Overclocking

Adding some more juice by installing 1.35V increases all-core speed to 5.0GHz. That result constitutes an extra 500MHz over the out-the-box speed. Blender rendering time drops from 719 seconds to 656 seconds - shaving off more than a minute - while there is an extra 4fps in Shadow of the Tomb Raider at FHD. It's worth it because it takes all of a minute to configure in the BIOS.

Performance Analysis

The addition of hyperthreading means that this new Core i5 head honcho is up to 35 percent faster than the last-gen 9600K when it matters most. Intel will point to that as a very solid generation-to-generation uplift in heavy-load tasks. The informed enthusiast will understand that's true but also appreciate Core has a ways to go to catch up to rival AMD.

Ryzen 7 3700X was rightfully identified as a key competitor at the outset. The Core i5-10600K, as expected, trails it by a decent margin in multithreaded applications. For example, it is over three minutes slower in the Blender test, so if a lot of your workloads can task all available cores to the limit, AMD is the better choice from at equal financial footing.

Gaming-wise, Intel has the slight edge, though do understand that any advantage at FHD is rendered moot as the resolution increases. Power is not a concern for either processor as the Core i5-10600K doesn't breach its stated 125W TDP at any time, unlike the Core i9-10900K.

Conclusion

Arguments on the other hand are weightier. Core i5-10600K feels like an overclocked Core i7-8700K from 2017, intimating a lack of real innovation from Intel in the intervening three years at a time when AMD has made serious hay with Ryzen.

To that end, price-equivalent Ryzen 7 3700X remains much faster in the likes of Blender, is arguably equally as good in gaming, and comes with a solid, capable cooler in the box. This is why it becomes very difficult to recommend the best Core i5 ever, and better value is to be found lower down the 10th Gen Core i5 pecking order.

The bottom line is that Intel has done all it can with the manufacturing restrictions that continue to plague genuine advancement in the desktop CPU space. Even so, pricing is crucial, and the £280 charged for the Core i5-10600K puts it in a situation where it comes off as second best to the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X.