Intel makes the cheaper 10-core 10th Gen 10850K officially official
The new 10-core/20-thread CPU is priced lower than the flagship 10900K and will be available as a standalone chip, after all.
That mysterious addition to Intel's 10th generation Core processor family, the Core i9 10850K, is now official. As in, officially official, complete with a listing on Intel's ARK website and a recommend customer price (via Anandtech).
The 10850K has been making appearances on the web for a weeks now, first in a leaked benchmark listing at Geekbench, then as an option in Digital Storm's prebuilt PCs. But up until now, Intel has not acknowledged the new part.
Now it has, and it carries an MSRP of $453 for bulk purchases (trays of 1,000 units). That is $35 cheaper than the 10900K's MSRP.
The 10850K is essentially a slower clocked version of the 10900K. Both chips sport 10 cores and 20 threads, both wield 20MB of Intel Smart Cache (L3 cache), and both have a 125W TDP.
But whereas the 10900K ($488 MSRP in 1,000-unit trays) has a 3.7GHz base clock and 5.3GHz max boost clock, the 10850K tempers things slightly with a 3.6GHz base clock and 5.2GHz max boost clock. In other words, it's 100MHz slower at both ends, compared to Intel's flagship Comet Lake-S part.
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That's not a bad proposition for the $35 savings, especially with the prospect of applying a modest overclock to make up the difference. Granted, actual retail pricing to consumers will be a little higher, but it should still be around $35 less than the 10900K, which is in short supply anyway.
Incidentally, that is probably why the 10850K exists—to fill the gap left by the shortage of 10900K CPUs. That also means the 10850K probably won't have oodles of overclocking headroom, because of it did, it would be curious for Intel to add another SKU to the lineup with such a nominal drop in frequencies.
At present, we're not seeing any retail listings in the US, but a retail boxed i9 10850K has found its way to Scan in the UK (via OC3D) for £479.99. That's a nifty £70 less than what Scan is selling the retail boxed 10900K for, so it will be interesting to see how the pricing disparity works out in the US when the 10850K inevitably lands at places like Amazon and Newegg.