Intel Core i5 Comet Lake i5-10600K BOX

It's definitely not a Core i7?

So, what do we have here? Yeah, 6 cores with Hyper-threading enabled (i.e., 12 cores), turbo boost up to 4.8 GHz and a result of almost 30,000 points in the Geekbench 4 benchmark. And for all this they ask for a little less than $ 300. Listen, are we really talking about Core i5 now? Because by all accounts it should be a pretty expensive Core i7. At least that's how it would have been a couple of years ago. But the bitter slaughter with AMD has led to the fact that Intel has lost its status as the king of processors and is now trying to catch up with a competitor, attracting customers with low prices, and not some new developments.

Multithreading and unlocked multiplier

However, as end users, we are only satisfied, because compared to the predecessor Core i5-9600K, the novelty seems to be a huge step forward. The new six-core processor gained support for Hyper-Threading technology and, thanks to this, increased its performance by almost a quarter, falling short of the Core i7-9700K level. However, both then at the time of release, and now, when this article is being written, the direct competitor of the Core i5-10600K is the great and terrible Ryzen 5 3600, which reigns in the middle price segment.

A worthy rival for the Ryzen 5 3600

At the beginning of 2021, both processors are asking for about $300, both are equipped with standard cooling, and both have an unlocked multiplier for overclocking. The Core i5 also has an integrated video core, which explains the nearly $20 difference in price. If you've been following AMD vs. Intel in recent years, the benchmark results will hardly come as a surprise to you: the Ryzen 5 3600 has a slight advantage in many resource-intensive tasks, but it also slightly loses to the six-core Intel when it comes to games. Therefore, we cannot unequivocally recommend “take this here”.