I don't get it why so much emphasis is put on overclocking reviews when only 0.00000001% of the users do overclock their stuff. It is nothing but a semi-useless marketing bullshit. What I care is what I believe those other 99.0000009% of the users care price, stability, longevity, normal performance, power usage/battery life, heat and noise. Did I mention stability and security?
First of all, I would dispute your claim that a negligible amount of people OC their stuff. Yes, it isn't half or even 10%. But it's more than 10^-8%. Also, your numbers don't add up to anything meaningful (99.00000091%).
I run my CPU 90% of the time with even the Turbo disabled (through Real Temp 3.70), however the rest 10% of the time my 4770K runs at 4.6 GHz while gaming.
As a veteran WoW gamer, ppl (when I say "ppl" I mean everyone and their little brother/sister) I know have been overclocking their chips to extreme levels at least since 2004, b/c not overclocking your CPU back then meant that you simply COULD NOT play the game. It wasn't funny or easy trying to raid in the World of Wacraft and run Teamspeak on a Pentium 4 mono-core 3.06 GHz with HT.
World of Wacraft alone has had over 50,000,000 players in its lifespan. Even Anand himself used to play WoW Vanilla on a Pentium 4. This shows how much BS your post contains. If ANANDTECH had a neon sign installed of a man shoveling up BS on his cart to denote unbelievabe BS, it would have gone off now. 'Nuff said.
That's odd. WoW ran fine for me on a Northwood 2.4GHz P4 with no overclocking. It was a little bit slow in crowded areas like around Stormwind's bank during the after school rush, but was relatively smooth in raids. I never felt the need to overclock it.
Ah no it wasn't. See, I still have my original 2005 laptop and I tested it on a private Vanilla server. While you can limp along while questing at 30 FPS, any group content is impossible with a 3.06 GHz Pentium 4. Raids are absolutely impossible. You are just full of it. Case in point: https://imgur.com/Y9oQ6xW
I'm not sure what kind of graphics solution or the heat situation you had in your laptop. On desktop the 2004 era Prescott Pentium 4 3.2 GHZ ended up pulling okay numbers into the start of Wrath of the Lich King when upgraded with a newer graphics card that was still compatible with an AGP graphics slot, eventually the Radeon HD 4650. Obviously this was with quite lower graphics settings.
An image uploaded on Apr 16 2016 and posted as relevant to a discussion happening in October 2018 alongside an accusation of me being "full of it." How does this random, 2+ year old screen capture of CPU and GPU from an old laptop support any claim you've made?
I currently play on a couple of different private servers. Vanilla with Insta max level is hard to find. The majority are TBC+ that fall under the private "fun server" class and few of them have the sort of population necessary to support endgame content raids regularly. Jumping on one with an old laptop you claim to still own in order to test raid performance to make your point in a discussion post will likely require an existing private account backed up by a lot of hours of grinding. Given the stale upload date of the image you shared, I'm suspicious that you don't have as much supporting evidence as you say you do. If that laptop hardware really is yours, how exactly were you overclocking it? Most laptop motherboards lacked the necessary settings to enable overclocking and the cooling headroom required and that includes the Toshiba Satellite 1950 in the (two year old) screencap you've linked.
Although I won't claim to have access to my old Northwood P4, I do have clear memories of how it performed and that it was reasonable in WoW without an overclock. At the time, there was very little mention of overclocking among the population. The bottom line is that overclocking just isn't as widespread as you claim - though I will concede that Zingam percentage estimate is an exaggeration, but it's clear that exaggeration was Zing's intent to begin with so there's no use in splitting hairs about it.
I had a P4 with HT and a dual core Athlon 64x2 4200 system back in those days when i was running vanilla and while i preferred to play on the AMD system. The P4 was functional with lower settings. Just my anecdotal 2 pennies
Because when I am using MS Office, Adobe Acrobat and Firefox, which is what I do on the PC 90% of time, I really do not care if these open 0.1 of a second faster with turbo on.
There is overclocking, and then extreme overclocking(what is being talked about here). Liquid Nitrogen is not used for your typical overclocking. Now, the only reason it means anything is to compare, "the very best that can be done" on a given platform. The theory is that if these new chips can hit a peak overclock that is much higher than what can be done on an AMD based platform, then they still have an edge in terms of design, even if that does not make it down to typical usage.
For overclocking though, I expect that over 25 percent of those who build their own systems will overclock at least a little. Cranking a first generation Ryzen chip to 3.9GHz isn't pushing the limits, but will give a bit better performance. Pushing an Intel chip to 4.9GHz on all cores all the time would obviously give better performance than stock speeds. Even a .2GHz overclock will be better than no overclock, and will probably not result in ANY instability or additional fan noise.
