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Commissioning Misleading Core i9-9900K Benchmarks (techspot.com)
On Monday, Intel unveiled the 9th Gen Core i9-9900K, which will rival AMD's Ryzen 2700X when it goes on sale in two weeks. We will soon be reading reviews of the 9th Gen Core i9-9900K, which Intel claims is the "world's best gaming processor," to see how exactly it fares against its AMD counterpart. But as reviewers test the new CPU and comply with an NDA/embargo (non-disclosure agreement) with Intel, which requires them to not share performance data of Intel's new CPU for another few days, surprisingly, one publication has already made a bold claim. In a story published this week, news outlet PCGamesN said, "Intel's Core i9 9900K is up to 50% faster than AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X in games." The publication cites data from an Intel-commissioned report [PDF] by third-party firm Principle Technologies to make the claim. TechSpot explains the issues with this: So Intel can go and publish their own "testing" done suspiciously through a third party ten days before reviews, while reviewers are prohibited from refuting the claims due to the NDA. First bad sign. Scrolling down PCGamesN says the following when looking over Intel's commissioned benchmarks. "But the real point of all this is for Intel to be able to hold out the 9900K as hands down the best gaming processor compared with the AMD competition, and in that it seems to have excelled. On some games, such as Civ 6 and PUBG, the performance delta isn't necessarily that great, but for the most part you're looking at between 30 and 50% higher frame rates from the 9900K versus the 2700X."
Right away many of the results looked very suspect to me, having spent countless hours benchmarking both the 2700X and 8700K, I have a good idea of how they compare in a wide range of titles and these results looked very off. Having spotted a few dodgy looking results my next thought was, why is PCGamesN publishing this misleading data and why aren't they not tearing the paid benchmark report apart? Do they simply not know better?
Over at the Principled Technologies website you can find the full report which states how they tested and the hardware used. Official memory speeds were used which isn't a particularly big deal, though they have gone out of their way to handicap Ryzen, or at the very least expose its weaknesses. Ryzen doesn't perform that well with fully populated memory DIMMs, two modules is optimal. However timings are also important and they used Corsair Vengeance memory without loading the extreme memory profile or XMP setting, instead they just set the memory frequency to 2933 and left the ridiculously loose default memory timings in place. These loose timings ensure compatibility so systems will boot up, but after that point you need to enable the memory profile. It's misleading to conduct benchmarks without executing this crucial step.
Right away many of the results looked very suspect to me, having spent countless hours benchmarking both the 2700X and 8700K, I have a good idea of how they compare in a wide range of titles and these results looked very off. Having spotted a few dodgy looking results my next thought was, why is PCGamesN publishing this misleading data and why aren't they not tearing the paid benchmark report apart? Do they simply not know better?
Over at the Principled Technologies website you can find the full report which states how they tested and the hardware used. Official memory speeds were used which isn't a particularly big deal, though they have gone out of their way to handicap Ryzen, or at the very least expose its weaknesses. Ryzen doesn't perform that well with fully populated memory DIMMs, two modules is optimal. However timings are also important and they used Corsair Vengeance memory without loading the extreme memory profile or XMP setting, instead they just set the memory frequency to 2933 and left the ridiculously loose default memory timings in place. These loose timings ensure compatibility so systems will boot up, but after that point you need to enable the memory profile. It's misleading to conduct benchmarks without executing this crucial step.
Intel any thing to win other then more pci-e lanes or no raid keys
I have just benched the latest Intel CPU and it is 2000% more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, and send all your confidential data to China.
Desperation calls for desperate measures.
I saw the prices for the new core, and I feel like Intel is trying to be the Apple of CPUs. Inflated price just because "Intel" rather than those other guys "AMD".
Ah fuck not even close... at least I'll make some idiots waste their mod points to mod me into oblivion ;)
By on average 3% IPC not counting AVX and AVX 512. Their biggest advantage at the consumer level is the ring bus, not IPC or even clock speed, which becomes significantly less useful as they add more cores. Meanwhile clock speeds above 4.6 GHz get diminishing returns.
amd fanbois can try to argue their case all they want, but they'll still be w.r.o.n.g. intel's architecture is more efficient, more speed per core and per megahertz (even a fucking pentium 'gold' has faster single core speed than the fastest ryzen), and has been for over a decade. the new chips are no different, even with the recent strides amd has made, intel still kicks amd's ass, especially where cost is no object. period. end of thread.
If all that were true, why the NDA/embargo and this early "cooked books" review?
