Intel Comet Lake desktop CPUs are fast approaching, and the closer they get to release the more we’ll likely hear of leaked specs and benchmarks. The latest leak shows a Cinebench R15 score of 3,0002 for the Intel Core i9 10900K. Oh, and a CPU-Z screenshot shows this CPU supposedly hitting 5.4GHz on all cores – 100MHz higher than the Core i9 10900K’s stock rated thermal velocity boost (TVB) speed, and 1.7GHz higher than its base clock speed.
The latest apparent leak came from Baidu forums (via Guru3D) but this original post has now been deleted. Not before people were able to grab screenshots of the benchmark results, however.
We already knew that clock speeds were going to be high with Comet Lake-S – they’d pretty much have to be, considering the next-gen CPUs are yet another iteration of what is essentially the same (but more refined) Skylake architecture using essentially the same (but more refined) 14nm process node technology. 5.4GHz, though. Damn.
The benchmark also shows this result being attained while running on 1.35V. This is a ‘high but not dangerously high’ voltage, meaning if the leak is true then this mystery person managed to overclock the Core i9 10900K substantially without having overvolt too heavily.
The cinebench score of around 3,000 is also impressive, putting it between 700 and 800 points ahead of the current fastest gaming CPU, Intel’s Core i9 9900K. Now, being the fastest gaming CPU doesn’t necessarily make it the best gaming CPU, since price and multi-core performance also has to be considered. But flagships are useful if only to give us a standard to aim for, and if an all-core overclock to 5.4GHz becomes the new flagship gaming CPU standard then it can only mean a rising tide to lift all boats.
That’s a big ‘if’, though. Whether or not such an overclock will be possible for your average Joe gamer, we’ll have to wait and see. But my money’s on no. We don’t know what cooling solution is being used, or just how bin selected this CPU is. Every batch of CPUs will bring with it some that are capable of hefty overclocks while the majority get left behind, and for every fan-cooled or AIO-cooled setup there’s someone else with a canister of liquid nitrogen ready to skew the results.
No, while this clock speed is impressive, it’s far from certain that such results will be possible across the board. Still, if the screenshots are true, it shows that Intel could still be capable of turning the heat up on AMD despite being stuck on an ageing architecture – albeit with a lot of its own heat being produced, and power being guzzled, in the process.