% pricier ($319 vs. $530 average online prices).”

While Principled Technologies corrected half its rookie mistakes by running the 2700X in the default "Creator Mode" that enables all 8 cores, it didn't correct the sub-optimal memory. Despite this, the data shows gaming-performance percentage differences between the i9-9900K and the 2700X narrow down to single digit or around 12.39 percent on average, seldom crossing 20 percent. This is a significant departure from the earlier testing, which skewed the average on the basis of >40% differences in some games, due to half the cores being effectively disabled on the 2700X.
 
really hope AMD can get it's parity with Intel on the same page in 2019 ... then we wouldn't see these crazy prices.

Simply because, slower and more expensive will put your company out of business overnight
 
dear god, if those 2990WX gaming numbers in creator mode were a flavor, it would be the taste of orange juice and toothpaste mixed together.
 
oldmanbal said:
dear god, if those 2990WX gaming numbers in creator mode were a flavor, it would be the taste of orange juice and toothpaste mixed together.
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Yeah, the 2990wx is a lot of things, but gaming processor is not one of them. I mean you could use it for that, don't get me wrong, but unless you enable gaming mode, use process lasso (or whatever it's called), or something like that, you may not have a great experience.
 
...which is what we expected?

Yes, you're going to pay for that extra 12%+. That's also to be expected, and as alluded to above, you cannot get this performance in an AMD product so Intel is free to price as they wish.
 
Jim Kim said:
Who uses price vs performance as a metric in the first place. /s
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Especially when what you should be comparing is system price, not processor.
If you're going for top-drawer, you're already putting down $1300 for the GPU.
Paying $200 more for the CPU isn't going to bother you.

Besides, people pay $500 for a freakin' case, when a $130 case would do just fine.

Price-performance is for corporate bean counters, and even then, making an employee 12% more productive is easily worth $200 more in system cost. Just do the math: what's 12% of the employee's fully-burdened cost?
 
pcgeekesq said:
Especially when what you should be comparing is system price, not processor.
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And that relative to the goal. What's interesting is that Intel is really just making overclocking a bit easier and stock-clocked performance a bit better, but not really moving the top of the bar; assuming you could get the same clockspeeds out of a 6700k, you see very little improvement in gaming going to six cores with an 8700k or eight cores with this 9900k. Where you do see improvement isn't necessarily that useful.

Instead, what you see- and why I swapped in the 8700k in my system- is that you can get top-end gaming performance and very good multi-threading performance. Now, depending on what you're most interested in, AMD offers essentially the opposite: top-end multi-threading performance and very good multi-threading performance, until you get to this 9900k. Being the best you can get in a consumer socket, and with respect to gaming the best you can get period, can absolutely be worth the marginal increase in system cost.

Of course, reading the popular responses to this thread, one wouldn't think that to be the case, but then those that bought the 8700k and kept it rare for months showed that they don't really listen to what's popular, but what works best for them :).
 
SeymourGore said:
I bet Intel won't be using PT next time.
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7e3abf35f6b2187ee97bb62055be887611de6a1ed137c6387948e6c21da99ca6.jpg
 
This isn't new though, right? Incremental performance at the top end is never on a linear perf/$ line. You want top dog? Pay out the arse.

Yeah, for other people, they'd be much better served with a 2700X, 9700, or a rung down from those. If you give a crap about perf/$. Some don't.
 
SeymourGore said:
I bet Intel won't be using PT next time.
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Why not?

They know that the results will be highly scrutinized, and since they've burned some credibility with misleading results, one could expect PT to actually be pretty solid.

Now, if they do this again, burn 'em, but PT isn't a bad way to do things if they're doing it fairly. And they know that they could be ambushed by GN if they do :D.
 
pcgeekesq said:
Especially when what you should be comparing is system price, not processor.
If you're going for top-drawer, you're already putting down $1300 for the GPU.
Paying $200 more for the CPU isn't going to bother you.
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Oh that's rich. You know, some of us aren't made of money or have a money tree in our back yards. If I can save $200, I'm going to do so; no question about that!
 
pcgeekesq Price-performance is not your thing. Point taken. Most of us take price-performance into consideration but not blindly. Few % moar performance for a signficant load of $ will turn a lot of people off. Intel & Nvidia take this bad habit lately. I would have been [hard] on the 9900k and the 2080ti but the price-perf (or the price-fun) is just too awful for ME. Even though money is not a problem.
 