Those going full open loop liquid will be a smaller percentage of the overall market, but these days, a closed loop CPU cooler isn't all that uncommon, and won't cost too much more than a high end air cooler.
Er, 100% - 0.00000001% is 99.99999999%, not 99.0000009%. Neither number is anywhere close to reality anyway. They might apply to LN2 and/or liquid helium overclocking, but certainly not air-cooling or liquid-cooling overclocking.
Actually I would say quite a few people OC their systems. Moderate OCs that don't require a VCore increase and aren't running the chip overly hot don't really harm the CPU and can be maintained in a stable state for years.
LN2 OCing on the other hand? Sure, your numbers are pretty much correct there. It's basically the equivalent of top-fuel drag racing for CPUs.
I saw GN's coverage with Steponz. Cool dude, it's nice to hear solder is officially back (at least for these enthusiast parts) and I would be fine if they only used STIM, for example, on K-branded SKUs for the overclockers and save a few pennies on the non-K SKUs by sticking to their thermal paste.
9900k sounds like a beast, and while solder makes the product tempting, the $500 cost and the potential 10nm node drop in the next year or two makes it more compelling to "wait and see". I'm glad AMD's pushed Intel towards higher core counts and back to solder in the mean time, even if so far it hasn't resulted in lower prices for blue team CPUs.
At 500$ there is not one single reason why anyone would buy this CPU. For multithreaded stuff you can buy a 1920X with 12 cores and 24 threads at 450$ and get much better performance. For ST or gaming you can buy a 300$ 2700X or a 8700K/9700K. They need to lower the price, otherwise this product is no good.
You just said that if you want multi-thread to get threadripper, and for single thread to go with lesser thread count or the cheaper AMD.
What about if you want both? I play games many hours a week but I also do content creation on my PC (rendering, encoding, etc) and I am a heavy overclocker. I push my stuff to the max on water cooling.
I fully agree with that. Everyone is ignoring enthusiasts that both work and game on the same machine, because why not. Personally I'm not going to get a 9900K though, but if Ice Lake on 10nm has an equivalent part, I might get that one.
I think it's too expensive too, but there is a market out there.
Premiere cares more about per-core frequency than having tons of threads, but it also cares about threads as well. The iGPU can also be used in some applications to speed up rendering times for video. For a workstation whose express purpose is to edit video, the 9900k makes sense if time is money and they're in a daily business of making video content (YouTube/Twitch/whatever) and a day of not meeting a deadline of an upload means lost traction in the video space.
It's a niche, but it exists and the processor can be the best of the best for some applications. As with all things, end consumers need to operate and decide their parts on a fixed budget and stick to the best parts they can fit under the budget they have. And for most people, yeah $500 on the CPU alone is way outside of budget, and that's fine.
But yes, I do want Intel to drop their prices here. They're always pricing this jank under the "supposition" that they'll cannibalize other product stacks, but the fact is if someone needed enthusiast board features, they'd go for the enthusiast chipset and processor. If someone just wants mainstream features they'll stick to the mainstream product.
9900K is guaranteed to turboboost to 5Ghz, which means it will be reliably overclocked to 5.3~4Ghz. That is 20~30% faster than ANYTHING AMD has. In short, 9900K will be much faster than ANY AMD processor (including 32 core threadripper) for tasks that uses less than 16 threads, which is 99.9% of all the single user applications.
I agree the 8700K and even the 8700 are both significant alternatives, but the point of the 9th Gen's improvements, according to this article, focus on the TIM. Since they are soldered they will run significantly cooler, even at stock.
Isn't the all-core boost only going to 4.8GHz without manually overclocking on the 9900K? Going to 5.2-5.3GHz I can see as well. Ryzen 3rd generation should also be hitting the 5GHz on 8 core/16 thread without a problem when it comes out in March/April of 2019, but beyond that, I won't speculate how high it will be able to clock without more information.
What if you are doing video decoding\encoding, and need Quick Sync?
Just one of many common scenerios someone would need a high-power Intel CPU with an iGPU (Xeon CPU's - at least all of the previous ones with disabled iGPU's, do NOT support Quick Sync)
Not a word on Intel's shenanigans with "Principled" Technologies?
I have to admit, I'm unfortunately starting to doubt the impartiality of Intel's PR offload group Purch Marketing's subsidiary Anandtech when it comes to reviewing Intel's products with a critical eye.
It's an article about extreme overclocking, no comparisons as such to AMD (other than that AMD holds several GHz records). So I'm not sure what your point is.
You'd have to be some kind of moron to give Intel your money, given their overpriced CPUs, Management Engine, and shady practices (don't forget the 28-core fiasco).
Here's hoping that AMD doubles Ryzen core counts on 7nm.
I hope you call out Intel's shenanigans in your review.
