Last week, Intel-commissioned benchmarks from Principled Technologies were heavily chastised for their misleading comparisons to competition. Originally claiming to be up to 50 percent faster than the Ryzen 7 2700X, promised re-tests under fair conditions show that the Intel i9-9900K is actually a much more marginal 12 percent quicker than competition.

With reviewers under a strict NDA , consumers had to rely on Principled Technologies (PT) to explain just how much bang for buck Intel’s new i9-9900K was compared to competition. In an attempt to match lofty expectations of its first mainstream 8-core/16-thread CPU and justify its $488 price tag minus a cooler, the Intel-paid benchmarks claimed that the i9-9900K was the “world’s fastest gaming processor” with a 50 percent performance increase over the $299 AMD Ryzen 7 2700X.