Coffee Lake CPUs without processor graphics: No IGP, same price

Intel’s CES campaign this year didn’t bring much joy to the average desktop users/gamers. AMD had Ryzen 3rd gen and Radeon VII up its sleeves, Nvidia released RTX 2060; meanwhile the only “new” processor Intel came up with during the show was a locked Core i5-9400. However, the silicon giant disclosed plans for releasing some Coffee Lake refresh chips with their integrated graphics chips disabled. Those versions will come with an “F” moniker suffixed with the original model name (i7 9700KF for example). Other than the disabled graphics, everything else i.e. frequency, no. Of cores, amount of cache etc. remain identical. Have a look.

Processor model	core/thread	Base/Boost clock	IGP	Memory	Cache	TDP
Core i9-9900K	8 / 16	3.6 / 5.0	UHD 630	DDR4-2666	16MB	95W
Core i9-9900KF	8 / 16	3.6 / 5.0	No	DDR4-2666	16MB	95W
Core i7-9700K	8 / 8	3.6 / 4.9	UHD 630	DDR4-2666	12MB	95W
Core i7-9700KF	8 / 8	3.6 / 4.9	No	DDR4-2666	12MB	95W
Core i5-9600K	6 / 6	3.7 / 4.6	UHD 630	DDR4-2666	9MB	95W
Core i5-9600KF	6 / 6	3.7 / 4.6	No	DDR4-2666	9MB	95W
Core i3-8100	4 / 4	3.6/ -	UHD 630	DDR4-2400	6MB	65W
Core i3-8100F	4 / 4	3.6/ -	No	DDR4-2400	6MB	65W

Here is a link to the full list of Intel's Coffee Lake 9th gen CPUs.

Intel’s 14nm manufacturing process has seen it’s fair share of issues over last couple of years. Low yields in recent times even caused a shortage of Intel’s mainstream chips where manufacturing couldn’t keep up with high demands of these parts. Volume production mean there will be parts which are not perfect and it’s understandable that Intel got some chips in its hands that apart from a defected graphics subsystem works just fine. The best solution often is to disable the troubled subsytem and sell those as “just” processors. Intel is doing exactly that and there is nothing wrong in it. We’ve seen AMD giving some of there APUs the same treatment in the yesteryear. AMD, however, sold the IGP-disabled parts at a much lower price than the “normal” ones.

And this is where Intel could have made things interesting by pricing the “F”-suffixed chips at a lower price point which, turns out, it is not!

Tom’s Hardware and others are reporting that the IGP-disabled models will be sold at the same price of their original counterparts. That’s somewhat baffling as I can’t see any reason as to why someone would like to buy these IGP-disabled parts over the ones with functional graphics if there isn’t any savings involved. Intel’s UHD 630 iGPU isn’t the best when it comes to integrated graphics but still it’s a lot better than to spend ₹3.5k on a discrete graphics card just to get display. Then there are many users who don’t need more graphics power other than what the processor grants. 

Even if you’re using a full-fledged discrete graphics card, having an iGPU helps immensely in troubleshooting. Not only it works as a fallback option in case your main graphics card is having issues but at times it helps to isolate the problem. 

 
Perhaps Intel feels its processor graphics is “free” but we certainly don’t! So be careful to read the lebel when shopping for a new Intel processor, there should be something in line of “No Graphics” or “Requires discrete graphics card” written on packages containing parts with “F”-suffix. And unless you get a bargain which we seriously doubt, stick with the ones with an iGPU.