Why are the x series processors being outperformed significantly by the all the Intel K series they tested? That seems... odd. Is it all down to the higher stock boost clocks?
 
SixFootDuo said:
really hope AMD can get it's parity with Intel on the same page in 2019 ... then we wouldn't see these crazy prices.

Simply because, slower and more expensive will put your company out of business overnight
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No, remember when Athon 64 was better than Pentium 4? AMD went to asking Intel prices. I agree they had to raise their profits, but they were budget before and I believe they priced themselves out of gaining marketshare. Currently though, to be within 12% for a 66% price savings there should be some marketshare to be had if their public perception can be changed to positive (talking about Joe Six-pack here) My brother has always been AMD, and for the most part I have been Intel with a few AMD that just didn't cut the mustard. I now have a 1700X system and a 2200G system and recommend people to buy AMD now while they are good or good enough. AMD does not have the R&D to keep pushing and intel is going to strike back like P4 to Core 2 Duo. Intel may even overshoot again like the 2nd gen I series
 
blurp said:
Few % moar performance for a signficant load of $ will turn a lot of people off. Intel & Nvidia take this bad habit lately.
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But has it turned people off? 2080Ti's can't stay in stock, despite the 'poor' price/performance being the main consensus of criticism among reviewers.

blurp said:
I would have been [hard] on the 9900k and the 2080ti but the price-perf (or the price-fun) is just too awful for ME. Even though money is not a problem.
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Something to consider: the general advice when purchasing computer hardware seems to be 'buy what you need now'. If you don't need the best single-core performance alongside the best multi-threading performance you can get concurrently, then you don't need the 9900k, and it is then a poor price/performance proposition for you.

For me, I will say outright that I don't need the 9900k either- I didn't really need the 8700k over the 6700k I had before, but I upgraded partly because I perceived the 8700k as being relevant for quite a bit longer, and because I had a use for the 6700k and its platform elsewhere.

But what attracts me to it is that I could get higher stable clockspeeds than my 8700k gets, most likely at least, while getting two more cores. And as I've been homelabbing a bit, I'd have an 8700k to use for something else!

Now, I don't plan on doing that- as an aside, I'd like to get something server-grade for homelabbing, specifically something with gobs of ECC- and I just don't use all of the 8700k I already have.
 
It really shouldn't annoy anyone that Intel's 9900K is 66% more expensive because 90% of people who buy or build computers will not use either a 2700X or a 9900K. They're extremist hardware, meant for people who don't mind paying extra for the cutting edge. According to Steams hardware survey 30% use dual core, while 60% use quad core, which is a nice change as not long ago it was 50/50. But only 10% is other, and that could mean 6 core or 8 core CPU's, which I'm willing to bet that the majority of that is 6 core.

So really we should be pissed that AMD and Intel are charging that much for CPUs. I bought my AMD FX 8350 for $150 when it was relatively new in the industry, and recently bought a Ryzen 7 1700 for $200 cause I waited for a good deal, but something like $270 for a Ryzen 7 2700 isn't going to push game developers to make use of more than 4 cores. Something like the 9900K for $530 is for people who have a lot of disposable income that bought a gaming cpu that'll likely never see full use for the same reason why a Ryzen 8 core won't, because most people can't afford to buy these chips.
 
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elite.mafia said:
Why are the x series processors being outperformed significantly by the all the Intel K series they tested? That seems... odd. Is it all down to the higher stock boost clocks?
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Single-core performance. That's higher boost clocks on those cores and everything that feeds those cores as well, and that's really Intel's advantage overall.

The real 'triumph' for Intel with the 9900k is that they not only tacked two more cores onto their consumer part- which is set up differently than their HEDT parts!- but also managed to push the single-core performance up a notch on the very same SKU.

Now, at its price and the price of the competition both from AMD and from Intel's own less expensive SKUs, it's still a hard sell for what it offers, but it's worth pointing out that it is also a bit unique.
 