PS - There's this concept in the English language called "capitalization". Learn how to use them, and you won't come across as an ignorant backwoods doofus. Communication skills matter...
you forgot to say Intel chips come complete with Meltdown, Spectre variants 1-4, a few more undiscovered Spectre variants, and a few more backdoors.
Corporate and brand shills running around and hyping their brand and products. Nothing like it. It can be Apple, Tesla, AMD, Intel, Sony, etc. All corporate shills posting extraordinary claims which never pan out.
Ryzen doesn't perform that well with fully populated memory DIMMs, two modules is optimal.
I haven't read that before. What I like about Ryzen memory specs is that it can run in single channel mode with a single DIMM. Instead of buying a pair of 8GB DIMMs you can buy one 16GB DIMM. Intel memory specs doesn't mention single channel mode with one DIMM (it should work). I'm specing out a new PC build and leaning towards Ryzen for the most bang per buck.
Goodbye, Slashdot!
Tell me; if i buy that AMD processor; & fill the memory banks; WHERE do i get the warning that that is not a good idea?
answer: NOWHERE!
maybe its a good idea to have an out-of-the-box AMD system; & an out-of-the-box Intel system; & compare those; in stead of tweaking memory; filling or not filling banks to get the most out of a system.
I'm a gamer; but i just want to game; not fill out memory banks; change clock speed; & do other tinker-stuff with it.
So when i look at it; its nice to have a possible-better-amd system; but out of the box its not as good; so bad luck AMD; gratz to intel.
Intel has always been fighting dirty. They are with the mob (three letter agencies). Hence, they usually get away with everything.
The only thing that surprises me is that people can still be surprised by Intel cheating.
I switched from intel to some Amd box with 1800X CPU and it works very fine. I could have never gotten the bang for bucks with another Intel machine, and then there were also the serious security flaws of Intel chips. My machine handles everything including flight simulation and every game very well, so getting even more speed would be pointless at this time.
It's a pragmatic decision and it's stupid to get emotionally attached to companies. A PC is nothing but a tool (or a fun toy, when we speak about gaming). If Intel produces something better in 5 years from now, maybe I'll switch back to them.
The poster is saying you can only use 2 memory modules (overclocked) and tuned away from boot stability in order to compete? That's ridiculous. Ryzen isn't really that bad is it??!!
Nice to see that the guy who gets most of his annual salary by blowing Intel's board of directors has found part-time work as an AC on Slashdot.
Way to climb that career ladder!
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Speculation on Reddit about this seems to suggest they may have enabled the gaming profile* in Ryzen Master for games that don't benefit it (threadded / multi-core friendly games), and disabled it for those (single threadded dependent games).
For a multi-threadded suddenly loosing access to 4 cores, and for a single threadded game suddenly losing access to an additional 200MHz will give you some of those gimped benchmarks.
*For those who don't know, Gaming profile disables half the cores on a Ryzen 2, specifically targetting the poorest performing cores, and then raises the boost frequency thanks to the additional thermal / power headroom available. This is of great benefit to games that don't take advantage of multi-core processors.
Instead they just set the memory frequency to 2933 and left the ridiculously loose default memory timings in place.
For the purpose of a review, is it more or less representative to tune every aspect of the system like this? When a reviewer tunes and tweaks every possible setting, the results really are only applicable to that motherboard + RAM combination. I would rather have apples-to-apples comparisons.
Modern RAM settings need to be tweaked a bit or the performance is meh. The company did the tweaks on the Intel platform but not the AMD one.
They had to know they'd be called out by the benchmarking community. That and Youtubers hungry for video content.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Is that official or unofficial backdoors? It's important to seperate the basketload of intentional Intel security holes from the piled mound of critical Intel screw ups.
They think an NDA will prevend us from thinking badly about them, once the truth comes out.
But in reality, the NDA is what makes us assume there is something bad that they want to hide, in the first place.
It's very similar to the Streisand Effect.
I tried running it and it shit itself pretty badly. The whole office stank pretty badly and had to open the windows to air everything out. It is the smell of failure.
No Ryzen isn't really that bad out of the box. Of course you can mess with its performance if you screw up things intentionally.
As far as gaming goes, Intel's have always taken the lead so far. The i7-8700k already beats the R7 2700X if high performance gaming is your only concern. I don't really understand why they think it's necessary to pull of crap benchmark comparisons like this in the first place. Naturally I'd think that they have something to hide. But they should be well aware that subsequent benchmarks from multiple and more reputable sources should cover up all this crap and therefore cause more damage to Intel in the longer run than these skewed benchmarks may do to AMD.
