Intel silently rolls out their locked i7/i9 9th Gen CPUS

[Princess Luna]

Intel has quietly finally made available the 65W TDP Locked variants of the Core i7 9700 and Core i9 9900 processors in a further attempt to stay competitive against upcoming Zen 2, price-to-performance wise.

 

Intel high end locked SKUs are nothing new and have always been part of Intel's portfolio, the latest entry was the well known Core i7 8700 which was still a very good value alternative to the Ryzen 5 2600X when you factor in the savings on motherboard and cooling you could have a similar priced system with yet greater performance despite the 4.3ghz all cores max frequency (unless you BCLK it on a Z chipset).

 

Coffee Lake Refresh 9th gen however was an odd ball and the first time Intel has delayed the locked variants not having those released alongside their unlocked counter-parts, the pressure for high performance at lower price points caused by AMD with it's upcoming Ryzen 7 3700X is likely the reason Intel has finally brought these SKUs.

 

Now the moment of truth, with the 9700 priced at 329 dollars and the 9900 at 399 dollars, the possibility to use cheap motherboards such as an AsRock Z390M Pro4 and a cheap cooler such as the Cooler Master Hyper 212 Black Edition you can build a gaming PC capable of fully driving even a RTX 2080 Ti at 1440p/4K.

 

It certainly is a shame Intel still overcharges for the privilege of overclocking however nowadays locked parts have better power efficiency while still sustaining very high all core clocks, 4.5ghz for the 9700 and 4.6ghz for the 9900, which as we know is sufficient for not only high end gaming but lots of productivity tasks.

 

What are your thoughts? Could these processors represent a better value than AMD's upcoming Ryzen 7 3700X ~ Ryzen 7 3800X?

 

@Mira Yurizaki Tagged you simply for our long running acceptance for these locked SKUs, I'd like to hear you out ^^

[NunoLava1998]

The 3600 is 199$ and is 9700K performance, so no Intel won't be able to compete.

 

[boey]

so basically, we pay $100 more over a 9900 for a 9900k which has a 100mhz higher all-core boost? why though? shouldn't intel just have sold these 9900s unlocked as 9900k's for $399 and actually be competitive against amd? a $399 unlocked 9900 would definitely be competitive against a $399 3800x.

[boey]

Just now, NunoLava1998 said:

The 3600 is 199$ and is 9700K performance, so no Intel won't be able to compete.

 

we don't know that for sure yet

[NunoLava1998]

1 minute ago, _d0nut said:

we don't know that for sure yet

El Chapuzas Informática already has released a review for the 3600, on both X470 and X570 motherboards.

Single-core is 3% behind the 9900K (and way ahead of the 2700X), and multicore is about 20% behind the 9900K (not surprising; you're comparing a 6c to an 8c). It's about the same as 9700K in terms of performance. About the price tag, we already know for weeks now.

[boey]

1 minute ago, NunoLava1998 said:

El Chapuzas Informática already has released a review for the 3600, on both X470 and X570 motherboards.

Single-core is 3% behind the 9900K (and way ahead of the 2700X), and multicore is about 20% behind the 9900K (not surprising; you're comparing a 6c to an 8c). It's about the same as 9700K in terms of performance

It's not 100% confirmed, as is any benchmark that comes out before the actual launch date(unless it's from AMD, then it may be a biased comparison and shouldn't be trusted anyway)

 

We'll only know for sure on 7/7 when the NDA lifts and 3rd party reviewers release statistics

[NunoLava1998]

Just now, _d0nut said:

It's not 100% confirmed, as is any benchmark that comes out before the actual launch date(unless it's from AMD, then it may be a biased comparison and shouldn't be trusted anyway)

 

We'll only know for sure on 7/7 when the NDA lifts and 3rd party reviewers release statistics

El Chapuzas Informatica IS a 3rd party reviewer. I think the NDA lifts before 7/7 though. No idea why they released the review so early though; it's not even July.

[nick name]

2 hours ago, NunoLava1998 said:

El Chapuzas Informatica IS a 3rd party reviewer. I think the NDA lifts before 7/7 though. No idea why they released the review so early though; it's not even July.

That guy most likely didn't get a sample from AMD.  He's released every Ryzen review early.  

