Now I have to redo my benchmarks 😬

@bitman Didn’t want to be too pushy, but yeah! looking forward to that😅

stepping R0 only adds some bug-fixes, sorry.

[Cynic]

From my visit to ark.intel.com it appears that you have purchased two extra cores for ~$450-499 US and have taken a very slight hit to maximum clock speed. Unless you can run at 100% very often, I'm skeptical whether it will be justified in terms of cost/CPU clock.

[/Cynic]

Two or three upgrade cycles ago, I would buy into a chipset generation at the entry point processor and buy a processor at the top after two years even if I had to buy a used one . I've since given up on that strategy since Intel began changing the chipsets so often. Now, my four-year upgrade cycle involves a fork-lift upgrade.

Please prove me wrong.

@john_dennis You are right of course! 2 extra cores, (or 4 threads extra if count in HT) for that price, yes that is not the smartest thing to do. I always build my own PC's the last decades, and that is also not smart budget wise. It always tends to cost more building yourself as you tend to handpick the best components to avoid having some weak link in the chain.

On the subject on the i9 I was eyeballing this for over a year now, the i7-8700K  I had in my system for 2 years now.

I thought about upgrading to the new AMD Ryzen 9 3900X or Ryzen 7 3700X who seem to crush Intel in multi-core applications. But then I needed a new motherboard, maybe a new cooler and new memory, and more important I knew I would be tempted to also upgrade my PC components with new PCI Express 4.0 SSD variants. All in all a more expensive exercise and I did not fancy re-installing all my software. The latter usually takes me a week or more to get everything installed and tuned on a new PC. I rather wait another year or two when the dust settles on PCI-express 4 price-wise.

What triggered me to get the i9 now (apart from spending more on a new PC with AMD) was the stepping R0 which I cannot find any official stuff, but is rumored to maybe have some bug fixes, or change in clock speeds or the thermal design power...

@Ehemaliger User I quickly tried a few of this forum's Vegas benchmarks (the one by JN_) on Vegas 16 and could not see any rendering speed improvement vs my old processor using the NVENC (I suppose due to my RTX2080 TI). What I did see is a big improvement on the average FPS in region 1, this went up from around average 12 to around average 20.

Below a stress test I did via CPU-Z

There's nothing wrong with better timeline performance. Your CPU could run a little cooler.

@john_dennis Yes my CPU could run a bit cooler if I had used a more expensive cooler paste, I had to settle with Thermal Grizzly Aeronaut, better ones where out of stock, but that would only yield 1 or 2 degrees difference on my Noctua. Water cooling is often overrated, especially against top of the line air-cooling, and air cooling does has it merits as it can cool as a side-effect your other nearby components such as memory, chipset and M2 SSD's. Also check out the following test by Linus (why you shouldn't water cool your PC) :

@bitman I found going to 8 cores (from 4790k) really helped playback on 4k material. Magix recommends an 8 core for 4K editing. You did a very cost effective upgrade, well done.

@bitman I found going to 8 cores (from 4790k) really helped playback on 4k material. Magix recommends an 8 core for 4K editing. You did a very cost effective upgrade, well done.

I got exactly the same with my much cheaper i7 7900 4.7Ghz

Also check out the following test by Linus (why you shouldn't water cool your PC) :

@bitman comparing AIOs to top of the line air cooling makes no sense. A custom water cooling system can run as quiet if not even quieter than an air cooled system and at much lower temps. I have a custom water cooling system that cools my 9800k @ 4.6GHz and Vega 64 Frontier edition, both are at 62C at full load when rendering in Vegas and 68C when doing Cinebench testing. The fans are Noctua too and are really quiet. I would never ever go back to aircooled. I never OC my ram, always at the max speed the CPU's memory controller is rated for. SSD's dont run hot either, so aside from the water cooling fans, I only have one 140mm intake fan on my case.

@OldSmoke You are correct that custom water cooling can be more efficient and run more quiet. But not always, at least not for the AIO line up presented by Linus tech you tube channel with the title 'why you shouldn't water cool your PC'. I am not against water cooling. I used water cooling (corsair) in one of my older PC builds some time ago.

