The 18 and 16 core CPUs, of course, were significantly quicker still but the 9900K bridged the gap between the 7820X and the 7960X. This is time based so lower is better and the 9900K bested the 8 core 16 thread 7820X as well as the 8 core CPUs from AMD to be the third fastest CPU tested. Sticking with the encoding theme I did tests in the always popular Blender application to render in their new dedicated benchmark on the quick benchmark setting. The 7960X and 7980XE did outperform in the 5.0-second pass, but with the longer first pass the combination of 16 threads and clock speeds beat out the Ryzen 2700X by 22 FPS. This was surprising because some of the high core count CPUs from Intel are in the mix of these tests as well. In both tests, the 9900K topped the charts. I used the older HD Benchmark 4.0 test and then the HD Benchmark 5.0 test. My first two tests were both X264 encoding focused. I’ve also added a few more games into our testing as well, Intel is advertising this as the best gaming CPU on the market so I wanted to see it in a few more modern games. I’ve expanded our CPU testing with more multi-core focused workloads and I had the time to do retesting with the AMD Ryzen 2000 series CPUs to get a good look at the 9900K compared to the 2700X.

Okay, we can finally dive into the testing.

Intel processor diagnostic tool 9900k