Coffee Lake Thread

[SteelCrysis]

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-...37908.html

There are few absolute truths, but the old mantra of "never trust vendor's benchmarks" is certainly one of them so today's findings that the benchmarks are flawed isn't entirely surprising. We've seen misleading reports in the past from almost every vendor, but it is concerning that this report comes during Intel's 10-day preorder window.

Here are some of the controversial results in Principled Technologies' report.

Principled Technologies' benchmarks pit the Core i9-9900K, Intel's new flagship eight-core processor for mainstream systems, against AMD's mainstream desktop Ryzen 7 2700X. The 19 game benchmarks in the report paint a very convincing picture of the Core i9-9900K's total dominance over the Ryzen 7 2700X in gaming, but a deeper look at the system settings used during the tests revealed a few questionable, and one downright unbelievable, configuration that skews the results in Intel's favor.
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Slight differences in cooling solutions can have an impact on the test setup. In this case, the Intel system could expend more waste heat than the AMD system, which would provide it with an advantage. Intel's new K-series processor doesn't come with a stock cooler, so the company had to use a third-party solution, but sound testing methodology dictates that coolers for both systems should be of equal quality, which didn't happen here.

Perhaps the most damning admission involves AMD's Game Mode feature that AMD created for its Threadripper processors. Game mode essentially disables half of the processors' available cores to circumvent the intricacies of the Threadripper architecture. Those same principles don't apply to the mainstream Ryzen processors, but Principled Technologies chose to enable the feature on the eight-core Ryzen 7 2700X anyway, thus turning the processor into a four-core chip. As you might expect, this effectively cripples the processor in heavily threaded gaming benchmarks, and the test suite included a few impacted titles, like Ashes of the Singularity.
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We've reached out to Principled Technologies for comment and have lodged follow up questions with Intel. For now, in spite of Intel's statement, it appears that the tests are spurious at best. We advise readers to wait for reviews instead of plunking down their hard-earned cash based solely on vendor benchmarks.