Intel Core i9-10850K CPU Benchmarks: Cheaper, but Nearly Identical to 10900K

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Comet Lake gets a price drop disguised as a new chip

The 10-core 20-thread Core i9-10850K has landed in our lab, bringing with it nearly identical specifications as Intel's halo Core i9-10900K that holds the crown as the world's fastest gaming processor (albeit by a slim margin). We're sharing the results of our most relevant tests now, like gaming, application performance, and power testing, as they tell the pretty simple story behind the chip. We'll post the full review with a bit more testing in the coming days.  

In many respects, the Core i9-10850K feels like a price cut that comes disguised as a new product. A scant 100 MHz of frequency separates it from the $488 Core i9-10900K, but the 10850K's recommended price of $453 represents a 7% savings. Given the price gouging we've seen on the 10900K due to its spotty availability, we expect the price deltas to be even larger at retail. That makes the 10850K a contender for our list of Best Gaming CPUs.

As you'll see below, the Core i9-10850K offers nearly the same level of performance as the 10900K in the majority of our tests and even ekes out a few wins throughout our benchmarks.

The slight difference between the two chips raises the question: Why did Intel release the 10850K three months after the Comet Lake-S launch?

There are a few possibilities, but they're interrelated. Despite the 10900K's impressive performance in gaming, it brings along some baggage in the form of intense power consumption and heat generation that require a bevy of high-priced accommodations, like a premium motherboard, cooler and power supply.

That magnifies the 10900K's high up-front pricing. Those factors make AMD's ultra-competitive Ryzen 9 3900X, which retails for $100 less and doesn't require such extravagant accommodations, a better value if you aren't looking to pay a hefty premium to eke out the very last few fps of gaming performance. The Ryzen 9 3900X also excels in threaded workloads, making it more attractive for the productivity-minded.

The 10900K is a high-priced and high-performing product with a limited target market, but Intel has had problems filling that niche. The Core i9-10900K has suffered from spotty availability in the US. It is also consistently out of stock overseas, which has led to price gouging from retailers and exacerbates the already-high pricing. 

 

It's rational to assume the availability issues stem from the 10900K's position at the top of the Comet Lake-S binning chart – it's a premium-binned chip and there simply might not be enough chips coming out of that fabs that land on the higher end of the binning distribution, making it hard to satisfy demand. The resulting price gouging only serves to widen the pricing gap between Intel's halo model and AMD's competing chips that already hold several key advantages.

 

Conversely, the 10850K obviously falls into a slightly lower position on the binning chart, which could boost Intel's production capacity and help address the obvious demand for the unlocked Core i9 chips. We imagine that would take some pressure off of the 10900K and result in better pricing and availability all around.

The end result for you? A chip that will largely provide identical performance to the Core i9-10900K, but at a discount. Let's take a quick look at the Core i9-10850K at stock settings and with the power limits removed, which equates to a simple form of quasi-overclocking. We'll post more in-depth overclocking testing in our full review, which you'll see in the coming days. 

Core i9-10850K Pricing, Specifications and Availability

 

The Comet Lake architecture, which comes with the 14nm++ process, is yet another Skylake derivative, meaning most performance gains come from added features and clock rate improvements. We've covered the finer details here, but like the Core i9-10900K, the 10850K has an unlocked multiplier that enables easy overclocking, solder TIM to boost overclocking capabilities, and doesn't come with a bundled cooler. As before, be sure to price in a Z-series motherboard and a capable cooling solution, preferably liquid, if you're off to the overclocking races. 
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