I also wish you'd stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. They aren't that stupid. How many times will they have to perform a "whoops" before you start to accept these things are not accidental?
When there's a gulf between base and turbo clocks, overclocking makes little sense. What does make sense is overTDPing. With a higher TDP you can run turbo most or all the time. Higher performance with no overclocking...
"This might mean the processors has a rated lifespan of several years, rather than a dozen years."
That sounds bad. Will we still see some processors with paste? I'd rather buy a more reliable computer with a longer lifespan than a faster computer.
Will multiplier-locked processors still have paste? If the paste is more reliable, and if locked processors have paste, then I'll start buying multiplier-locked processors.
I'm curious as to what "several years" means. I've got ye olde Sandy Bridge i7 2600 (non-K mind you) with a soldered heatspreader still going after 7 years. Is it due to keel over shortly? What's the MTBF for soldered CPUS?
Soldered chips are more reliable than paste TIM chips, not less. This fact applies to the actual enthusiast sector, which is not a pro sector that uses liquid nitrogen.
Enthusiasts cool with custom water loops, most typically. Below them are those who use AIO setups. And, believe it or not, some enthusiasts also use air cooling.
PC mark, you know the same company that Intel is "a board member" so they can screw with results in the background to make anything Intel branded show higher numbers then it actually is..
They (Intel, and others) should go out of their way to find a "truly" unbiased benchmark suite that is allied and not entrenched with anyone other then the maker themselves to "level the playing field" and so when new CPU-GPU-SSD etc come out and the big corporations want to truly show off they will be able to do so from a "clean slate"
none of this "working behind closed doors" to fleece consumers/customers out of big $$$$$$$$$ expecting one thing and getting a completely other real world result.
Like vehicles that gut the interior, trim down the weight of everything to increase fuel mileage on a closed circuit indoor test track and "claiming" as real expected fuel mileage..its crap way of doing things.
Eh, the importance of a soldered IHS in the consumer space has diminished between Sandy Bridge's release and today. Sure the new CPUs will likely deliver higher overclocks, but the world of 2018 has seen increased outright replacement of desktop PCs with phones, tablets, and laptops. I'm thinking this is more a marketing department checkbox intended to have a halo effect on sales of higher volume non-K processors rather than a serious nod to the diminished number of remaining people that still play games with big, clunky desktop computers.
"That sounds bad. Will we still see some processors with paste? I'd rather buy a more reliable computer with a longer lifespan than a faster computer."
It's typically smoke and mirrors to make Intel's force-feeding of substandard TIM onto enthusiasts all these years. The propaganda has always been about microcracking. The original claim, which was ludicrous but pushed heavily in places like the Anandtech forum, was that microcracking is a problem for soldered chips under air and water. In reality, it's a problem for liquid nitrogen. A PDF that was supposed to seem like credible science kept being posted to prop up this ruse. A big part of the nonsense was the claim that process nodes have shrunk since Sandy so much that the dies are simply too small to support solder. Yes, folks, that nonsense was treated like fact, again and again, in the forums and elsewhere.
AMD has exposed these lies with Ryzen so Intel has had no choice but to abandon its craven thermal paste strategy, a strategy it adopted as a consequence of Bulldozer/Piledriver not competing with Sandy/Ivy. So, Intel apologists are moving the goal posts for the word enthusiast. Now, it's not the typical water loop person. No. It's not liquid nitrogen cooling! Enthusiasts don't use liquid nitrogen. Pros use it. But, since we want to forget about Intel's marketing strategies, like telling actual enthusiasts that it was using better-quality TIM for Devil's Canyon (later exposed to be the same TIM as before), we will pretend that the enthusiast space is about liquid nitrogen.
Intel benefitted from selling its substandard TIM for enthusiast-grade parts. It saved money on the thermal interface. It made money from damaged chips, due to extra sales to replace them. It got marketing from all the delidding traffic. But, now that it has competition it has to offer a better-quality product. This is what competition is about, folks. Monopolies always offer less product quality. You get less for your money when there is monopoly.
For the real enthusiast space, soldered chips should be more reliable, not less. Heat is the enemy, not microcracks, unless you're a pro using truly exotic impractical cooling which is what liquid nitrogen is.
"Enthusiasts don't use liquid nitrogen. Pros use it."
Hubawah? What professional uses liquid nitrogen to cool a processor? In a professional environment, computers are typically OEM builds from a relatively well known brand. There's nothing professional about extreme overclocking except that sometimes a hardware manufacturer that might have a professional workforce sponsors a team or an event in order to help get their name out through side-channel marketing.
About CPU lifetimes: The only CPU that I ever have seen failing was the Core i7 6700K (with paste) that failed after one year of use (with maybe 2 hours of overclocking during that time). By contrast, the Clawhammer Athlon 64 3200+ that I bought 15 years ago (with solder AFAIK) still works and is still in use.
