But favoring higher single core benefits both designer's chips and I recommend it for Intel as well.

When it comes to heat, this Ryzen 9 5900X vs Core i9-11900K CPU benchmark comparison is pretty lopsided. Power consumption and heat go hand in hand, and Intel's Core i9-11900K consumes more power than any of the company's previous mainstream processors. In fact, we recorded a peak of 295W during an AVX-512 Prime95 test.MORE FROM FORBES Intel Announces 11th Gen Core i9-11900K, i7-11700K And i5-11600K Desktop CPU Details And Pricing By Antony Leather It is hard to say whether there is a clear winner here, as is common it comes down to your exact preferences and needs.

Ryzen 9 and Intel i9 chips are both the top end of what AMD and Intel are producing, meaning that all the chips here are premium and expensive, though there is a range of options within each. Finally, the AMD hardware has an edge on battery power as well, with the laptop unplugged from the wall, where it runs both faster in sustained loads, and more efficiently. More on that in a bit. Gaming performance Intel meanwhile uses the powerful Raptor Lake architecture, which sees improvements of 34% for multi-core and 11% for single-core, over the previous Alder Lake.

The Overclockers Difference

Intel’s 12th Generation Alder Lake and 13th Generation Raptor Lake processors have switched up the terminology with the measure "Base Power," which is essentially the same as TDP. That said, to simplify laptop shopping, we’re going to rope TDP and Processor Base Power under one blanket term: processor power rating. The 13900K also has Adaptive Boost Technology (ABT), which dynamically boosts to higher all-core frequencies based on available thermal headroom and electrical conditions. If the ABT algorithm sees that the chip is below 100C during heavy workloads, it will increase performance and power consumption until the processor reaches the safe 100C limit, thus providing more performance. On Turbo, the top-performance profile, the Intel platform has a 20% advantage over the AMD hardware at peak power in the first run, which then stabilizes at around 15% sustained. The Ryzen 9 5900X ultimately wins on the strength of its better blend of gaming and application performance, not to mention that it comes with much lower power consumption that ultimately results in a cooler and quieter system. And that's despite it coming with four more cores than the 11900K. Here’s what we got in our tests on the AMD platform, with the screen’s brightness set at around 120 nits (~60 brightness), 60 Hz refresh, and on Hybrid MUX mode.

Gaming performance has also been a traditional strength of Intel's desktop CPUs, in games at resolutions where CPU performance comes into play as the limiting factor. And for a while there, Intel hung on. Through the various "Lake" generations of processor starting with "Skylake," up against its successive AMD Ryzen challengers, Intel would sustain its lead in the one area that drives lots of sales of desktop processors among PC upgraders and builders: PC gaming. And here are a couple more Ryzen 9 6900HX and Core i9-12900H models in this same test, to verify our findings on these ROG platforms.In my early career, I worked as an editor of scholarly science books, and as an editor of "Dummies"-style computer guidebooks for Brady Books (now, BradyGames). I'm a lifetime New Yorker, a graduate of New York University's journalism program, and a member of Phi Beta Kappa. In other price categories, Intel i9 does tend to actually pip Ryzen 9, while generally offering similar gaming performance and improved multi-core performance. Which one should you go for? That said, you can be confident that Ryzen will be using AM5 for a good few years, which means you will have the ability to upgrade your CPU multiple times without having to change your motherboard.