Seriously. I remember in the 1981/1982 time frame when the Motorola 68000 was starting to make some inroads in desktops and Intel released their own performance reviews showing how the 8086/8088 was better at user (Intel specified benchmark) tasks. Motorola's response was to fight fire with fire showing that the 68k was better in a highly subjective benchmark. This has been going on between Intel and whomever is their current main competition since then.
It sounds like actual hardware will be available in a week or so with actual standard benchmarks being available a couple of weeks after that.
Avoid the hype and just wait for tests on actual hardware.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
An even benchmark would have used stock timings on both boards, not XMP on intel, and no optimization on AMD.
That's an obvious Fail on their part; to me, that means this is the only way they can compete now.
And these chips still have ALL the flaws, and require software mitigations that drop performance 20-40%.
When they fix those, and stop being lying douchebags, I may buy intel again.
I'm still using a 17-3930k at 4.8GHz; it's been running that on ALL cores since about 2011 or so.
A chip that's only 10 or 20% faster really doesn't impress me enough to upgrade; it still plays Quake2 just fine, and Crysis works great. :)
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Nope, the memory has high latency default settings, and advertised settings with lower latencies for each given operation (CAS, RAS and various funny names).
If you get memory errors when using the advertised settings then your memory is faulty and this is ground to act on the warranty.
Albeit, this "XMP" profile might be certified for Intel memory controllers only and thus on a technicality they might say, only Intel supports these settings so it's fine if we let AMD on crappy default settings.
It's still fairly dishonest and has the most impact on video games. Video games are a dual of memory latency basically, this is why Intel 7700K, 8700K beat the competition - especially Intel's own i9 7900X, 7980XE. If you cripple AMD's memory latency you compound the effect and if you ignore half of your own rigged tests by using the words "up to" then you compound this again by only considering the games that work better on Intels no matter what.
But Apple's benchmarks in the bad old days (G3 and G4 vs Intel) were worse (they basically wrote Photoshop plugins, easy to rig something you control e.g. use hand optimized SIMD on the PowerPC, use old ints and x87 on Intel. anyone not paying attention closely would think it was Photoshop benchmarks while they were rigged microbenchmarks)
Just not in safe mode.
Compare it to Debian's definition of "stable". Sure, stable is what's supposed to be the normal version you install. But: Nobody does that. Except maybe on mission-critical servers, where it is nice to have.
I consider it a strange quirk introduced by motherboard vendors, to always havr everything in "safe defaults" mode, when it's freshly out of the box.
Nobody who has enough of a clue to put together his own system, does not go into the BIOS to configure it properly. If somebody has no personal views, and eats whatever he is given, a piece of Apple electronic jewelry is the better choice for him.
The thing is - some games are GPU-bound and others are CPU-bound.
If it's the former - then you can replace your CPU with DeepThought, Holly or HAL and your frame rate won't move an inch.
So whether this contraption does you any good depends sensitively on the games you play and the performance of your GPU.
Even the performance of your GPU will depend on your screen resolution.
The ONLY reliable benchmark is the actual application you're running on the actual Before and After hardware setups.
www.sjbaker.org
If only someone had known Intel was going to do this, maybe we could have stopped them.
If you are not detecting the sarcasm then it's probably because you've died.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Who the fuck cares - get a job you bums
surly i9-9999k would be more catchy.
It could be 200% faster* and I'm not buying Intel.
(I bet it'd be 200% faster if it didn't enforce any memory bounds checking, Get on that, Intel.)
It's the second time I hear this company's name in less than a month. Some days ago I read a press release by Dell about a panoplia of new products, and the entire list, ranging from laptops to server computers was full of performance improvements (vs competitors) claims. all of them referring to paid-for reviews by this same company.
I personally find their motto - "win the attention war" - amusing. Also of interest is the fact (pun setup) they interchange links with their main domain and with a redirect from my country's TLD subdomain "facts.pt" (pun successful..?), as a subtle way to include their initials as something factual, and for the unsuspecting eye to believe it's a different company or to provide credit to their reviews with such a "reputable" subdomain. Genius stuff.
These companies are the audit companies of tangible products. Usually, you have Big Four conducting external audits for finantial institutions, country elections and whatnot, gathering data only these auditors are given access. The process is usually compulsory, but still paid by the targets of the audit, and there's always the sense the best auditors are usually the more positive. Now we get these paid product reviewers acting exactly the same way, getting paid to review products before they come out so companies can make bold claims. Then just NDA every other actually independant party interested in reviewing the product. See a pattern?
even a fucking pentium 'gold' has faster single core speed than the fastest ryzen
With a statement like this I'm sure "fanbois" could argue all they won't. It's not like you would listen, your paycheck won't allow you to. Or braindamage. I dare not call you a shill without proof. Mental illness is a very real problem these days.