@OldSmoke You are correct that custom water cooling can be more efficient and run more quiet. But not always, at least not for the AIO line up presented by Linus tech you tube channel with the title 'why you shouldn't water cool your PC'. I am not against water cooling. I used water cooling (corsair) in one of my older PC builds some time ago.

@bitman AIO vs custom water cooling is like comparing a stock Intel cooler vs a Noctua.

@bitman AIO vs custom water cooling is like comparing a stock Intel cooler vs a Noctua.

I have a $140 3-fan 360mm Corsair H150i AIO cooling my 9900K & IMO it handles stress-tests, long days of rendering, etc. better than a $90 Noctua NH-D15 that is cooling an overclocked Xeon. I can overclock my 9900K to 5.0 ghz, but the fans spin-up to full speed. At 4.9 ghz the system is very quiet - so I've been keeping it at 4.9. My $350 liquid cooled VEGA 64 is also self-contained & is also quiet when overclocked. I can record using a live mic right beside the tower case & not pickup any background/fan noise.

That said, IMO for paid work the 9900K is a worthwhile upgrade over the 8700K, especially if the OP can resell the 8700K, because many processes in Vegas are CPU dependent.

“Corsair H150i AIO” Yeah, sweet, I never hear it, lovely match for the i9.

This post drifted a bit to cooling, but I really was curious to stepping R0 vs P0

@bitman Well i’m curious too, but the reason I didn’t follow up is I really don’t know much about it. I guess your query is aimed at a more select knowledgeable set of users.

Can I take it that the early cpu's (9900k's) have a stepping of P0 and that your later one has a stepping of R0?

How to determine those values, are they available via software query, or on the bare cpu or on the box?

Maybe its as simple as @supergafudo's answer?

stepping R0 only adds some bug-fixes, yes is that simple. no perfomance improvement nor changes that you can perceive.

@Ehemaliger User As said in the original post you can recognize stepping R0 on the processor housing (=bare cpu) as "SRG19",

@supergafudo can you substantiate this? Intel is silent on this.

What I do know is that for Z370 Gigabyte mobo you needed a new BIOS version for i9 9900K range originals (P0 stepping), and yet another new BIOS was released to support the same processor with stepping R0, so there is maybe more to it than we know...

@bitman 

“ As said in the original post you can recognize stepping R0 on the processor housing (=bare cpu) as "SRG19",

Fair enough, no way ill be checking that now as its covered by the water block, but since I was one of the very early adapters im sure its the equivalent of the P0 you mentioned. How does SRG19 translate to R0?

Or what does the P0 translate to? Ok, found it on Wikipedia “SRELS” = P0.

@bitman

You probably know this SRG19 specification that lists :

Notes on sSpec SRG19:

The processor supports DDR4-2666 memory.
Direct Media Interface speed is 8 GT/s.
Frequency of integrated graphics controller in turbo mode is 1200 MHz.
Integrated graphics controller runs at 350 MHz.

But these are the same as for the SRELS. There is supposed to come a new version of this Coffee Lake-S processor as the i9-9900ks with about 5% performance increase and ~125W TDP.

The 9900KS, to be released sometime in October, is suppose to come from the factory guaranteed to boost to 5.0 ghz on all 8 cores with affordable cooling options. In comparison, my 9900K overclocks to 5.0, but tends to run too hot for my liking, so I dropped it to 4.9 ghz where it runs much cooler w/quieter fans on the Corsair H150i. The difference between 4.9 & 5.0 is negligible. However, if Intel is binning all of the best CPUs as the KS version, then the standard K is less likely to overclock as well as mine purchased back in April. If I were building today I might consider paying an extra $100 to guarantee 5.0, but not a premium... Vegas' code kinda old, so it still tends to benefit from up to 8 cores at faster ghz vs. more cores at slower ghz… Therefore, IMO, the 9900K is a good bang/buck CPU for Vegas.

top performance aside, with the knowledge of hindsight, which CPU in your opinion yields the best performance/price for Z370 currently?