Intel Core i9-9900KF Review: Disabled Graphics and No Discount

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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.

Core i9 takes a commanding lead throughout these tests. The Adobe suite is very sensitive to clock rates, so we begin to see more differentiation emerge between the stock and overclocked Core i9 models.

Web Browser

The Krakken suite evaluates JavaScript performance using several workloads, including audio, imaging, and cryptography. Like most browser-based benchmarks, single-threaded performance reigns supreme. These tests expose the trade-offs you make for an all-core overclock, particularly with the second-gen 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. The -9900KF does take a slightly more pronounced lead over the standard model. However, these results fall within PCMark's three percent variance.

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.

The photo editing benchmark measures performance with Futuremark's binaries using the ImageMagick library. Common photo processing workloads also tend to be parallelized. Spreading an extra 200 MHz of frequency across all eight of the -9900KF's cores equates to slightly larger leads using overclocked settings.


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Paul Alcorn
Managing Editor: News and Emerging Tech

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.