"The world's fastest gaming processor." That's how the new generation of Intel Comet Lake processors, the Core i9 10900K, is being touted by the Blue Team. This is based on proprietary benchmarks, which show that the frame rate performance of this 10-core chip rivals the 8-core i9 9900KS and AMD's 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X across over 25 different games.

According to our own testing, that's probably true, with Intel's traditional gaming performance holding the big boys of Ryzen mega-core chips at bay even against half-core Core i9 CPUs. Realistically, the competition for the "world's fastest gaming processor" will probably not be AMD, but whether the i9 10900K can continue to deliver higher gaming performance than the limited edition (now discontinued) Core i9 9900KS.

Running at an all-core clock of 5 GHz, the 9900KS is a true benchmark for gaming frame rates when it comes to raw processor power. With the new generation of CPUs, Intel always makes bold claims, so it would have been a problem if Comet Lake's top-of-the-line chip was not the complete best.

So how could Intel make a 4.8GHz all-core processor outperform the previous generation of 5GHz CPUs?

They put a ridiculous amount of power into the chip so as not to decide to throttle back the potential Turbo opportunities of the Comet Lake CPUs.

In the system configuration slides in the back of the latest press deck, Intel states that it has set a short-term power limit, PL2, of 250W. This is twice the base TDP of the Comet Lake chips, almost twice the base TDP of the 9900KS, and nearly 100W higher than the recommended PL2 rating for Coffee Lake processors.

Intel also set the Tau (the time it takes for a chip to consume that much power) at 56 seconds, allowing it to dominate the others; given that there is no information on how much power the 9900KS was running at, it was running at the recommended 159W PL2 level and a Tau of 28 seconds We can assume that.

Considering all this, one can see how Intel advertises the 10900K as "the world's fastest gaming processor" despite the fact that it requires little effort and a lot of power to make it run like this.

Also, while 250W is offered as the PL2 recommendation for the 10900K, Anandtech's Ian Cutress reports that motherboard vendors are producing Z490 boards with much more power. [But let's be honest, the 10900K is not the reason we are excited about the new 10th generation CPUs; it is the mid-level and entry-level processors that are more attractive to us PC gamers now that HyperThreading has been introduced to all products. [In particular, the 6-core, 12-thread Core i5 10400F is cheaper than the similarly spec'd but slower clocked Ryzen 5 3600. There is also a quad-core Core i3 10100 with the same price and specs as the new Ryzen 3 3300X.

All of these sub-$200 CPUs should make excellent gaming CPUs, and we could see some serious budget gaming rigs in the coming months.