Core i9 9900x vs 9900k

[prophet89]

Hi guys,

I'm looking to upgrade from at i7 2700k and cannot decide between the 9900x vs 9900k
I cannot find any OC info on the 9900x, is this because it just doesn't overclock well or is there another reason that I am missing.

The PC is used for Lightroom/Photoshop, Plex Transcoding and gaming.

My original thought was to get the 9900x and try to overclock into the 4.8ghz region thinking this would provide decent performance and have the support of 10 cores etc... making it fairly future proof. However, the more i look i can only find info on 9900k which in benchmark tests seems to outperform the 9900x given its 5ghz clock speeds as well as a fairly decent amount of overclocking potential.

What is the better option to go with here?
Would it be a mistake to go down the LGA2066 socket route in terms of future upgrades?

 

[Wommers]

If you are insistent on staying with intel i guess the 9900k is the best option, that or wait for comet lake which is 10core, although still on 14nm so god knows what the thermals will be like when overclocked.

 

[voidshatter]

i upgraded from 2700x to 9900k and got 50% increase of fps for demonbuddy, thanks to the overclockability. For gaming, Ring Bus architecture is still favoured.

However, it's also worth waiting for the Zen2 3850x at this point. Even if you play Intel-biased games like I do, you may still find 9900k to drop price due to competitions.

 

[VortexA1]

50% increase? wow..

 

[Zenduri]

i upgraded from 2700x to 9900k and got 50% increase of fps for demonbuddy, thanks to the overclockability. For gaming, Ring Bus architecture is still favoured..

50% increase? wow..

I wouldn't grasp on that 50% increase as a generic "for everything" considering its a Diablo bot hes referring to...

I hate to say it as its said all the time atm but wait to see what AMD brings to the table in the next few months if you can. If anything Intel prices should drop once AMD release but they might bring a far better offer to the table for your needs

 

[Grim5]

It's worth waiting even if you end up with a 9900k because the prices should drop after the zen 2 launch

 

[prophet89]

Thanks. I will try and hold off until the zen release to see what happens to prices.

What are peoples thoughts on 9900x? I know that the 9900k seems to be favoured especially for games but is there a real world difference between the two? would i be better off or disadvantages going for the 9900x and the LGA2066 socket?

 

[beany_bot]

Thanks. I will try and hold off until the zen release to see what happens to prices.

What are peoples thoughts on 9900x? I know that the 9900k seems to be favoured especially for games but is there a real world difference between the two? would i be better off or disadvantages going for the 9900x and the LGA2066 socket?

Well I would go 9700K now that many programs are disabling hyperthreading anyway.

 

[Aretak]

Thanks. I will try and hold off until the zen release to see what happens to prices.

What are peoples thoughts on 9900x? I know that the 9900k seems to be favoured especially for games but is there a real world difference between the two? would i be better off or disadvantages going for the 9900x and the LGA2066 socket?

For gaming there's certainly a difference. Skylake-X generally has a significant performance disadvantage compared to the mainstream Intel chips due to using the "new" mesh architecture instead of the ringbus. For workstation purposes the difference isn't so pronounced, but it still ends up being exceptionally poor value compared to Ryzen or Threadripper in that space for most use cases. Unless you have a specific AVX-512 workload for it to handle, there's really no reason to ever touch X299. And that's before even considering the power consumption and heat, which are both truly ridiculous (especially once you start overclocking). People say the 9900K is power hungry and hot, but it has nothing on Skylake-X in that respect, to the point where a lot of X299 boards aren't even fit for purpose due to the VRMs overheating and throttling because of the power draw.

In any case, wait to see what Zen 2 offers. This will also allow you to wait and see what Cascade Lake offers. Maybe it can be the saviour of LGA 2066.

 

[Radox-0]

Agree, would wait for the new Ryzen stuff or get mainstream Intel. I still suspect for very high refresh rate stuff Intel will hold the lead with Ryzen out, but remains to be seen.

Disagree with comment that X299 is poor for gaming. I game fine on a 7980XE when I cant be bothered to move to my gaming rig (8700k) and similar GPU's. Its the out the box clock speed that makes up most the disadvantage. Clock them to a reasonable level, give the mesh a small notch and you can game perfectly fine on Skylake-X. On the higher core count, don't even need to OC all the core's just a handful of them, focusing on ones highlighted in the BIOS and get a mix of nice speed for gaming and when more cores come into play. Gamers Nexus has a review of the 9900k but in it also includes the 7980XE OC'd also and does fine in gaming: https://www.gamersnexus.net/hwreviews/3421-intel-i7-9700k-review-benchmark-vs-8700k-and-more infact leads the pack in some which includes the 9900k OC'd. Another set from Tom's with more games and even lower clocked 7980XE @ 4.2 Ghz in charts: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-core-i9-9980xe-cpu,5902-3.html

There are few titles which seem to be impacted by Mesh, mostly FC. But aside from that a modestly clocked Skylake-X seems to be right up there with most other mainstream Intel and slightly more aggressive clocked topping the boards in some games. This is with 18 core, so lower core count stuff which can clock further will do better.

