As our testing results came into focus, it was clear that we had an interesting comparison on our hands against the Core i7-10700K, which we have also tested. The TDP will be the maximum power under a sustained workload for which the base frequency is the minimum frequency guarantee. The Core i7-10700 and Core i7-10700K are both members of Intel’s 10 th Generation ‘Comet Lake’ Core i7 family.

For many markets, such as embedded processors, that value of TDP still signifies the peak power consumption. For the turbo, as mentioned, Intel has recommendations for power levels and turbo time in its documentation, however OEMs and motherboard manufacturers are free to routinely ignore it. Aside from the suffix difference, the K variant has a TDP almost twice as high, and this manifests almost entirely in the base frequency difference.Intel likes to state that the base frequency is the guarantee, however if a processor can achieve a higher frequency while power limited, it will - if it can achieve that power value with 200 MHz above base frequency, it will run at the higher frequency. PayPal Credit and PayPal Pay in 3 are trading names of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH. Intel defines a sustained workload one in which the 'turbo budget' has expired, and the processor will achieve its best frequency above base frequency (but not turbo modes) . Processor numbers differentiate features within each processor family, not across different processor families. We test at DDR4-2933 with JEDEC settings with Comet Lake, as the difference here is that DDR4-2933 is where Intel’s warranty comes into the equation.

In the past, we used to assume that it was the peak power consumption of the processor was its TDP rating – after all, a ‘thermal design point’ of a processor was almost worthless if you didn’t account for the peak power dissipation. This is a relatively narrow range which indicates that the Intel Core i7-10700 performs reasonably consistently under varying real world conditions. For communication with other components in the computer, Core i7-10700 uses a PCI-Express Gen 3 connection.Intel’s tenth generation octa-core hyperthreaded i7-10700K is one of the fastest high-end desktop CPUs ever made. If this sounds familiar, this is how all AMD Ryzen processors work, however Intel only implements it when turbo is no longer available.