Just How Special Is The Intel i9-9900KS?
Ryan’s Kentucky Special?
Today we get a look at the Core i9-9900KS, a special release of the best of the i9-9900K processors made all of which operate 300MHz higher than your usual top end Coffee Lake processor, sporting a 127W TDP and a $14 to $25 price premium. That is a wee bit of a bump from the 95W i9-9900K, but you need some serious juice to run all eight cores at a full 5.0GHz. There is even some room for overclocking and 5.2GHz is reachable if you can keep your cool.
Kitguru’s testing showed that there are benefits from the increased frequencies in benchmarks and productivity software but for gamers you will not see a benefit unless you are able to drive a game with a refresh rate of 120Hz or higher. Those with the hardware to drive a high refresh rate monitor will indeed see a bit of an increase as well as bragging rights. On the other hand, it does tend to outperform AMD’s new chips overall, as far as performance per dollar goes Ryzen is still the better investment.
In a clear effort to stamp its clock frequency and gaming performance authority over AMD, Intel has released a ‘Special Edition’ version of the Core i9-9900K. Clocked at 5GHz out of the box on all eight cores, only the best of the Core i9-9900K silicon can become the Core i9-9900KS.
More Tech News From Around The Web
- Intel Core i9 9900KS Linux Performance Benchmarks @ Phoronix
- A Look At The Per-Clock Performance / Peak Frequencies With The Intel Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake @ Phoronix
- Intel Core i7-10710U Benchmarked: 14nm+++ Comet Lake @ Techspot
- Intel Core i7-1065G7 Ice Lake Linux Performance Benchmarks @ Phoronix
- AMD EPYC vs. Intel Xeon Cascadelake With Facebook’s RocksDB Database @ Phoronix
- The Mitigation Impact Difference On AMD Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Intel Core i9 9900K Performance @ Phoronix
- The Spectre Mitigation Impact For Intel Ice Lake With Core i7-1065G7 @ Phoronix
- AMD Ryzen 5 3600X @ The FPS Review
There’s another wrinkle: According to Phoronix (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=intel-corei9-9900ks&num=1), the 9900KS has a different mitigation report to the 9900K, and this is reflected in testing (e.g. reduced context switch cycle count). At the very least that means it’s a new stepping.