Heat and power are largely dependent on how you clock it. It does indeed got both hot and drink power if your OC all the core on higher core count stuff. But tweak it smart so some of the cores to higher speeds, mainly ones highlighted and can do amazing in games and multi-threaded stuff alike. Now not to say get X299 for gaming, I would not or even with TR and current Ryzen stuff out if you want higher core count stuff, but not as poor as people seem to believe.

 

[Aretak]

Disagree with comment that X299 is poor for gaming.

Nobody said that it's "poor" for gaming. It's around Ryzen's level for the most part, and I game very happily on Ryzen. But they're both objectively worse than a 9900K (or even an 8700K) in the vast majority of titles, cherrypicking aside.

This is with 18 core, so lower core count stuff which can clock further will do better.

In other games, but the 18-core specifically tops charts in a very small selection of titles that scale with both extremely high numbers of threads and frequency, like Ashes of the Benchmark and F1 2018. A lower core count Skylake-X chip would be worse in those titles and better in others, but so would the 9900K (and be well ahead). Those Tom's Hardware benchmarks are also essentially worthless, since they're conducting their testing with a GTX 1080, meaning they're hitting a major GPU bottleneck in almost all of them.

Nobody's saying they're outright bad CPUs - they're not. But they're entirely pointless for most part, and there are better, significantly cheaper options that are a lot easier to cool available for almost any use case.

 

[Radox-0]

Nobody said that it's "poor" for gaming. It's around Ryzen's level for the most part, and I game very happily on Ryzen. But they're both objectively worse than a 9900K (or even an 8700K) in the vast majority of titles, cherrypicking aside.

In other games, but the 18-core specifically tops charts in a very small selection of titles that scale with both extremely high numbers of threads and frequency, like Ashes of the Benchmark and F1 2018. A lower core count Skylake-X chip would be worse in those titles and better in others, but so would the 9900K (and be well ahead). Those Tom's Hardware benchmarks are also essentially worthless, since they're conducting their testing with a GTX 1080, meaning they're hitting a major GPU bottleneck in almost all of them.

Nobody's saying they're outright bad CPUs - they're not. But they're entirely pointless for most part, and there are better, significantly cheaper options that are a lot easier to cool available for almost any use case.

your right not "poor" but "significant disadvantage" was used sorry, just a line very much just picked up on that as it does not tally with my experience having both the 7980XE and 8700k side by side. May just be me but to me just made skylake-X sound dead in water for gaming when it performs solid (not the best) and as you say even if it did perform on level as Ryzen, provides a very good experience. Even then as I say, easy to give Skylake-X stuff an overclock and do it smartly (you can overclock on a per core basis with Skylake-X down to a individual voltage level vs mainstream) and can very much get a number of cores which you game on at 4.6-4.8 Ghz pretty easily without heat being an issue.

I agree on your last statement as you can see from my own comment. I very much agree there are better options in both the gaming arena and workload arena with better price / performance, just pointing out tweaked smartly, they perform very well for gaming also. Similarly tweaking them smartly can keep temps in check's also.

 

[EsaT]

My original thought was to get the 9900x and try to overclock into the 4.8ghz region thinking this would provide decent performance and have the support of 10 cores etc... making it fairly future proof.

Intel has no future proofness in upgrades.
There are now signs for second artificial motherboard change for these 6th gen Skylake rebrandings.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/intel/comet-lake-backwards-compatibility-400-series-chipset-motherboard

And that soon four years old Skylake architecture with lots of even older design parts has more holes than Swiss cheese.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/03/05/spoiler_intel_processor_flaw/
https://www.pcmag.com/news/368372/new-intel-chip-flaws-can-leak-confidential-data-from-the-cpu

It's pretty clear that Intel's speculative code execution has been designed completely disregarding security and they haven't cared least bit about updating design.
But guess fixing all those taken "short cuts" might have caused IPC setbacks...

Thanks. I will try and hold off until the zen release to see what happens to prices.

