Intel Core i9-9900KS
With 5GHz on all cores, it’s the new gaming king
THIS A MILESTONE for Intel and CPUs, with the Core i9-9900KS officially being the first CPU that can do 5GHz on all eight of its cores, all the time. The Core i9-9900KS takes everything good about Intel’s existing ninth-gen refresh, then cranks the dial up to 11, using binning to select the best chips and reach the lofty goal of 5GHz. Is it enough to maintain Intel’s claim to the gaming throne? Yes, absolutely. The Core i9-9900K was already the fastest CPU in games, so tacking on 300MHz is only going to help.
At the same time, 300MHz more isn’t going to come close to closing the gap between Intel and AMD’s 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X in multithreaded workloads, never mind the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X and third-gen Threadripper. Fifty percent more cores with relatively similar percore performance, and only a 14 percent advantage in clock speed for Intel, means AMD unequivocally offers more total performance in the right applications.
Most people going out to buy a i99900K want the maximum performance possible, within reason, and with a good cooler, 4.7GHz shouldn’t be a problem— and for the Core i9-9900KS, even 5GHz isn’t a problem. Let’s reiterate that bit about having a good cooler: Intel doesn’t include any box coolers with its K-series CPUs, assuming that most enthusiasts plan to use something more robust. We can only guess what would happen if you tried a basic air cooler on the i9-9900KS, but it would either overheat and throttle, or overheat and crash.
Using a high-end motherboard with a good liquid cooler, temperatures weren’t generally a problem. In fact, the 9900KS sample is clearly superior to our 9900K sample as it has lower idle power use by about 5W, and even running flat out at 5GHz, we didn’t see temperatures go above 81 C in most workloads. The slower 9900K, meanwhile, topped out at 84 C with peaks of up to 92 C. With extreme liquid cooling, you can probably push the Core i9-9900KS up to 5.2–5.3GHz without overheating, but that’s still a very small overclock. Ever since AMD became more competitive, Intel has been pushing clock speeds closer to the limit at “stock.”
CHART TOPPER
As you would expect, considering the i9-9900K was formerly the top CPU in the gaming charts, the i9-9900KS is just a tiny bit faster. Overall, it’s a 1.2 percent improvement over the 9900K, which means that even at 1080p ultra with a 2080 Ti, many games are still mostly GPU-limited. Basically, though, the top three CPUs are all effectively tied—no one is really going to notice the difference in gaming performance between the 9700K, 9900K, and 9900KS.
Moving our attention to application performance, the Core i9-9900KS doesn’t look so potent. Many CPUs outperform the 9900KS in multithreading tasks, including pretty much all the Threadripper 2000 series, and the ninthgen Skylake-X Core i9 parts. There’s a catch, however: How many of these applications do you regularly use? Cinebench, POV-ray, and Blender all test 3D rendering performance. If you’re not doing that sort of work, it’s more of a theoretical benefit, rather than something immediately noticeable.
This is Intel’s highest clocked CPU to date, finally hitting 5GHz on all cores without any serious effort on the part of the user. This is also a limited edition part, meaning just like the Core i78086K anniversary edition, it won’t be on sale forever. It also still uses 14nm++ lithography, which is holding Intel back.
But even though it’s built on yesterday’s lithography, the Core i9-9900KS is more than fast enough for almost any non-professional workload. If you were looking at the Core i9-9900K before, the 9900KS is a barely noticeable bump in price for 3–6 percent more performance. It hangs on to the gaming crown as well, and will likely do so until at least the next generation of graphics cards arrives.
The i9-9900KS is largely the same chip as the i9-9900K. The main benefit is that it comes with some extra binning sauce. For slightly better performance, our 9900KS sample actually runs cooler than a lower clocked 9900K, and it still has a bit of overclocking headroom in a pinch. Right now, this is as good as it gets for gaming performance.