One thing I never understood about overclocking is why Intel or AMD doesn't try to make *more* money from the community on it. For example, given that very few CPUs can hit the highest frequencies, why not sell those that do at auction? I'm really curious what the market would pay for overclocked CPUs that are supported by Intel/AMD.
Is there any justification beyond theatrics for using liquid nitrogen vs dry ice acetone?
In both systems, the temperature of the coolant is already far lower than the processor would require to function properly if it were in thermal equilibrium (eg at the same temperature) -78 C (~195 K) or -196 C (77k)
However, Dry ice possesses a significantly higher (latent) enthalpy of sublimation compared with the (latent) heat of vaporization of liquid nitrogen (570 vs 200 kJ/kg). Furthermore, Dry ice is denser than liquid nitrogen (~1.4-1.6 kg/m^3 vs ~0.8 kg/m^3).
In both cases, the heat sink is not the material itself storing the heat in excitations of vibrations/translations/rotations of atoms or molecules. Instead the heat is powering a phase change ("breaking" those intramolecular or intraatomic bonds). With liquid nitrogen, the material is already saturated with heat. Every gram of liquid nitrogen is in a constant process of vaporization (boiling). Same with dry ice, which is subliming.
With dry ice/acetone you get 2x the heat sink (570 vs 200 kj/kg) and 2x the density (~1.5 vs ~0.8 kg/m^3). Its obviously not 1:1 because you can't pack the dry ice perfectly into the volume of the dewar heat sink, but its close. You can certainly smash up the dry ice with an ice pick and pack in there tightly.
In theory you should be able to get significantly more than 2x the heat into the dry ice acetone bath than the liquid nitrogen. The safety consideration is minimal. In both cases you need ventilation so that concern would already be met. nitrogen for accidental asphixiation, and with dry ice acetone for the spark/fume hazard. However, the flammability and inhalation hazard is minimal with dry ice acetone as the vapor pressure is considerably lowered due to the lower temperature. This distinction is well known in the sciences. When scientists need a quick, simple, readily accessible, and most importantly CHEAP cooling method they use dry ice acetone.
Go into any biology, chemistry, or materials science laboratory. Less well funded laboratories often utilize dry ice acetone to cool rotary evaporators and chemical reactions (because acetone is cheap and dry ice is readily available and provided by the facility, vs chillers which are expensive). Liquid nitrogen is also used, although its typically used when the temperature, rather than the heat dissipation, is the concern (eg lyophilization in a biochemistry setting or degassing in a chemistry/materials science setting).
Dry ice is cheap. You can buy it at most grocery stores. You do not need a dewar. Acetone is cheap. You can buy it at 100% of hardware stores (either explicitly as "acetone" or in some cases as laquer thinner, although you should look up the SDS to make sure its not a different chemical or mixture) and most pharmacies (pure acetone nailpolish remover; you have to look at the label, as plenty of nailpolish removers have other chemicals added to them, but they definitely sell it)
You can also use methanol, but that is more inherently toxic.
So I ask again:
Aside from theatrics.... the cool factor..... the NPC/NORP "like WOAH DUDE TOTALLY!" factor.... is there any justification for liquid nitrogen?
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rocky12345 - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
For those tests posted such as PCMARK 10 and others was this overclocked on LN2 to get those scores?Ian Cutress - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
Yes.Zingam - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
I don't get it why so much emphasis is put on overclocking reviews when only 0.00000001% of the users do overclock their stuff. It is nothing but a semi-useless marketing bullshit.What I care is what I believe those other 99.0000009% of the users care price, stability, longevity, normal performance, power usage/battery life, heat and noise. Did I mention stability and security?
Death666Angel - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
First of all, I would dispute your claim that a negligible amount of people OC their stuff. Yes, it isn't half or even 10%. But it's more than 10^-8%. Also, your numbers don't add up to anything meaningful (99.00000091%).Zingam - Saturday, October 13, 2018 - link
Are some kind of a Number-Nazi counting the zeros? :)))just4U - Monday, October 15, 2018 - link
I'd think there are many reasons for it.. One being it can be a indicator of the potential of future mainstream products.Achaios - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
I run my CPU 90% of the time with even the Turbo disabled (through Real Temp 3.70), however the rest 10% of the time my 4770K runs at 4.6 GHz while gaming.As a veteran WoW gamer, ppl (when I say "ppl" I mean everyone and their little brother/sister) I know have been overclocking their chips to extreme levels at least since 2004, b/c not overclocking your CPU back then meant that you simply COULD NOT play the game. It wasn't funny or easy trying to raid in the World of Wacraft and run Teamspeak on a Pentium 4 mono-core 3.06 GHz with HT.
