 Intel has spent the last five years on 14 nanometer and the thermals have been bad enough that d-lidding has been popular since the 7700k launched. I don't care how many pluses they add to the end of this thing, they simply cannot compete with the laws of physics and certainly not with AMD's 7 nanometer node. And now they've gone and packed 10 cores into this thing? Well gee, I sure hope our fire insurance is up to date. I was so sure that Intel's 10th generation consumer chips were going to literally immediately catch fire that I told Anthony, you know what, why don't we put the thermals right at the beginning of the script so that we can save everyone from bothering to watch the whole review just to find out the thing is unusable. And as you guys can see here I was absolutely wrong. I'm sorry what? Apparently the core i9 10900k 10 core CPU is shockingly well behaved from a thermal perspective. Not only does it sit comfortably at around 60 degrees or so under sustained load at its default settings, when we remove the turbo boost limits in the bios we do see ninth gen like thermals except we're hovering it around 4.8 gigahertz on all cores. That is well above the 3.7 gigahertz base clock. That does not compute. How in the heck did they manage this? Well as it turns out in spite of some of my misgivings about the things their marketing department says and does, Intel's engineers are still pretty dang good at their jobs and they've got a few tricks up their sleeves. Instead of just using soldered thermal interface material on this new generation of chips they have also shrunk the thickness of the CPU die itself significantly reducing the amount of material that's standing between its heat generating transistors and the heat spreader on top. To compensate the heat spreader was made thicker to provide more thermal mass as well and you might not think this tiny difference is a big deal but it clearly is. Now power consumption is of course still very high as we might expect with stock package power measuring at around 125 watts and our limits removed power peaking at over 220 watts full turbo. So whoo-wee suffice to say daily driver overclocking this thing is going to be a challenge to say the least and you're gonna want beefy cooling and a beefy motherboard even for stock turbo unleashed operation. Speaking of which we've actually got a new socket. Hooray LGA 1200 is here. Boo. Although at least it's for a potentially good reason this time around. Gigabyte's Aorus team hinted that the new power budget requirements of these 10th gen chips would have made many last generation boards out of spec anyway and they confirmed that their motherboards are capable of PCIe gen 4 even if these 10th gen chips aren't. So the bad news is if you want to go 10th gen you need a new motherboard. The good news is that there will be an upgrade path once 11th gen comes around with PCIe gen 4 rumored to be a headline feature. By the way if you want to see us build one of these rigs stay tuned for Friday's live stream you won't want to miss it. Get subscribed. There's more good news for the platform too. Every core i3 through i9 is getting hyper threading which I'm really jazzed about this can now be toggled on and off on a per core basis. Why would you want to do that I hear you ask. Well the new platform also reports the two best cores in your system so if you wanted to unchain them and let them run single threaded as fast as possible while your other hyper threaded cores handle all the background junk you can do that. Oh by the way if you were thinking to yourself hey hold on a second didn't Intel do that without the hyper threading controls on their high-end desktop chips? If you were give yourself a cookie because yes they did. The consumer desktop is getting not one but two new turboing mechanisms. Turbo boost max 3.0 along with what they're calling thermal velocity boost. Intel's opportunistic boost algorithm that means that in theory these CPUs should be turboing up quite aggressively under bursty loads. It's time to test out these new CPUs make sure you got an extra pair of underwear on standby lttstore.com because for today's shootout things are getting real. We've got the core i9 10900k along with the core i5 cousin that people are actually gonna buy and an assortment of previous gen and team red equivalents and unsurprisingly at these clock speeds Intel has still got gaming on a lockdown for now. The higher base clock on the six core core i5 10600k pushes it out ahead of the 10th gen core i9 in more lightly threaded games like shadow the tomb raider and red dead redemption 2 which may make it a contender for mid-range enthusiasts in its own right but it's still worth noting that the core i9's frame rates are far more consistent and measurably higher than our other platforms wherever a large thread count comes into play where the cpu can maintain higher individual core frequencies over time. Of course as many prospective amd buyers know gaming is only part of the equation in productivity the ryzen 5 3600x still dunks on the core i5 but while the ryzen 9 3900x does do the same to the core i9 it is not by the margin that you might expect from amd's 20% increase in thread count with our multi-threaded workloads ranging anywhere between 5 and 15% difference. Single threaded results confirm what we already knew from gaming each thread is faster on 10th gen than on ryzen thanks to those insane clocks and the longer the workload is the more likely the core i9 is going to be forced to drop out of max turbo which reopens that performance gap in amd's favor. So then we're back in this weird situation where intel is measurably better for gaming and amd is measurably better for productivity but the gap between the two is beginning to more closely resemble the gap between zen plus and coffee lake even if intel did have to resort to running very high core clocks at very high power draws like amd once did and as much as i was concerned that the increase in power draw would result in consumer systems overheating left and right it turns out that the thermals are somehow even better controlled than last generation. Pricing is of course geared to come in at a slight premium over amd's components which hints at the more premium brand image that intel hopes to maintain in comparison to team red you guys might not think it works and you might hate that it works but it does work intel isn't playing around here and while our 10th gen comet lake cpus feel like a stopgap solution rather than something transformative like amd's zen 2 was competition does seem to be alive and well within the cpu market gives me goosebumps just thinking about it thanks for watching guys if you're done which you are maybe go check out our recent review of amd's new third gen ryzen 3s for more head to head red versus blue goodness