Intel has put its marketing guns on AMD's Ryzen processors, drawing a comparison that claims the Core i7-10700K surprises the Ryzen 9 3900XT in terms of price and gaming performance. Before we get into the fairness issues of this comparison, let's take a look at Intel's claims here, which were presented via a presentation by the chip giant in the APAC region, as noted by Wccftech. . To set the backdrop for this processor battle, the Core i7-10700K is an 8-core (16-thread) processor clocked at 3.8 GHz with a 5.1 GHz boost. AMD's Ryzen 9 3900XT advances to 12 cores (24 threads) with the same 3.8 GHz base clock, with a boost of 4.7 GHz. Intel's case goes on to argue that in terms of cost, the 10700K runs with an introductory price of €387 in the US. Compared to the €499 asking price for the Ryzen chip, though this doesn't reflect current pricing at actual retailers (more on that later). So, given that, Intel offers plenty of benchmarks for 30 games at 1080p resolution on a platform with 16GB of system RAM and an RTX 2080 Ti graphics card (no mention of the respective motherboards used). The chip giant goes on to claim that the 10700K is on par with or even better than the 3900XT in 24 of those 30 games, and there are big wins for the Core i7. These include:
- 23% faster in Total War: Warhammer II
- 17% faster in League of Legends
- 15% faster in Monster Hunter World: Iceborne
- 14% faster in Rocket League
Intel's Core i7-10700K is more than 3% faster across 12 games, and 12 of the games are rated about the same (3% or less difference), with AMD winning 6 titles (including CS:GO). Therefore, Intel concludes that the 10700K is much faster in a selection of games, overall, and is considerably cheaper than the Ryzen chip.
Fair comparison?
So is this particular comparison fair? There are several reasons why we do not believe this to be the case. To begin with, we should note that Intel obviously chose this library of games (albeit from ``popular'' titles that have a benchmark mode). Looking at the price comparisons listed, the 10700K may have an MSRP of $387, but it sells for around $410 in the US. Similarly, the 3900XT sells for $479, not $499, so the price gap is not as wide as Intel shows in the presentation. While the 10700K is still a good, cheaper part, of course; there's no denying that. However, there are two other things to remember here. First of all, the 3900XT gives you a lot more performance in certain scenarios, like streaming while gaming, for example, and those 12 cores will also make a difference outside of gaming when it comes to running apps. heavy. This material could be an important consideration for some buyers. If you're just talking about gaming, the 10700K is definitely the winner, as Intel suggests, but the point becomes comparison fairness. If you like gaming and nothing else, why would you buy the 3900XT and not the 3700X? With the 3700X you get 8 cores, the same as the 10700K, and enough for gaming, and there's no shortage of gaming benchmarks, which show the 3700X to be just a whisker behind the 3900X in terms of performance. games (and yes, the XT model is slightly faster than the vanilla 3900X, but it's still just a minor upgrade). Then look at the current price of the 3700X, which is $290 at Newegg US right now (that's where we pull all the prices in this article) and, well, that's a much different story. in terms of price / performance compared to the 10700K (at €410) now, right? There's no denying that Intel's new Comet Lake chips offer solid gaming performance, and those benchmarks are pretty telling in some ways, and single-core speed is undoubtedly one of Intel's biggest strengths. , but we try to prove it. For the 10700K to somehow get into the value bets of Ryzen goes too far on the marketing front.