Intel Core i5-9600K Review: A Mid-Range Gamer's CPU
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Civilization VI Graphics and AI, Dawn of War III
Civilization VI AI Test
Civilization VI's AI test measures CPU performance in a turn-based strategy game and tends to favor per-core performance.
The Ryzen processors trail due to their lower per-core performance, which is dependent on instruction-per-clock (IPC) throughput and frequency.
Civilization VI Graphics Test
The Core i5-9600K carves out a respectable lead in this test, which typically favors physical cores over simultaneous multi-threading.
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War III
Although the Warhammer 40,000 benchmark responds well to threading, AMD's Ryzen 5 2600X still falls to the bottom of our chart.
Because we can only include so many CPUs in our current chart template, we're substituting in a Ryzen 7 2700X for the Ryzen 7 2700. The overclocked Ryzen 7 2700X provides roughly the same performance as a tuned 2700, and it's obvious that eight cores and 16 threads pay dividends in games optimized for parallelization.
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Paul Alcorn is the Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech for Tom's Hardware US. He also writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage, and enterprise hardware.
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