Intel’s recent launch of their 10th Gen Comet Lake CPUs has reinforced their place at the peak of the gaming CPU market and has even proved to compete admirably in workstation tasks down to the new Core-i5. While they won’t be able to hold out forever as developers learn how to build games that utilize the higher core and thread counts offered by Zen 2 (and beyond), single-threaded performance and clock speed still reign supreme for game performance. Here we arrive at the Core-i9 10900K, Intel’s new gaming CPU champion.

If you’re in the market for the best of the best in games performance, then look no further. Not only has Intel managed to provide marked improvements over the Core-i9 9900K from last-gen, but (while having 2 fewer cores and 4 fewer threads), they even trade blows in productivity benchmarks with the likes of the 12 core/24 thread Ryzen 9 3900X. Such excellent performance is mostly thanks to their new manufacturing techniques for their 14nm (+∞) process. By shrinking the height of the silicon, increasing the thickness of the IHS, and improving the quality of their materials overall, the K-Series Comet Lake CPUs all have impressive thermal performance. These improvements come at a cost, however, with the TDP for the 10900K quickly reaching 250W+ when unrestricted and overclocked. Thus, if you’ve decided to upgrade to the 10900K, you’re going to need to invest in some robust cooling; at minimum, a high-end dual-tower air cooler or 240mm+ AIO. If you’ve already got a beefy cooling solution, rest assured, the new LGA 1200 socket is compatible with all i5 8400 cpu mounting hardware.