Intel’s commissioned i9-9900K gaming benchmarks are reportedly misleading

After the official launch of their 9th Generation of Core processors, Intel released a detailed report from Principled Technologies to showcase that their flagship i9-9900K as the “World Best Gaming CPU”. 

Principled Technologies testing was conducted over 19 games and eight processors, including AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X, Ryzen Threadripper 2950X and Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX, with the report showcasing a performance advantage on Intel’s CPU hardware in every instance. 

The problem with this report, which is available to read here, is that many of the results within it have been shown to be inaccurate, at least according to Hardware Unboxed.   

If you read Principled Technologies report, you can see that AMD’s Ryzen 2700X-based system is incorrectly configured, with all other systems using XMP or DCOP profiles to set memory speeds/timings. On the X470-based Ryzen 7 2700X, the system’s DDR4 memory is set to 2933MHz and forgotten about, ignoring the optimised settings that are enabled by DCOP performance profiles. “Game Mode” was also activated on AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X processor, limiting the CPU to four cores and eight threads, reducing its performance in highly multi-threaded games. 

This leaves AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X in a bad position, with sub-par memory timings. Hardware Unboxed conducted a number of performance tests using the same CPUs and graphics card as Principled technologies, finding that in the majority of their benchmarks that AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X offered higher performance levels than what was showcased by the Intel commissioned report from Principled Technologies.

While AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X is unable to catch up to the listed results for Intel’s i9-9900K, Intel’s performance lead is shown to be much smaller than advertised by Intel, assuming that Hardware Unboxed’s findings are accurate.  

The video below highlights the differences between Intel’s commissioned gaming results and 3rd party benchmarks on the same hardware configuration.