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i7-9700K or i9-9900K? What are your opinions?

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Oct 28, 2010
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Motherboard
Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Pro Wifi
CPU
i9-9900K
Graphics
RX 570
I am thinking about building a new hackintosh. My 10 year old hack is still running flawlessly but I figured it was time.

i7-9700K or an 19-9900K. I know the technical difference between these two processors, but what do you all think in terms of real performance? Is hyper threading that important? Price/performance wise it looks like the i7-9700K is a better choice. Seems like you can overclocked it higher and easier. But does that matter? Price wise there is a $100 difference! For just hyper threading?!

I use my hack for creative production work. Adobe CS all day. InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. I may on occasion have to re-encode a video or two.
 
I am thinking about building a new hackintosh. My 10 year old hack is still running flawlessly but I figured it was time.

i7-9700K or an 19-9900K. I know the technical difference between these two processors, but what do you all think in terms of real performance? Is hyper threading that important? Price/performance wise it looks like the i7-9700K is a better choice. Seems like you can overclocked it higher and easier. But does that matter? Price wise there is a $100 difference! For just hyper threading?!

I use my hack for creative production work. Adobe CS all day. InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. I may on occasion have to re-encode a video or two.
I would go with the i7-9700K and overclock it to 5.0 GHz
 
Imo, Hyper Threading makes a huge difference, although maybe not for your workflow... I don't think Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign requires so many threads.

Overall performance-wise, I think the i9-9900KF is much more powerful.
 
I was just looking at this too. I was thinking to just max out everything, therefore 9900k, but looking at detailed specs, I don't think it's that simple. The 9700k can be more overclocked while using less power and making less heat. And the 9900k's slightly higher multiprocessor performance has costs that are significantly higher, in power, heat, and dollars. So I'm thinking that:
  • If you're doing a single thing, you can do it both faster and cheaper with the 9700k
  • If you're doing lots and lots of things, maybe you need the 9900k.
So for example some kind of server situation would want the 9900k. If you love having a million tabs open at once, this is perhaps a good argument for the 9900k (every tab is a separate process). But if you are doing one single compute-intensive task (that is not optimized for multi-threading), the 9700k would actually perform better. The devil is in the details though and if you're running one single program, it may be spawning multiple processes or threads under the hood, and could still take good advantage of the extra power of the 9900k.

I'll probably still stick with the 9900k, because it'll be my house file server, music server, cloud syncing, and I usually have a million browser tabs open.

Here's the reference I was looking at on the difference: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13400/intel-9th-gen-core-i9-9900k-i7-9700k-i5-9600k-review/22
 
I opted to buy the i9-9900K. I'm looking to make this thing last another 10 years and I just figured that is the best way to do it. And the extra $100 isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things. I know myself, I’d alway be wishing I had bought the bigger, better processor.

Now to actually build the thing! I think it will be fine, there are a lot of guides of the setup I've bought.
 
Imo, Hyper Threading makes a huge difference, although maybe not for your workflow... I don't think Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign requires so many threads.

Overall performance-wise, I think the i9-9900KF is much more powerful.

Just an FYI... In highly thread-able java applications (I used to work for a software company), it was determined that hyper-threading only gives a 25% to 30% boost. So if you have a 4 core CPU it will feel like a 5 core CPU. A 6 core CPU MIGHT feel like almost an 8 core. Since our licenses were per VM core (thread), We would tell the customers to turn hyper-threading off and add more real cores. an 8 core CPU with no hyper-threading is definitely faster than a 6 core, 12 thread CPU.
 
Just an FYI... In highly thread-able java applications (I used to work for a software company), it was determined that hyper-threading only gives a 25% to 30% boost. So if you have a 4 core CPU it will feel like a 5 core CPU. A 6 core CPU MIGHT feel like almost an 8 core. Since our licenses were per VM core (thread), We would tell the customers to turn hyper-threading off and add more real cores. an 8 core CPU with no hyper-threading is definitely faster than a 6 core, 12 thread CPU.

Yes, that's always been my understanding as well. Approx 30% increase.
 
Its not only HT, its about 12 vs 16mb cache which is a big factor for performance.
 
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