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DukenukemX said:
Something like the 9900K for $530 is for people who have a lot of disposable income that bought a gaming cpu that'll likely never see full use for the same reason why a Ryzen 8 core won't, because most people can't afford to buy these chips.
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Not for gaming, they won't. Of course, gaming isn't everything people use these things for- and I know that isn't something that you don't understand, I'm just pointing it out to keep the argument balanced :).

DukenukemX said:
I bought my AMD FX 8350 for $150
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Joke's on you!

[had too- I used one of these myself for a sibling's build, and it was and remains a very decent CPU for general usage, but gaming was never a strong point if you weren't playing Crysis :D ]
 
and then when the 2800x is released the performance gap will be even smaller but the price gap.... he he he.
 
Master_shake_ said:
and then when the 2800x is released the performance gap will be even smaller but the price gap.... he he he.
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If?

Intel rumors can be taken with some certainty; they've earned that, historically. So ponder two possibilities: that the 2800X has lower or very similar performance to the 9900k, so it will be priced noticeably lower, and that the 2800X has marketably higher performance than the 9900K, so it will be priced the same or higher.

And I'd point out what AMD has done in the past when they had the absolutely faster product: they tried to charge Intel prices. US$1000 CPU prices. And that was over a decade ago (or right at).

Intel charging half that for top-end consumer performance doesn't seem so bad viewed through that lens, especially when one can get almost as good performance for single-threaded applications like games or multithreaded performance for significantly less should top-end performance not be needed/desired.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
If?

Intel rumors can be taken with some certainty; they've earned that, historically. So ponder two possibilities: that the 2800X has lower or very similar performance to the 9900k, so it will be priced noticeably lower, and that the 2800X has marketably higher performance than the 9900K, so it will be priced the same or higher.

And I'd point out what AMD has done in the past when they had the absolutely faster product: they tried to charge Intel prices. US$1000 CPU prices. And that was over a decade ago (or right at).

Intel charging half that for top-end consumer performance doesn't seem so bad viewed through that lens, especially when one can get almost as good performance for single-threaded applications like games or multithreaded performance for significantly less should top-end performance not be needed/desired.
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Otoh, they may be charging less for these because they're afraid AMD may have something that could beat them, and they don't want to give AMD an excuse to charge $1000 for it. Generally I'd expect them to charge whatever they could get away with, but you never know.
 
Nobu said:
Otoh, they may be charging less for these because they're afraid AMD may have something that could beat them, and they don't want to give AMD an excuse to charge $1000 for it. Generally I'd expect them to charge whatever they could get away with, but you never know.
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I'll say that I've been pretty surprised that Intel has kept the consumer i7 between US$300-$400 for so long while AMD has had literally nothing to compete with above an i3 for so long. I remember the era before that where the top-end consumer CPUs sold for >US$1000 as 'Extreme Editions' and whatever AMD called theirs that I'm forgetting, and overclocking was the only way to get more performance for any reasonable budget. And we could never get enough CPU performance for gaming, no matter what we had, unlike today!

So I don't really see the 9900K being a departure; they're marketing it as an 'i9', essentially creating a new SKU. One could argue that it should be an i7 and that it should slot in at ~US$350, and that everything else should shift downward; I'll not argue against that as I'd certainly prefer that to be the case, my position is simply that I have an understanding of what Intel is doing and don't consider it to be an aberration.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
I'll say that I've been pretty surprised that Intel has kept the consumer i7 between US$300-$400 for so long while AMD has had literally nothing to compete with above an i3 for so long. I remember the era before that where the top-end consumer CPUs sold for >US$1000 as 'Extreme Editions' and whatever AMD called theirs that I'm forgetting, and overclocking was the only way to get more performance for any reasonable budget. And we could never get enough CPU performance for gaming, no matter what we had, unlike today!

