Intel Core i7 10700K 8-Core CPU Review

There’s no going around it: Intel is hanging on as much as it can but with the competition scoring numerous victories as of its last-gen while Intel is struggling, a loss at this stage may mean that this is Intel’s “Last Dance” at the top of the gaming mountain. There’s no revenge narrative or breaking-the-stalemate story here. It’s one of survival. Battling to keep a market position Intel has hold onto for such a long time that criticisms of its their lax development may ring true now that they have are trying to fight back an ever-evolving Ryzen threat.

March 2021 Update: Intel has released the Intel Rocket Lake-S desktop CPUs. See our reviews for those CPUs here: Intel Core i9-11900K CPU Review and Intel Core i7-11700KF CPU Review

Today, Intel releases its 10th-gen consumer desktop CPU to the market and in this review we’ll be taking a look at the current flagship of the Comet Lake-S stack with the Intel Core i9-10900K. This 10-core CPU is perhaps their last bid into claiming a win against AMD, brandishing a 5.3Ghz boost – albeit for a single core – and a nominal Turbo of 4.Ghz. Of course all of these have a catch and we’ll talk about that in this review.

In this review we’ll take a look at the Core i7-10700K, essentially the revenge of 9900K. Our review of the Core i9-10900K is here.

I’m writing this as I just finish my Core i9 review and despite my enthusiasm about the Core i9-10900K, I feel like the Core i7-10700K is the sorry note you want to receive for that hot mess that was the 9900K, just because it was too hot. With Intel promising a better die design with a thinner substrate between the die and IHS, the temperatures are better on the the 10th-gen CPUs. That said, this makes me much more excited to actually see this Core i7 than the i9.  The 10700K, as mentioned, is an 8-core CPU featuring Hyperthreading and is capable of boosting up to 5.1Ghz. It is pretty much the 9900K in many facets but is demoted to i7 status and of course, it has the improvements of this release. At $374 tray price, we’re looking at an approximately $400 retail chip, definitely lower than the 9900K.

Read on as we find out more about this Core i7 10700K in this review. Let’s begin.

Major parts of this review is shared with our Core i9 10900K review. If you’ve read that review, you can jump straight to the conclusion.

 Intel 10th-gen CPU: What’s New

There’s really not a lot to talk about with the new CPU in terms of details but to dash through the specs, we do have plenty of SKUs launching and each of them are somewhat a more refined release than previous-gen. It’s much more easier to discern models this time around with Hyperthreading present in the full stack. Much more prevalent as well as Intel pointing our Thermal Velocity Boost.

If you’re not familiar, Turbo Velocity Boost sits on top of Turbo Boost 2.0 and Turbo Boost Max 3.0 but with board manufacturers can override Intel standards hence different boards having different CPU performance results but require better if not overdesigned VRMs. By default though, Intel fits the Comet Lake-S lineup from 125W and 65W.

We have the Intel Core i9-10900K sitting on top featuring a baseclock of 3.7Ghz and has a Turbo Velocity Boost(TVB) of  5.3Ghz. This is followed by no-IGP models and non-K models but we’re not interested in those so up next we have the i7 in the stack back with Hyperthreading, the i7 10700K and so forth. The chart is listed below for your reference. For a quick summary, the most noteworthy models here are the i9-10900K of course to see how Intel does 10-core on mainstream and then the i7-10700K which goes head-to-head with the 9900K versus last-gen. then we have the i5-10600K and i6-10600 for mainstream which is a  great middleground for mainstream builds and at its pricepoint, its both i5 will look to beat out the 3600 and 3600X from AMD. Last up is i3-10100, the entry-level 10th-gen Core CPU this generation and this pricepoint has always been the go-to for many builders and will be a good competition for AMD’s newer entry-level CPUs.

While the CPUs may be straight-forward, the motherboards are fairly kept to the high-end for the launch wave and we’ll here more about the other 400-series chips in the coming days. For now the Z490 is the top-end motherboard chipset and will support the entire range of 10th-gen CPUs from Intel for LGA1200.