[Mathieu9836]

IMO you can't compare a 199 USD unlocked 3600 to a 329 USD locked i7-9700, it's getting close to 50% of the price for what?. If benchmark leaks are the truth, then Intel will have work to do to be competing with AMD performance per dollar value. Personally i'm not into buying locked CPUs.

[Mira Yurizaki]

I'm convinced the whole locked/unlocked thing doesn't even matter anymore. The first is that the potential gains most people are getting out of overclocking the processor has been minimal in the past few years. The average amount of overclocking I can see since Coffee Lake were less than 10%. The second is that this is still adjusting only the maximum turbo boost speed. So that 10% may not even be seen across all scenarios. Adding all-core boosting doesn't seem to significantly improve performance while blowing up TDP moreso than what Intel claims their processors are.

 

At least the price difference is a better pill to swallow going the unlocked route since it's 10% higher than the locked core. It used to be as high as 20%. But still, I don't see a point in going after unlocked processors anymore.

 

EDIT: To put things in perspective, the i7-2600K could be overclocked to 4.8GHz easily. This is not only a full gigahertz faster, but it's about 25% better performance.

 

The average I've seen the i7-9700K get is 5.1GHz, or 0.2GHz or 4% better. Granted this becomes 8% better compare to the i7-9700, but we're not even in double digit gains anymore.

[Coachdude]

Honestly I don't think even their recent price cuts are enough to combat AMD's offerings effectively. The 9900K should be i7 prices, ( $400 max ), and the i7 9700K should be i5 prices, because that is effectively what it is and historically what it should have been, so ( $280 max ). 

 

In my opinion, I think if they were to do a mid generation refresh, something along the lines of: 

i9 9990K - 10C+/20T+ Clocks...? - Price $450 Max as this would effectively be competing against the 3900X which would still have 2 more cores. 

i7 9770K - 8C/16T Base 4.5GHz Boost 5GHz All Core Turbo 4.8GHz Price $350

i5 9650K - 6C/12T or 8C/8T Base 4.3GHz Boost 4.8GHz All Core Turbo 4.5GHz Price $200-$250

i3 9370K - 4C/8T Base 4.0GHz Boost 4.5GHz All Core Turbo 4.2GHz Price $120 

Pentium G9320K - 4C/4T Base 3.6GHz Boost 4.1GHz All Core Turbo 4.0GHz Price $60 

 

The i3s need to be bumped up to 4c/8t status and the i5 should be what the current gen i7 is now. As historically the i5 has always had hyperthreading disabled as being it's main differentiator from the i7 line. And they always shared the same thread count with the i3s, only i3s had half the cores. ( Everything up to and including 7th gen, i3s were 2c/4t and i5s were 4c/4t. ) 

 

Honestly if they just did a lineup like that they'd be just fine. I also think they should really start including coolers with their processors again, as although most people do tend to buy aftermarket heatsinks and fans it is still a nice stock option, and they used to offer them anyways and should return back to doing so since AMD includes one with all of their processors including their highest end ones.

 

They need to stop with all of the artificial segmentation of the product stack, ( Stop "locking" processors, and stop disabling hyperthreading on their lower end skus. I mean even this gen's i7 has it disabled, that's just lame. ) 

 

I think this is what they'd have to do personally, or just drop the prices on each tier to the prices up above. I just don't see any reason to consider any of Intel's lineup atm with their current pricing structure. 

 

 

[Mathieu9836]

The thing is Intel have been for a long time seen as the ''Premium'' brand, just like a luxury car manufacturer and when you have the status you can do pretty much anything you want with both price and SKUs. So they have a lot of CPUs pretty much all the same but some with or without hypertreading and unlocked, you had to pay for the premium features so people that wanted the 10% performance paid the additional 100 or 150$ for the fully unlocked 9900K or 9700K and now the 9900KF.... but now the card as been mixed up by AMD, they got CPUs as good as Intel and they have nothing to respond to this right now because of their issue with 10nm and they can't keep up with the demand.

 

How I see this? Intel will have no choice but to cut in prices until they have their new 5ghz+ CPUs, they try to distract us before the new Ryzen Zen2 is out with their 1000th CPU based on the same architecture. AMD tried to distub the market with the announcement of the Ryzens and new Navi GPU and it worked.