Intel Core i5-9600K Review: A Mid-Range Gamer's CPU
Why you can trust Tom's Hardware
Office and Productivity
Adobe Creative Cloud
Even though this suite has a few parallelized workloads, its final score is heavily influenced by the lightly-threaded tasks common in most desktop applications.
The Core i5-9600K clearly excels in lightly-threaded tasks, while AMD's Ryzen carves out wins in the threaded applications. Overclocking does help Intel more, though.
We see slight advances favoring Intel's -9600K over the -8600K, but it's definitely not worth upgrading from the latter to the former.
Web Browser
The Krakken suite evaluates JavaScript performance using audio, imaging, and cryptography workloads. Like most browser-based benchmarks, single-threaded performance reigns supreme.
The stock Core i5-9600K leverages its relatively high clock rates to outperform the Ryzen processors.
Productivity
The application start-up metric measures load time snappiness in word processors, GIMP, and Web browsers under warm- and cold-start conditions. Other platform-level considerations affect this test as well, including the storage subsystem. Single-core performance largely determines responsiveness, so Intel's processors form a predictable hierarchy based on their frequencies.
Our video conferencing suite measures performance in single- and multi-user applications that utilize the Windows Media Foundation for playback and encoding. It also performs facial detection to model real-world usage. This workload responds well to available resources, so AMD's Ryzen family fares well. For example, the Ryzen 5 2600X takes a commanding lead over the Core i5-9600K. Even a Ryzen 7 2700 and its relatively low base clock rate ekes past the overclocked -9600K.
The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized, giving the Ryzen 7 2700 and Ryzen 5 2600X an easy advantage over Intel's Core i5-9600K. Also bear in mind that an overclocked Ryzen 7 2700 and 2700X offer similar performance.
MORE: Best CPUs
MORE: Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy
MORE: All CPUs Content
Current page: Office and Productivity
Prev Page Shadow Of War and Project CARS 2 Next Page Rendering, Encoding and CompressionStay On the Cutting Edge: Get the Tom's Hardware Newsletter
Get Tom's Hardware's best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
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.
AMD delays its Ryzen 9000 launch due to unspecified quality issue — new launch in August; chipmaker pulls back all units shipped globally for quality checks [Updated]
Japanese Prime Minister Kishida vows government funds for local chip fabs — Rapidus eyes 2nm production by 2027
Patched Microsoft Defender flaw still being used to deliver information-stealing malware to vulnerable machines
-
Tobias Claren How high can I overclock with intel boxed cooler?Reply
Or a cooler that fits in a mini itx case lake Silverstone Raven or similar (12 litres or less)?