The Core i9-9900K isn’t the first Core i9, but it’s the first one that matters to gamers. Intel’s Core i9 platform launched well over a year ago, bringing higher core-counts and clock speeds to home desktops. Yet those chips were targeted more towards productivity because they prioritized core count over clock speed. That’s not a winning combination for game performance and, as a result, the Core i9 chips often weren’t the best pick for games. That’s no longer true. Intel claims the i9-9900K is the “world’s best gaming processor ” — in other words, a processor that the average person was meant to own and use. So, does Intel’s latest and greatest live up to the hype, or fizzle under the pressure? The stakes Though still built on the familiar Coffee Lake 14-nanometer microarchitecture, the Core i9-9900K is indeed the launch of an entire new generation of processors. With that comes the familiar controversies around performance claims and benchmarks typical of generational launches. Intel came out of the gate swinging, claiming its new Core i9 bested AMD’s Ryzen processors by as much as 50 percent in some benchmarks. That’s a huge leap, especially since Intel has played catch-up in core count since AMD launched the Threadripper platform just over a year ago. Beyond that, Intel’s well-documented delay of 10-nanometer has been painful to watch, especially as AMD has been building out its 12-nanometer platform throughout all of 2018. Real-life performance was where the Core i9 blew us away. But Intel has done it again. Rather than compete directly with either the Threadripper 1900X or the Ryzen 7 1800X , the Core i9-9900K promises the best of both worlds. It has a base clock speed of 3.6GHz, matching the Ryzen 7, but boosts up to an audacious 5GHz Turbo frequency. Not even the 2nd-gen Threadripper has cracked that milestone. Its core count might be far behind, but the Core i9-9900K can hit higher per-core clock speeds at default settings. It’s priced like a Threadripper, has the core count of the Ryzen 7, and boosts faster than either. This Core i9 isn’t the same as other processors we’ve seen before. Record-breaking processing power We tested the Core i9 in Asus’ new ROG Strix GL12CX desktop, which also featured an Nvidia RTX 2080 and 32GB of RAM. The results weren’t just impressive. They were record-breaking. We compared the Core i9-9900K against the Ryzen 7 1800X. We also set it side by side with AMD’s Threadripper 1920X and 1950X, both of which have higher core counts than Intel’s product. Still, the Core i9 is the clear winner in every benchmark and test we could put it through. In synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench, the Core i9 beats the Threadripper 1920X in multi-core scores by around 21 percent. That increases to 28 percent in single-core. It looks even worse for the Ryzen 7, which nearly 40 percent behind Intel. Against the previous generation Core i7-8700K, the Core i9 matched its single-core performance, but flexed its eight-core muscles by upping its multi-core score by around 25 percent. That’s the kind of improvement two extra cores provides. Real-life performance tests are where the Core i9 blew us away. The system encoded a 4K video in Handbrake in just one minute and sixteen seconds. That’s the new record for systems we’ve tested, and well over half the time it took AMD’s Threadripper 1920X. The best gaming processor, indeed The Core i9-9900K is an attractive processor for any demanding use, but gaming is the headline feature. Its impressive performance makes a difference, though only in games constrained by the CPU. Civilization VI, which performs many AI calculations simultaneously, benefited greatly from the high clock speeds and eight cores of the 9900K. The Core i9-9990K outperformed the Threadripper 1920X by 40 percent. We saw similar results in Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey, where draw distance and high numbers of NPCs tap the CPU more heavily. In games like these, the Core i9 scores like no other processor. On the other hand, we saw little improvement over the competition in Deus Ex: Mankind Divided and Battlefield 1. Regardless of whether you’re playing in 4K on Ultra or in 1080p on Medium, much of the processing power was wasted. The GeForce RTX 2080 is doing the heavy lifting here. Game performance is capped by the GPU, not the CPU. Much of the controversy surrounding the benchmarks of the Core i9 revolve around the Threadripper’s Game Mode, which is said to improve game performance at the expense of peak processor performance. However, it should be noted they don’t ship with the setting on by default, which means gamers probably won’t experience a performance benefit. If you’re curious, though, flipping Game Mode on reduced the 40 percent lead in Civilization VI to 32 percent. The unsurprising champion You likely won’t be surprised to hear the world’s best gaming processor comes at a high price. The Core i9-9900K