The Performance & Power Efficiency Of The Core i7 990X vs. Core i9 9900K

Gaming tests weren't a focus for this comparison but rather more CPU/system oriented real-world tests, but I couldn't resist running a few lightweight open-source OpenGL games... With the still-maintained ET: Legacy game that continues advancing the legendary Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, the frame-rates more than doubled on the i9-9900K box from the i7 990X while using the same Radeon RX 560 on both systems.

The performance-per-Watt was a 3x improvement with the 9900K box during this game having an average power draw of 93 Watts compared to 126 Watts on the old Gulftown EE system. The peak power consumption was also 106 Watts on the Coffeelake refresh versus 141 Watts with Gulftown.

With the open-source Xonotic first person shooter, it was also a huge difference going from the 990X to 9900K.

The memory performance is also obviously a huge difference from three channels of DDR3-1066 to dual channel DDR4-2666 (or quad channel DDR4-2666 with the Core i9 9900X).

Running CloverLeaf for hydrodynamics and NAMD as a molecular dynamics simulator, the Core i9 9900K shows the huge difference from Gulftown to Cloverleaf.