i9-10900K vs i5-10400 - Need For Speed: Payback RTX 3070 Ti Max-Q - Game Performance Benchmarks

Multi-Thread Performance

Single-Thread Performance

i9-10900K

• The i9-10900K has higher Level 3 Cache. This is useful when you have substantial multiprocessing workloads, many computationally intense simultaneous processes. More likely on a server, less on a personally used computer for interactive desktop workloads.
• The i9-10900K has more cores. The benefit of having more cores is that the system can handle more threads. Each core can handle a separate stream of data. This architecture greatly increases the performance of a system that is running concurrent applications.
• The i9-10900K has more threads. Larger programs are divided into threads (small sections) so that the processor can execute them simultaneously to get faster execution.
• The i9-10900K has a higher turbo clock boost. Turbo Boost is a CPU feature that will run CPU clock speed faster than its base clock, if certain conditions are present. It will enable older software that runs on fewer cores, to perform better on newer hardware. Since games are software too, it is also applicable to them.

i5-10400

• For some games, a cpu with a higher clock speed, or in a technical name IPC (Instructions per clock), has better results than other CPU's with higher core count and lower core speed.