Intel’s 10th Gen Comet Lake-S desktop CPUs will be capable of hitting single-core boosts of 5.3GHz under the right conditions. We still don’t know the exact power draw of these latest 14nm chips, but thanks to a leak on Weibo, we’ve got a rough idea. A user by the name of “WolfStame” has shared the power draw and load-temperatures of the Core i9-10900 along with the sustained clock speeds, and it’s not looking pretty:
Even with a 120mm AIO cooler, the 10900F hits a single-core boost clock of just 4.58GHz. At this point, the temperatures scale up to as much as 93 degrees and the CPU starts lowering its clocks (throttling). The AIDA64 stability test was run for just one minute, and as you can see, the chip began to overheat. On top of that, this is a non-K part. For the 10900K, you’ll be needing a 360mm liquid cooler to run the CPU at the rated specs.
Surprisingly, the 5-pipe radiator tower performed better than the AIO cooler, though not by much. When running the AIDA FPU test, the chip drew 170W of power and reached 83 degrees using the latter while the air-based cooler restricted it to 80 degrees.
During the earlier conducted AIDA64 stress test, the temps were much higher (93 degrees), and the power draw spiked up to 220W. The user claims that the air-based radiator manages to keep the clocks from throttling in certain scenarios, but in the most intensive tasks, the single-core boost clock drops below 4.5GHz.
Furthermore, the user (who’s also a Lenovo China Gaming Desktop Product Planning Manager) recommends a 240mm AIO cooler for the 10th Gen Core i7 and i9 parts at the very least, and a high-end 5-6 pipe air cooler for the hex-core i5 chips.
I’m guessing that Intel once again won’t be packaging the stock cooler with the Comet Lake-S parts, with even the i5s requiring a third party cooler. This will make budget-conscious gamers think twice before buying a 10th Gen desktop CPU. Considering that the rival Ryzen 7 3700X chips run under 75 degrees even with a stock cooler, this isn’t good news for Intel fans.
