So I have an i5 9600k and I was looking into doing some light upgrades on my rig. I know the i9 from that generation is compatible with my motherboard, so I used UserBenchmark to compare the two. To my surprise, it said the i9 is only about 4-5% better than my i5. That doesn't make much sense to me considering the i9 has a higher clock speed, more cores, and hyper-threading. Is this comparison reliable, and how can it be that the upgrade only shows such a small improvement?
5 Answers
Pretty much no one endorses that site. In fact, at one point Microsoft even flagged it as a problematic site. Their reviews tend to be pretty trashy overall.
I wouldn't trust anything from UserBenchmark. Their admin has a questionable reputation, and their benchmarks often don't correlate with trusted channels like Gamers Nexus or Hardware Unboxed, which provide more thorough reviews. Just know that there are other issues at play with Intel CPUs right now too.
Absolutely not, steer clear from that site! It’s notorious for giving inaccurate results.
Do people even search for info before asking these days? It’s wild how many misconceptions still circle around, especially given how common that site shows up on Google results.
Honestly, UserBenchmark isn't considered reliable by many in the community. For gaming, most titles don't leverage more than 6 cores effectively, and the clock speed differences might not be as significant as you'd expect.
What about for tasks like browsing with lots of tabs open or heavy Excel processing? Wouldn't the i9 with 8 cores and hyper-threading perform better than the i5?
Yeah, ironic since it’s usually the first result when you search for PC hardware comparisons. That's likely why a lot of people get misled.