Eight Cores At 5GHz: Intel Core i9-9900KS Review

A processor like Intel’s Core i9-9900KS is way easier to sum-up than most. The chip is effectively a Core i9-9900K that’s been binned well enough to satisfy the requirement for 5GHz Turbos on all eight of its cores. When the 9900K first came out, we couldn’t help but wish we saw those clocks at the time, but clearly, producing a bleeding-edge chip like this is not easy.

Some proof of how difficult it is to produce this chip may be evident by the fact that we first learned of it at Computex in early June. At the time, we expected the chip to release not too long after, but were surprised when we learned it’d come in the fall. Add to that, this CPU only has a one-year warranty, which is quite a change from the three-year of the 9900K. And the TDP jumps from 95W to 127W.

From some angles, the high-TDP might seem like a problem, and so would the 1-year warranty, but at the end of the day, this is not a typical product. The fact for the warranty could be due to the fact that Intel doesn’t expect to continue producing these too far into the future, so it’s not going to be able to cough up replacements after a year. That’s a big contrast to other regular SKUs which will last for years. This is “Special Edition” for a reason.

Those who will purchase this chip probably know what they’re getting into. As our gaming tests have shown, the 9900KS is pretty much unbeatable overall, both at low- and high-end resolutions. Of course, we’d be misleading to insinuate that there’s some significant difference between 200 and 210 FPS, but if you are someone who actually games at these sky-high frame rates, then you’ll obviously care a lot about making sure you get that top performance consistently throughout.

We did not do in-depth temperature or power tests with the 9900KS, for lack of ability to capture results that give us a high degree of confidence, but we can say that the better your cooling, the more you’re going to guarantee those top-end clocks. We could hit 90°C pretty easily in some workloads, but as our results showed, it didn’t impact its scalability with the 9900K any.

For those looking for the best bang-for-the-buck, the 9900K probably isn’t it, but it also depends on what you’re looking for. If you deal with workloads that take great advantage of many cores, then you may be better off with an enthusiast platform (which would also add 4-channel memory). We will say, though, that if you have a high-end GPU paired with the 9900KS, it’s going to be one heck of a combination, based on our recent in-depth look at Corsair’s ONE PC, which featured both the 9900K and RTX 2080 Ti.

Pros

• 8 cores at 5GHz a piece is beautiful to see.
• Enables the highest frame rates in gaming.

Cons

• Hard to compete with 3900X in some encoding and rendering workloads.
• Only includes a 1-year warranty.