World of Wacraft alone has had over 50,000,000 players in its lifespan. Even Anand himself used to play WoW Vanilla on a Pentium 4. This shows how much BS your post contains. If ANANDTECH had a neon sign installed of a man shoveling up BS on his cart to denote unbelievabe BS, it would have gone off now. 'Nuff said.
PeachNCream - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
That's odd. WoW ran fine for me on a Northwood 2.4GHz P4 with no overclocking. It was a little bit slow in crowded areas like around Stormwind's bank during the after school rush, but was relatively smooth in raids. I never felt the need to overclock it.Achaios - Saturday, October 13, 2018 - link
Ah no it wasn't. See, I still have my original 2005 laptop and I tested it on a private Vanilla server. While you can limp along while questing at 30 FPS, any group content is impossible with a 3.06 GHz Pentium 4. Raids are absolutely impossible. You are just full of it. Case in point: https://imgur.com/Y9oQ6xWdesolation0 - Saturday, October 13, 2018 - link
I'm not sure what kind of graphics solution or the heat situation you had in your laptop. On desktop the 2004 era Prescott Pentium 4 3.2 GHZ ended up pulling okay numbers into the start of Wrath of the Lich King when upgraded with a newer graphics card that was still compatible with an AGP graphics slot, eventually the Radeon HD 4650. Obviously this was with quite lower graphics settings.PeachNCream - Monday, October 15, 2018 - link
An image uploaded on Apr 16 2016 and posted as relevant to a discussion happening in October 2018 alongside an accusation of me being "full of it." How does this random, 2+ year old screen capture of CPU and GPU from an old laptop support any claim you've made?I currently play on a couple of different private servers. Vanilla with Insta max level is hard to find. The majority are TBC+ that fall under the private "fun server" class and few of them have the sort of population necessary to support endgame content raids regularly. Jumping on one with an old laptop you claim to still own in order to test raid performance to make your point in a discussion post will likely require an existing private account backed up by a lot of hours of grinding. Given the stale upload date of the image you shared, I'm suspicious that you don't have as much supporting evidence as you say you do. If that laptop hardware really is yours, how exactly were you overclocking it? Most laptop motherboards lacked the necessary settings to enable overclocking and the cooling headroom required and that includes the Toshiba Satellite 1950 in the (two year old) screencap you've linked.
Although I won't claim to have access to my old Northwood P4, I do have clear memories of how it performed and that it was reasonable in WoW without an overclock. At the time, there was very little mention of overclocking among the population. The bottom line is that overclocking just isn't as widespread as you claim - though I will concede that Zingam percentage estimate is an exaggeration, but it's clear that exaggeration was Zing's intent to begin with so there's no use in splitting hairs about it.
imanuglyone - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
I had a P4 with HT and a dual core Athlon 64x2 4200 system back in those days when i was running vanilla and while i preferred to play on the AMD system. The P4 was functional with lower settings. Just my anecdotal 2 penniesskavi - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
why do you disable turbo? that's one of the biggest parts of making normal activities feel fast.Achaios - Saturday, October 13, 2018 - link
Because when I am using MS Office, Adobe Acrobat and Firefox, which is what I do on the PC 90% of time, I really do not care if these open 0.1 of a second faster with turbo on.RU482 - Saturday, October 13, 2018 - link
still...why bother?Targon - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
There is overclocking, and then extreme overclocking(what is being talked about here). Liquid Nitrogen is not used for your typical overclocking. Now, the only reason it means anything is to compare, "the very best that can be done" on a given platform. The theory is that if these new chips can hit a peak overclock that is much higher than what can be done on an AMD based platform, then they still have an edge in terms of design, even if that does not make it down to typical usage.For overclocking though, I expect that over 25 percent of those who build their own systems will overclock at least a little. Cranking a first generation Ryzen chip to 3.9GHz isn't pushing the limits, but will give a bit better performance. Pushing an Intel chip to 4.9GHz on all cores all the time would obviously give better performance than stock speeds. Even a .2GHz overclock will be better than no overclock, and will probably not result in ANY instability or additional fan noise.
Those going full open loop liquid will be a smaller percentage of the overall market, but these days, a closed loop CPU cooler isn't all that uncommon, and won't cost too much more than a high end air cooler.
Santoval - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
Er, 100% - 0.00000001% is 99.99999999%, not 99.0000009%. Neither number is anywhere close to reality anyway. They might apply to LN2 and/or liquid helium overclocking, but certainly not air-cooling or liquid-cooling overclocking.skavi - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
what about the 0.99999909% of users?twtech - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
Actually I would say quite a few people OC their systems. Moderate OCs that don't require a VCore increase and aren't running the chip overly hot don't really harm the CPU and can be maintained in a stable state for years.LN2 OCing on the other hand? Sure, your numbers are pretty much correct there. It's basically the equivalent of top-fuel drag racing for CPUs.
