Serious cooling is required if you want to get consistent turbo clocks out of the new 10-core Intel Comet Lake processors. This is because the CPU alone consumes 224W at peak performance. This is higher than the TDP of the Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics card, and in fact is nearly identical to the peak power consumption of the 2080 board we measured, which is quite significant for a desktop processor.

We have heard reports that Intel is holding off on releasing a new series of 10th generation desktop processors because its 10-core Comet Lake flagship CPU, the Core i9 10900 series, is getting rather thirsty. Motherboard makers have been frustrated by this delay, and they should have had new Z490 motherboards ready for some time, suggesting that Intel is working on reducing this enormous power consumption.

Now it appears that Intel has given up and is simply using what they have; Comet Lake is rumored to be announced later this month, with a release later in May. And newly leaked screenshots of the Core i9 10900F show PL1 and PL2, one of the 10-core chips without integrated graphics silicon. And they are incredibly expensive.

You are probably familiar with the term TDP (Thermal Design Point) for processors. It stands for Power Level One and is the rating in watts at which the chip will operate under long-term load. In this case, the PL1 rating is 170W, meaning that the top-of-the-line Intel Comet Lake processor will effectively have a TDP of 170W.

The 7nm AMD Ryzen 9 3950X is a 16-core, 32-thread processor with a TDP of only 105W (actually around 146W at full load). These 10th generation CPUs are probably not a big surprise to anyone since they are essentially using the same 14nm technology we have been putting in our PCs since 2015.

What is interesting here is that PL1, or effective TDP, is only part of the picture: the PL2 rating of 224W means that when the 10900F is aiming for short-term bursts of power (usually referred to as a transition to turbo mode), the entire 10 cores will need to maintain that performance This indicates that the 10900F requires an enormous amount of power to maintain its performance across all 10 cores when aiming for short-term bursts of power (usually called a transition to turbo mode).

And the latest leaked information shows that even with that level of power drawn, it is only running at 4.58 GHz. The limited edition Core i9 9900KS ran at 5 GHz on all eight cores, with a power like PL2 rating of just over 170W. Alternatively, there is a Comet Lake with lower power levels.

In short, if you are upgrading your gaming PC to the next generation of Intel Comet Lake processors, you will need one of the best CPU coolers on the planet and a rather heavy PSU.

Also, a 240mm liquid chip cooler is going to be a must for the 10th generation K-series chips. Otherwise, we will not see the true potential of the last days of the Skylake architecture.