Intel Core i7-10700 vs Core i7-10700K Review: Is 65W Comet Lake an Option?
by Dr. Ian Cutress on January 21, 2021 10:30 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i7
- Z490
- 10th Gen Core
- Comet Lake
- i7-10700K
- i7-10700
Gaming Tests: Chernobylite
Despite the advent of recent TV shows like Chernobyl, recreating the situation revolving around the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the concept of nuclear fallout and the town of Pripyat have been popular settings for a number of games – mostly first person shooters. Chernobylite is an indie title that plays on a science-fiction survival horror experience and uses a 3D-scanned recreation of the real Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It involves challenging combat, a mix of free exploration with crafting and non-linear story telling. While still in early access, it is already picking up plenty of awards.
I picked up Chernobylite while still in early access, and was impressed by its in-game benchmark, showcasing complex building structure with plenty of trees and structures where aliasing becomes important. The in-game benchmark is an on-rails experience through the scenery, covering both indoor and outdoor scenes – it ends up being very CPU limited in the way it is designed. We have taken an offline version of Chernobylite to use in our tests, and we are testing the following settings combinations:
- 360p Low, 1440p Low, 4K Low, 1080p Max
We do as many runs within 10 minutes per resolution/setting combination, and then take averages.
| AnandTech | Low Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Low Quality |
High Resolution Low Quality |
Medium Resolution Max Quality |
| Average FPS |  |
 |
 |
|
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
210 Comments
View All Comments
Mr Perfect - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
Yeah, if Alder Lake doesn't get things under control later this year, my next ITX build will also be Ryzen. There's just no sense in using a CPU drawing 200+ watts in SFF when cooling the current crop of GPUs is hard enough as it is!DanNeely - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
In SFF I suspect you'll be operating well below 215W. If not because the mobo can't supply the power, but because your small form factor cooler can't handle the heat and you're limited to short turbo periods due to thermal throttling.Mr Perfect - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
You should well be able to run the 215watt mode if you're daring. Some folks over on r\sffpc use the big CPUs, because the mITX boards have power delivery similar to the ATX boards and do support them. The problem is they report idle temps around 50C and gaming temps around 70C.Personally, I'm just not willing to run those temps. My current ITX build is using an older 95watt CPU(that actually drew 95watts at turbo) and idles at 35C and games around 50C. A new CPU with an idle temp that's the same as my current load temp is just mind boggling.
Dug - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
You do realize that 50 and 70c are not anywhere close to being worried about anything? You said personally you aren't willing to run those temps. Have you even looked into what modern processors are capable of? Have you ever used a laptop, which will hit that temp just by opening the lid?Calin - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
I remember one processor (or maybe GPU) had temperature limits (internal temperature, as measured on-die) of a bit over 100 Celsius. It might have been an NVidia chip, however I remember Intel coming close to that.Compared to that, 50 Celsius at idle and 70 at load is positively arctic ;)
at_clucks - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
Perhaps idling at 50 is not outstanding but full load at 70 definitely is, especially for a cramped SFF PC.Spunjji - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
It all depends on the fan speeds, really. 50 at idle is extremely impressive if the system is silent!Wineohe - Thursday, January 21, 2021 - link
I too just picked up a 5600X for list of $299 to build a NAS. Paired it with a $120 B550, some extra RAM and a video card I had collecting dust. Wish I would have researched the case more though. Ironically it’s considerably faster than my desktop with it’s pokey old i7-6800K. I’ll wait until the 5950X comes more readily available for a upgrade.schujj07 - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
Using a 5600X for a NAS, I assume it is for home and not enterprise, is total overkill. You would be fine using an Athlon 200G in a home NAS and would never notice the difference.magreen - Friday, January 22, 2021 - link
I run a pentium M for my Ubuntu server/NAS