JoeyJoJo123 - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
I saw GN's coverage with Steponz. Cool dude, it's nice to hear solder is officially back (at least for these enthusiast parts) and I would be fine if they only used STIM, for example, on K-branded SKUs for the overclockers and save a few pennies on the non-K SKUs by sticking to their thermal paste.9900k sounds like a beast, and while solder makes the product tempting, the $500 cost and the potential 10nm node drop in the next year or two makes it more compelling to "wait and see". I'm glad AMD's pushed Intel towards higher core counts and back to solder in the mean time, even if so far it hasn't resulted in lower prices for blue team CPUs.
gavbon - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
Soldered TIM > that abhorrent cheap paste they usually useyeeeeman - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
At 500$ there is not one single reason why anyone would buy this CPU. For multithreaded stuff you can buy a 1920X with 12 cores and 24 threads at 450$ and get much better performance. For ST or gaming you can buy a 300$ 2700X or a 8700K/9700K. They need to lower the price, otherwise this product is no good.SirMaster - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
No reason?You just said that if you want multi-thread to get threadripper, and for single thread to go with lesser thread count or the cheaper AMD.
What about if you want both? I play games many hours a week but I also do content creation on my PC (rendering, encoding, etc) and I am a heavy overclocker. I push my stuff to the max on water cooling.
I feel like the 9900K is perfect for me.
nevcairiel - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
I fully agree with that. Everyone is ignoring enthusiasts that both work and game on the same machine, because why not. Personally I'm not going to get a 9900K though, but if Ice Lake on 10nm has an equivalent part, I might get that one.JoeyJoJo123 - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
I think it's too expensive too, but there is a market out there.Premiere cares more about per-core frequency than having tons of threads, but it also cares about threads as well. The iGPU can also be used in some applications to speed up rendering times for video. For a workstation whose express purpose is to edit video, the 9900k makes sense if time is money and they're in a daily business of making video content (YouTube/Twitch/whatever) and a day of not meeting a deadline of an upload means lost traction in the video space.
It's a niche, but it exists and the processor can be the best of the best for some applications. As with all things, end consumers need to operate and decide their parts on a fixed budget and stick to the best parts they can fit under the budget they have. And for most people, yeah $500 on the CPU alone is way outside of budget, and that's fine.
But yes, I do want Intel to drop their prices here. They're always pricing this jank under the "supposition" that they'll cannibalize other product stacks, but the fact is if someone needed enthusiast board features, they'd go for the enthusiast chipset and processor. If someone just wants mainstream features they'll stick to the mainstream product.
nerd1 - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
Obviously you have no idea.9900K is guaranteed to turboboost to 5Ghz, which means it will be reliably overclocked to 5.3~4Ghz. That is 20~30% faster than ANYTHING AMD has. In short, 9900K will be much faster than ANY AMD processor (including 32 core threadripper) for tasks that uses less than 16 threads, which is 99.9% of all the single user applications.
Fritzkier - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
Why not just buy 8700k?Samus - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
I agree the 8700K and even the 8700 are both significant alternatives, but the point of the 9th Gen's improvements, according to this article, focus on the TIM. Since they are soldered they will run significantly cooler, even at stock.Targon - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
Isn't the all-core boost only going to 4.8GHz without manually overclocking on the 9900K? Going to 5.2-5.3GHz I can see as well. Ryzen 3rd generation should also be hitting the 5GHz on 8 core/16 thread without a problem when it comes out in March/April of 2019, but beyond that, I won't speculate how high it will be able to clock without more information.Samus - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
What if you are doing video decoding\encoding, and need Quick Sync?Just one of many common scenerios someone would need a high-power Intel CPU with an iGPU (Xeon CPU's - at least all of the previous ones with disabled iGPU's, do NOT support Quick Sync)
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
Than you AMD for kicking intel in the pants hard enough to get them to back off on paste.Oxford Guy - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
Yeah. It seems we now need to redefine the enthusiast space to be about pro-level overclocking using exotic impractical cooling like liquid nitrogen.hoohoo - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
Stay away from liquid nitrogen! It makes you become hirsute!Atari2600 - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
Not a word on Intel's shenanigans with "Principled" Technologies?I have to admit, I'm unfortunately starting to doubt the impartiality of Intel's PR offload group Purch Marketing's subsidiary Anandtech when it comes to reviewing Intel's products with a critical eye.
gfkBill - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
It's an article about extreme overclocking, no comparisons as such to AMD (other than that AMD holds several GHz records). So I'm not sure what your point is.Damn Atari2600 fanbois.
nandnandnand - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
Sister site Tom's Hardware is reporting on it.You'd have to be some kind of moron to give Intel your money, given their overpriced CPUs, Management Engine, and shady practices (don't forget the 28-core fiasco).