That would be;
Neither Meltdown nor TLBleed affect AMD and AMD's Ryzen processors, as far as we know now...
So any benchmark of an Intel CPU without those security mitigations, (if needed), would be showing that they still want to abuse security for the performance gain. Something AMD appears not to want to do.
Lady Galadriel
As I read through comments with a box of popcorn, it occurred to me:
Isn't game play the important part?
We can benchmark all we want and see one is 10% faster than the other etc. But in the end do you actually see any difference in game play honestly? Does the human eye/brain notice any difference? If the answer is no, I'd rather get the AMD and spend the extra $$ on better/more monitors.
Just my take.
Sure being able to boast I am better by %% but.. If you have a Lamborghini and I have a Porsche, does it really matter if we are both in traffic at 65mph? Sure bragging rights are cool and we can run benchmarks, tweak benchmarks, etc but does it actually produce noticeable results?
"Pixel Slate will be available with an Intel Celeron or..."
How exactly does a tablet with an Intel Celery processor equate to a "premium tablet"? I get that tablets need a low power processor. What I don't get is marketing Intel Celery as a premium experience. If you want premium but still low power, and Intel, then go with an i3 or something similar.
Thats what getting paid for doing supposedly "third party" testing gets you, exactly what you want.
If you think they have 95% profit you haven't looked at their annual report
One hard learned lesson I've learned over the years is never ever think about buying kiddy ram.
Kiddy ram can be identified by aggressive timings, "XMP" profiles and "crazy looking heat spreaders" often marketed to "gamers". Basically companies that produce these things scrape chips they didn't produce from the bottom of the bin and do insufficient integration testing of the final result. Some vendors have previously allowed chips with a threshold of detected bit errors to pass QA and make their way into shipping product. I guess they figure if it works for stuck pixels in displays what the heck why not ram?
I always run a 24hr memtest before booting a new system and the problem with Kiddy ram installed often won't show up. It shows up as subtle errors in job result and eventually system crashes when cores are pegged for weeks at a time.
Do yourself a favor and never buy kiddy ram. Get dimms produced by Samsung or equivalent tested by grown ups. Every time I've done that my problems disappeared.
Equally as important don't drink timing koolaid. Latency especially in DDR4 has no meaningful impact on performance given pipelines of modern hardware. Differences barely exceeds the margin of error in comparative benchmarking tests. Worrying about this crap won't win you anything but headaches.
Very few PC games perform worse with more cores, mostly recent console ports.
Additional cores allow other programs to run on them, so your game doesn't get paused/swapped out while some windows housekeeping thing needs a few cycles.
The more modern games I'm playing love having 12 cores; Doom, for one.
Yes, the new one, lol.
Go try Arcade mode, then turn off half the cores, and see how that works out.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
"It's a pragmatic decision and it's stupid to get emotionally attached to companies."
Yes it is stupid to get emotionally attached but considering the historical track record of the company isn't necessarily emotional. AMD has always kept price/performance as an important metric. They've also been very focused on supporting open platforms. And yes, right now they've got the best line-up for most use cases, even in the server market which is definitely something new.
There is a point where the gap grows too large to ignore but there is definitely a point where the difference isn't worth fundiing a company that moves in the direction that is counter to your interests down the road. Being objective doesn't mean being short-sighted.
AMD had those same flaws
He didn't say overclocked memory modules. He was saying that the default clock latencies (as set by the BIOS) are less than sub-optimal, which is the same deal in the Intel camp. It further reduces Intel's already suspect credibility when they leave the Ryzen system at out-of-the-box defaults and benchmark it against Intel systems that have been tweaked just short of the point of crashing.
In the tests the Intel systems also used the fancy-pants Noctua NH-U14S CPU cooler whereas the Ryzen systems used the stock AMD coolers so would have been getting thermal throttling to boot.
It's also worth pointing out that the older Intel CPUs were not benchmarked on the same motherboard that the i9-9900K was tested on even though that motherboard supports them. They used older, slower motherboards in a ridiculous attempt to make the i9-9900K look even better than it actually is.
Well said.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Check out the videos, first with Steve going through the test report and saying how shoddy it seems and the second he actually rocked up to the company who did the benchmark tests for Intel and interviews them.
Intel's Gross Incompetence & Principled Technologies (Intel Responds) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Exclusive: Interview w/ Principled Technologies on Intel Testing (9900K) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Not much else needs saying, other than what a ridiculous move from Intel. How dumb do they think people are... oh, right. :-)
As far as I am concerned, wouldn't buy Intel before and double wouldn't buy em now.