Intel manipulates benchmarks to benefit core i9 9900k

Intel yesterday announced its 9th generation Core processors, including the Core i9 9900K, with benchmarks included to show that they are superior to the AMD Ryzen 2000. Enthusiasts quickly pointed out that Intel's numbers are wrong and misleading, as they misrepresent both test configurations and run AMD processors with suboptimal configurations.

Intel does not play fair in the presentation of Core i9 9900K

Intel paid Principled Technologies, a third-party performance testing agency, to obtain performance data by comparing the Core i9-9900K with the Ryzen 7 2700X, rather than testing the two chips internally and publishing their test configuration data.

We recommend reading our post on Intel Core i7-8700K Review in Spanish

From the beginning, we see that Principled Technologies uses a sub-optimal memory configuration for Ryzen 7 2700X, with all four memory slots occupied, and at stock speeds. Principled Technologies has set the memory clocks in the Ryzen configuration to 2933 MHz, letting the motherboard BIOS find extremely high memory times to stabilize the memory clock.

In the case of the Core i9-9900K, testers simply changed the XMP profile of the Corsair Vengeance RGB DDR4-3000 memory kit, which ended up not only at higher clocks, but also at tighter latencies. This gives the Intel platform a significant performance advantage over AMD. Ryzen processors are more sensitive to memory than Intel, since DRAM clocks are synchronized with InfinityFabric, which determines the communication speed of the two internal components of the chip.

The next part of their disappointment was testing both settings at 1080p in "Ashes of the Singularity" with medium settings, to get extremely suspicious performance data. When HardwareUnboxed used similar settings to compare its Core i7-8700K with the Ryzen 7 2700X, the performance numbers obtained were very different, and they do not bode well for the credibility of the Core i9-9900K numbers. Without the i9-9900K's unfair advantage, the Ryzen 7 2700X produces frame rates up to 18% higher than Intel's numbers suggest. History repeats itself with "Assassin's Creed Origins, " where Principled Technologies numbers paint the Intel 8700K 36% faster than the 2700X, while actually 8% faster.

In this case, Intel's numbers are released almost 2 weeks before the NDA is released to reviewers, and the Core i9-9900K is already available for pre-purchase, in some places even at $ 540. We strongly recommend that you wait until the performance reviews of various publications come out before purchasing.

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