Why would Intel drop prices when people have been happily asking for more rape&robbery by paying current prices?
For as long as they can sell all they make there won't be price drops for Intel CPUs.

 

[voidshatter]

For gaming there's certainly a difference. Skylake-X generally has a significant performance disadvantage compared to the mainstream Intel chips due to using the "new" mesh architecture instead of the ringbus.

your right not "poor" but "significant disadvantage" was used sorry, just a line very much just picked up on that as it does not tally with my experience having both the 7980XE and 8700k side by side.

I have a friend working in a big financial institute. They do things sensitive to computer and internet performance, such like high frequency trading. After years of performance profiling, they made conclusions that the Mesh architecture is a failure. Their Xeon Gold performed extremely poorly when compared against consumer grade 9900K.

 

[Radox-0]

I have a friend working in a big financial institute. They do things sensitive to computer and internet performance, such like high frequency trading. After years of performance profiling, they made conclusions that the Mesh architecture is a failure. Their Xeon Gold performed extremely poorly when compared against consumer grade 9900K.

Is that specifically down to the mesh or is it more then not likely down to the fact that usually Xeon gold with relatively low clock speed vs a pretty high clock speed 9900k. Plenty of tasks do not scale well with more cores and tend to favour higher clock speed, even in the business world. Review here has a 9900k and 7900x (but also some TR stuff).

9900k pretty much dominates most things thanks to its frequency:

• Web Rendering: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i9_9900K/10.html
• Some Image editing elements: https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i9_9900K/7.html

However where the cores can be leveraged in case of 7900x, even with its lower clock speed it can often keep up with higher clock speed 9900k or exceed:

• https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i9_9900K/5.html
  
• https://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Intel/Core_i9_9900K/9.html

So yeah, very much depends on use case. Do not get me wrong there is an impact of Mesh most definitely, why you can see my own comments in relation to SKL-X not being best pick, but at the same time in plenty of things, the clock speed deficiency of Skylake-X stuff out the box also has an impact in my use case and experience. Similarly you may have missed it, but we were talking about gaming mostly in that initial exchange of posts.

 

[voidshatter]

Is that specifically down to the mesh or is it more then not likely down to the fact that usually Xeon gold with relatively low clock speed vs a pretty high clock speed 9900k.

I just checked with him again. He said that they used to have communication latency among cores under 100ns for many years. It was that Skylake Mesh that made the latency go above 100ns and suddenly made them to return to stone age.

 

[Radox-0]

I just checked with him again. He said that they used to have communication latency among cores under 100ns for many years. It was that Skylake Mesh that made the latency go above 100ns and suddenly made them to return to stone age.

Absolutely, no doubt there will be stuff in which Mesh causes an impact and they rightly went to the CPU that suited there needs, can imagine for there use case (short time I was in IB world) that quick inter core latency is paramount for trading. Though would be curious to see what the performance impact is on there workload in metrics and what Xeon gold there actually using, did they compare metrics at like for like clocks? Always interested to see the actual impact of these various communication methods used weather it’s ringbus, mesh, infinity fabric etc.

For my use case (physics modelling) and gaming when i CBA to moved to my other rigs which was the initial exchange brought up not so much once I properly tune the SKL-X stuff and that includes core, mesh and memory.

 

[Silent_Scone]

Between the two CPUs it has to be the 9900K for a gaming system, no question. A well rounded setup will cope with rendering tasks just as easily, too.

 

[andremelo90]

Guys, sorry to resurrect this post but what about the pci lanes? 44 on 9900x and 16 on 9900k, i hear some saying that there is a certain level of performance decrease when using SLI (and upcoming NVlink) on a 16 lanes cpu, as each GPU work on x8, compared to the x16 on a 44 lane one.

 

[snips86x]

Guys, sorry to resurrect this post but what about the pci lanes? 44 on 9900x and 16 on 9900k, i hear some saying that there is a certain level of performance decrease when using SLI (and upcoming NVlink) on a 16 lanes cpu, as each GPU work on x8, compared to the x16 on a 44 lane one.

SLI is dead, they're not properly supporting it so it's a pointless investment.

As for the intel 9 series, i'd steer clear at this point in time. The new 10 series will require a new chipset and at the moment, AMD is outperforming them and better price vs performance.

Regarding the PCIE lanes, the 9900x is for the 2066 socket and they have more PCIE lanes by design. The GPUs will run at x16/x16. The 9900k is 1151 and when running muti card setup, will be x8/x8. Real world difference between x8 and x16 is probably 0.5fps.