Intel Core i7 Comet Lake i7-10700K BOX

Almost top

The Intel Core i7-10700K is a near-top processor from the Intel camp, which operates with eight cores with Hyper-Threading support and operates at a nominal frequency of 3.8 GHz. And when studying the performance of new items from Intel, one cannot do without comparison with the predecessor Core i7-9700K and the competitor in the face of the Ryzen 7 3700X. We will compare, keeping in mind some difference in price. According to the company's official price lists, it costs $374, that is, it is potentially the people's flagship. But right now, literally three stores are selling it, and their prices are significantly higher than stated. Therefore, if you like the i7-10700K, then we advise you to hold your horses a little.

A force to be reckoned with

Well, now to the tests. We start with games and see what we already knew very well: when using a fairly fast graphics card and a processor of this level, the influence of the latter on FSP is simply negligible. We are talking about a difference in just a couple of frames. In heavy archiving, rendering and compiling tests, the Core i7-10700K looks much more confident than the Ryzen 7 3700X. It is faster almost everywhere, and its advantage becomes especially noticeable in overclocking. By the way, overclocking here is quite interesting, when the voltage is increased by one core, it is able to keep the frequency up to 5.3 GHz (5.1 GHz in turbo boost), and when all 8 cores are activated, the stable frequency rests at 4.6 – 4.7 GHz, which is even slightly lower than the younger brother Core i7-9700K. However he did not have additional virtual cores.

Take care of cooling

In general, the numbers themselves are very interesting, but not out of touch with reality. And it turns out that the i7-10700K is quite hot and voracious, so it equally needs a good cooling system and a high-quality and powerful power supply. Secondly, the difference in price even at the recommended level is on the side of the Ryzen 7 3700X processor, but in reality the gap is much larger. In some stores, almost one and a half times. And the performance gap is far from being so obvious, in benchmarks tied to HEVC Decode and SmoothVideo video decoding, the Core i7-10700K even slightly lags behind the Ryzen 7 3700X.