In the wake of Intel debuting its Core i9-9900K CPU, performance numbers from a company called Principled Tech showed it beating out the 8700K and AMD's 2700X by quite a margin, making it far and beyond the best gaming CPU available today. Except, it turns out that those benchmarks weren't necessarily fair, especially when it came to the AMD chip.
While the 9900K was running on all cores and with a high-powered Noctua air cooler, Principled Tech admitted that it ran the AMD chip with a stock cooler and in the Ryzen Master software's "Game Mode," which cuts the cores in half on Threadripper CPUs to avoid degraded performance on those particular chips. On Ryzen CPUs though, such a move would massively degrade performance, cutting the 2700X down to just four cores and making its comparison with the 9900K at eight cores rather unfair.
The company has since admitted its mistake in doing so and plans to run the tests back to provide proper performance numbers, but Intel doesn't think that's necessary.
It said in a statement that the original benchmarks from Principled Tech were "consistent with what we have seen in our labs," and that it still believed that when the third-party reviewers release their results from testing that the chip will still be the most powerful gaming CPU in the world.
That may well be the case, but it seems hard to imagine that the 2700X won't be at least far more competitive with the 9900K when it can match it core for core and thread for thread.
The 9900K is currently available for pre-order at $580 and will be officially released on the 19th. AMD's next line of CPUs is expected to debut in early 2019 and could close the performance gap even more.