So I don't really see the 9900K being a departure; they're marketing it as an 'i9', essentially creating a new SKU. One could argue that it should be an i7 and that it should slot in at ~US$350, and that everything else should shift downward; I'll not argue against that as I'd certainly prefer that to be the case, my position is simply that I have an understanding of what Intel is doing and don't consider it to be an aberration.
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they can't have a 350 dollar octo core.

that's where their hexa cored cpus live.

they aren't going to cannibalize their own product stack so they have to price it high.
 
dgz said:
The /suckers, that's who
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My clients do if I read your comment and phrasing correctly.

If asked to build a without any preferences except that it just runs, then I can build a rig with the goal of 90% performance at 70% (or less) in price.

Last year and this year I built such a rig. So for $1000 it will perform as will as many of the $1400 at %90 or better in performance.

So I just saved my client $400 for something they will hardly know the difference. It adds up with you build 4 competitive rigs for the price of 3 if you purchase elsewhere.

This is the reason why choose certain things at certain market points because I know that there is a certain value that can be applied to my customer base and everyone is happy.
This info does not come free or easy. It's 28 years build rigs and going on 32 years overall (cry) longer if you count me messing with Trash 80's back in late 79.

Or messing with the teletypes (land line to the local university at the time) trying to learn computer programming.... god this dates me...
 
Master_shake_ said:
they can't have a 350 dollar octo core. that's where their hexa cored cpus live. they aren't going to cannibalize their own product stack so they have to price it high.
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...but they just did it to the 7700K with the 8700K last year?

Of course they can. They apparently feel that they don't need to.

And I'll say this: there's very little that your average consumer can't do on a four-threaded CPU, real or hyperthreaded. From that perspective, I can see why Intel isn't pushing cores down the product stack to cheaper SKUs; bigger dies just mean less profit, but generally aren't going to result in real improvements in experience. I can't tell the difference in desktop usage between a 7600k and an 8700k, and I'm running both in different machines right now. Hell, the relatively ancient and/or anemic CPUs that I use at work don't make much of a difference in actual usage. And Intel has something to lose here, as efficient as they are with their functioning foundry processes, and that's margins: bigger dies with more cores are more expensive!

This is also what gives AMD an 'in'; they can't yet compete in terms of single-core performance, but now that they have a relatively modern core, they can certainly throw cores at the problem and come up with something that is more competitive in a set of workloads not just for the price but outright.
 
blurp said:
pcgeekesq Price-performance is not your thing. Point taken. Most of us take price-performance into consideration but not blindly. Few % moar performance for a signficant load of $ will turn a lot of people off. Intel & Nvidia take this bad habit lately. I would have been [hard] on the 9900k and the 2080ti but the price-perf (or the price-fun) is just too awful for ME. Even though money is not a problem.
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I'm in this boat as well. I will pay, but I do have a concept of value.

That said, in an enterprise environment, productivity is worth a hell of a lot. However, some hardware changes may or may not translate into productivity increase. For example, the terminals at my office can have i3 shitkicker CPUs with moderate ram or they can have i9s with an ass of RAM - word processing is going to be about the same.

Now, that said, we print a few million pages per year. THAT'S the spot to spend on - that does translate into someone not waiting - or put another way, an increase in productivity.

I mean, it's more application-specific than has been suggested.
 
IdiotInCharge said:
...but they just did it to the 7700K with the 8700K last year?

Of course they can. They apparently feel that they don't need to.

And I'll say this: there's very little that your average consumer can't do on a four-threaded CPU, real or hyperthreaded. From that perspective, I can see why Intel isn't pushing cores down the product stack to cheaper SKUs; bigger dies just mean less profit, but generally aren't going to result in real improvements in experience. I can't tell the difference in desktop usage between a 7600k and an 8700k, and I'm running both in different machines right now. Hell, the relatively ancient and/or anemic CPUs that I use at work don't make much of a difference in actual usage. And Intel has something to lose here, as efficient as they are with their functioning foundry processes, and that's margins: bigger dies with more cores are more expensive!

This is also what gives AMD an 'in'; they can't yet compete in terms of single-core performance, but now that they have a relatively modern core, they can certainly throw cores at the problem and come up with something that is more competitive in a set of workloads not just for the price but outright.
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they didn't have much choice in the matter.

amd was selling 2x the core count and then only advantage intel had was clock speed.

don't think intel really wanted to lower their prices.
 
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