Here's hoping that AMD doubles Ryzen core counts on 7nm.
Diji1 - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
I guess nubcakes haven't heard of Trust Engine.Ian Cutress - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/104998631397...https://twitter.com/IanCutress/status/104998659837...
We don't care much for vendor purchased benchmarks. We ignore them. We do our own testing. We recommend you wait for our review.
Atari2600 - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
I hope you call out Intel's shenanigans in your review.I also wish you'd stop giving them the benefit of the doubt. They aren't that stupid. How many times will they have to perform a "whoops" before you start to accept these things are not accidental?
nandnandnand - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
Look closely at the Viking in the first image. He is clearly dead inside.Dump Intel.
cbm80 - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
When there's a gulf between base and turbo clocks, overclocking makes little sense. What does make sense is overTDPing. With a higher TDP you can run turbo most or all the time. Higher performance with no overclocking...Mikewind Dale - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
"This might mean the processors has a rated lifespan of several years, rather than a dozen years."That sounds bad. Will we still see some processors with paste? I'd rather buy a more reliable computer with a longer lifespan than a faster computer.
Will multiplier-locked processors still have paste? If the paste is more reliable, and if locked processors have paste, then I'll start buying multiplier-locked processors.
Mr Perfect - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
I'm curious as to what "several years" means. I've got ye olde Sandy Bridge i7 2600 (non-K mind you) with a soldered heatspreader still going after 7 years. Is it due to keel over shortly? What's the MTBF for soldered CPUS?Oxford Guy - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
Soldered chips are more reliable than paste TIM chips, not less. This fact applies to the actual enthusiast sector, which is not a pro sector that uses liquid nitrogen.Enthusiasts cool with custom water loops, most typically. Below them are those who use AIO setups. And, believe it or not, some enthusiasts also use air cooling.
Dragonstongue - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
PC mark, you know the same company that Intel is "a board member" so they can screw with results in the background to make anything Intel branded show higher numbers then it actually is..They (Intel, and others) should go out of their way to find a "truly" unbiased benchmark suite that is allied and not entrenched with anyone other then the maker themselves to "level the playing field" and so when new CPU-GPU-SSD etc come out and the big corporations want to truly show off they will be able to do so from a "clean slate"
none of this "working behind closed doors" to fleece consumers/customers out of big $$$$$$$$$ expecting one thing and getting a completely other real world result.
Like vehicles that gut the interior, trim down the weight of everything to increase fuel mileage on a closed circuit indoor test track and "claiming" as real expected fuel mileage..its crap way of doing things.
Lord of the Bored - Thursday, October 11, 2018 - link
PCMark isn't a company. Futuremark isn't anymore either, having been purchased and merged into Underwriters Laboratories.PeachNCream - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
Eh, the importance of a soldered IHS in the consumer space has diminished between Sandy Bridge's release and today. Sure the new CPUs will likely deliver higher overclocks, but the world of 2018 has seen increased outright replacement of desktop PCs with phones, tablets, and laptops. I'm thinking this is more a marketing department checkbox intended to have a halo effect on sales of higher volume non-K processors rather than a serious nod to the diminished number of remaining people that still play games with big, clunky desktop computers.Oxford Guy - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
"That sounds bad. Will we still see some processors with paste? I'd rather buy a more reliable computer with a longer lifespan than a faster computer."It's typically smoke and mirrors to make Intel's force-feeding of substandard TIM onto enthusiasts all these years. The propaganda has always been about microcracking. The original claim, which was ludicrous but pushed heavily in places like the Anandtech forum, was that microcracking is a problem for soldered chips under air and water. In reality, it's a problem for liquid nitrogen. A PDF that was supposed to seem like credible science kept being posted to prop up this ruse. A big part of the nonsense was the claim that process nodes have shrunk since Sandy so much that the dies are simply too small to support solder. Yes, folks, that nonsense was treated like fact, again and again, in the forums and elsewhere.
AMD has exposed these lies with Ryzen so Intel has had no choice but to abandon its craven thermal paste strategy, a strategy it adopted as a consequence of Bulldozer/Piledriver not competing with Sandy/Ivy. So, Intel apologists are moving the goal posts for the word enthusiast. Now, it's not the typical water loop person. No. It's not liquid nitrogen cooling! Enthusiasts don't use liquid nitrogen. Pros use it. But, since we want to forget about Intel's marketing strategies, like telling actual enthusiasts that it was using better-quality TIM for Devil's Canyon (later exposed to be the same TIM as before), we will pretend that the enthusiast space is about liquid nitrogen.
