Intel Launches First 9th-gen Core Desktop Processors: i9-9900K, i7-9700K & i5-9600K

A couple of weeks ago, Intel took the veil off of its ninth-gen Core series. At the forefront, that included the Core i9-9900K, an eight-core chip bound for the mainstream Z390 platform. With it comes the market’s highest Turbo clocks, and sixteen threads to help tear through some serious workloads.

As lightly touched on in a post from yesterday, I’m behind on work, and that includes the work required to get an i9-9900K review out the door. At the moment, I am tackling things as I can, and will likely cough up a review of the GeForce RTX 2070 before anything else, since it’s the most overdue. There’s another piece of quick content in store for some point this weekend, as a bit of a stop-gap until a 9900K review next week.

Nonetheless, Intel’s Core i9-9900K is special for a couple of reasons, and a big one is simple: it’s a Core i9 on the “mainstream” platform. I hate to use the word mainstream when talking about a $500 processor, because it is an enthusiast chip. It’s just not part of Intel’s higher-end Core X-Series platform, which includes beefier X299 motherboards.

There are some upsides to the 9900K’s positioning, though. Anyone who owns a last-gen Z370 motherboard will be able to upgrade to the newest chips, but, you’ll want to make absolute certain that your board’s vendor has already published an EFI update to support the processors. During the review cycle, a friend told me his Z370 board couldn’t use the 9900K, so I’m hoping that issue doesn’t persist for long.

For an overview of what Intel’s offering us as desktop customers right now, here’s the current list:

None of the new X-Series processors listed above are available right now, but all three of the regular Core series are. That includes the i7-9700K, which unlike the i7-8700K before it adds another two cores, but it comes at the expense of missing HyperThreading. Clearly, this was done to separate the chip further from the 9700K, but there’s still something about it that bugs me – even if the 8 cores of the 9700K will outperform the 8700K. Imagine if HT wasn’t removed.

Joe ‘Steponz’ Stepongzi overclocking Intel’s Core i9-9900K

In talking to friends who’ve already thoroughly benchmarked the 9900K, it seems folks are impressed overall, but not more impressed than they expected to be. Gaming performance will see a gain on the 9900K, but it’s not going to be a make-or-break kind of difference if you are able to find an 8700K that happens to be more affordable.

That said, anyone currently running Coffee Lake would have no need to upgrade to these 9th-gen processors, unless of course you entered in at the low-end and suddenly want to adopt a higher-end solution. It’s imperative that you check your board vendor’s support site first, though, because chances are the updates are not available right at this moment.