Intel benefitted from selling its substandard TIM for enthusiast-grade parts. It saved money on the thermal interface. It made money from damaged chips, due to extra sales to replace them. It got marketing from all the delidding traffic. But, now that it has competition it has to offer a better-quality product. This is what competition is about, folks. Monopolies always offer less product quality. You get less for your money when there is monopoly.
For the real enthusiast space, soldered chips should be more reliable, not less. Heat is the enemy, not microcracks, unless you're a pro using truly exotic impractical cooling which is what liquid nitrogen is.
Oxford Guy - Friday, October 12, 2018 - link
Add "look better" to the end of my first sentence.PeachNCream - Monday, October 15, 2018 - link
"Enthusiasts don't use liquid nitrogen. Pros use it."Hubawah? What professional uses liquid nitrogen to cool a processor? In a professional environment, computers are typically OEM builds from a relatively well known brand. There's nothing professional about extreme overclocking except that sometimes a hardware manufacturer that might have a professional workforce sponsors a team or an event in order to help get their name out through side-channel marketing.
Oxford Guy - Monday, October 15, 2018 - link
"What professional uses liquid nitrogen to cool a processor?"Professional enthusiasts.
AntonErtl - Saturday, October 13, 2018 - link
About CPU lifetimes: The only CPU that I ever have seen failing was the Core i7 6700K (with paste) that failed after one year of use (with maybe 2 hours of overclocking during that time). By contrast, the Clawhammer Athlon 64 3200+ that I bought 15 years ago (with solder AFAIK) still works and is still in use.Elstar - Tuesday, October 16, 2018 - link
One thing I never understood about overclocking is why Intel or AMD doesn't try to make *more* money from the community on it. For example, given that very few CPUs can hit the highest frequencies, why not sell those that do at auction? I'm really curious what the market would pay for overclocked CPUs that are supported by Intel/AMD.monglerbongler - Saturday, October 27, 2018 - link
Is there any justification beyond theatrics for using liquid nitrogen vs dry ice acetone?In both systems, the temperature of the coolant is already far lower than the processor would require to function properly if it were in thermal equilibrium (eg at the same temperature) -78 C (~195 K) or -196 C (77k)
However, Dry ice possesses a significantly higher (latent) enthalpy of sublimation compared with the (latent) heat of vaporization of liquid nitrogen (570 vs 200 kJ/kg). Furthermore, Dry ice is denser than liquid nitrogen (~1.4-1.6 kg/m^3 vs ~0.8 kg/m^3).
In both cases, the heat sink is not the material itself storing the heat in excitations of vibrations/translations/rotations of atoms or molecules. Instead the heat is powering a phase change ("breaking" those intramolecular or intraatomic bonds). With liquid nitrogen, the material is already saturated with heat. Every gram of liquid nitrogen is in a constant process of vaporization (boiling). Same with dry ice, which is subliming.
With dry ice/acetone you get 2x the heat sink (570 vs 200 kj/kg) and 2x the density (~1.5 vs ~0.8 kg/m^3). Its obviously not 1:1 because you can't pack the dry ice perfectly into the volume of the dewar heat sink, but its close. You can certainly smash up the dry ice with an ice pick and pack in there tightly.
In theory you should be able to get significantly more than 2x the heat into the dry ice acetone bath than the liquid nitrogen. The safety consideration is minimal. In both cases you need ventilation so that concern would already be met. nitrogen for accidental asphixiation, and with dry ice acetone for the spark/fume hazard. However, the flammability and inhalation hazard is minimal with dry ice acetone as the vapor pressure is considerably lowered due to the lower temperature. This distinction is well known in the sciences. When scientists need a quick, simple, readily accessible, and most importantly CHEAP cooling method they use dry ice acetone.
Go into any biology, chemistry, or materials science laboratory. Less well funded laboratories often utilize dry ice acetone to cool rotary evaporators and chemical reactions (because acetone is cheap and dry ice is readily available and provided by the facility, vs chillers which are expensive).
Liquid nitrogen is also used, although its typically used when the temperature, rather than the heat dissipation, is the concern (eg lyophilization in a biochemistry setting or degassing in a chemistry/materials science setting).
Dry ice is cheap. You can buy it at most grocery stores. You do not need a dewar. Acetone is cheap. You can buy it at 100% of hardware stores (either explicitly as "acetone" or in some cases as laquer thinner, although you should look up the SDS to make sure its not a different chemical or mixture) and most pharmacies (pure acetone nailpolish remover; you have to look at the label, as plenty of nailpolish removers have other chemicals added to them, but they definitely sell it)
You can also use methanol, but that is more inherently toxic.
So I ask again:
Aside from theatrics.... the cool factor..... the NPC/NORP "like WOAH DUDE TOTALLY!" factor.... is there any justification for liquid nitrogen?