will set you back $530 if you buy it at retail. That’s a huge bump over the $360 i7-8700K or the $374 i7-9700K, and much more expensive than a Ryzen 7 processor. The pricing actually makes AMD’s Threadripper the prime competition. Luckily for Intel, the Core i9-9900K boasts game performance that beats Threadripper and, on balance, everything else. The processor’s combination of respectable core count and per-core speed is the secret sauce games love. This doesn’t mean you have to buy the Core i9-9900K. You can enjoy an awesome gaming experience on a far less powerful processor, like Intel’s Core i5-8400 or AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X. But if you want the best of the best, the Core i9-9900K is it. Editors' Recommendations<doc-sep>PRODUCT INFO AORUS Z390 Master October, 2018 Type Motherboard Price $289.99 US Intel has come a long way with their mainstream processor platform. The platform has largely seen stagnation in terms of core and thread count over many generations since the first Core series CPU that launched back in 2010 but last year brought a big change to the CPU giant. What seemed to be a generational core clock bump has now turned into a generational core count bump while keeping the clock speed improvements. The Coffee Lake-S 8th Generation family, was the first big core count jump on the mainstream 300 series platform. It was an opportunity for Intel to show that they don't only hold the IPC or clock speed advantage on the mainstream segment but they can also offer good multi-threading CPU performance. While the jump to 6 cores and 12 threads was great, the competition was offering up to 8 cores and 16 threads on their mainstream platform. Intel’s Core i7-10700 Is The Cheapest 8 Core Desktop CPU Currently Available on Sale For $269.99 US Intel is now unleashing their own 8 core parts with their new 9th Generation lineup, also known as the Coffee Lake Refresh. The interesting part is that while there is the famous Core i7 SKU with 8 cores, they are also launching their first mainstream Core i9 part with 8 cores. Both parts are very interesting in their own right and the price to performance difference is something which gamers have been looking forward to, especially when Intel is terming the Core i9 SKU as the best gaming processor on the planet, which is something I'd extensively be looking into in the performance benchmarks. Today, I will be taking a look at the Core i9-9900K flagship CPU on the AORUS Z390 Master board. The CPU retails for $488 US in the market and is supposed to offer high-end CPU multi-threaded performance with enthusiast level overclocking capabilities, all at a premium price point. The Z390 AORUS Master retails for $289.99 US which is a great price for a high-end motherboard design like it. Intel Z390 Express Chipset - The Top 300-Series PCH Since the launch of Coffee Lake processors, Intel is also offering a new platform that is marked under the 300-series family. The Intel 300 series platform features several chipset SKUs but the top of the line is the Z390 PCH which replaces the Z370 PCH as the flagship mainstream SKU. AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX Flagship 8 Core Zen 3 Mobility CPU Spotted, Up To 4.60 GHz Clocks With Overclocking Support The Z390 platform is designed to support both 8th and 9th Generation Coffee Lake CPUs. Since the new processors are part of a refresh, Intel did not restrict 9th Gen compatibility to just Z390 boards or 8th Gen compatibility to just Z370 boards. We have more details on this in the LGA 1151 socket section so here, we will be taking a look at the Z390 feature set and what it offers over the previous 200 and 100 series platforms. Intel Z390 PCH Features: The 9th gen desktop platform has a range of new features that mainly include: First performance Intel Core i9 desktop S-series processor Up to 8 cores Intel Z390 chipset compatible Solder Thermal Interface Material (STIM) Intel Wireless-AC 802.11 AC and Bluetooth 5.0 Intel Wireless-AC Adapter Up To 6 x USB 3.1 Gen 2 Ports Up to 16 threads, 5.0 GHz, 16 MB cache, and 40 platform PCIe lanes (16 CPU + 24 PCH) 9th Gen CPUs Compatible with all Intel 300 series chipsets Intel Optane memory and Intel Optane SSD support Thunderbolt 3 support Intel Desktop Platform Chipset Comparison Chipset Name Coffee Lake S (KBL-R) PCH / Z370 Platform Coffee Lake S (CNL-H) PCH / 300 Series (Z390/H370, B360, Q370, H310) Comet Lake-S (CML-S) PCH / 400 Series (Z490) Rocket Lake-S (RKL-S) PCH / 500 Series (Z590) Process Node 22nm 14nm 14nm 14nm Processor 8C, 6C, 4C (6 Consumer SKUs at Launch) Enhanced IA and Memory Overclocking Gen 9 Intel Graphics GT2 (Up To 24 EUs) Consumer Only 8C, 6C, 4C, 2C (Full corporate/consumer SKU stack at launch) Enhanced IA and Memory Overclocking Gen 9 Intel Graphics GT2 (Up To 24 EUs) Corporate/vPro & Consumer 10C, 8C, 6C, 4C, 2C (Full corporate/consumer SKU stack at launch) Enhanced IA and Memory Overclocking Gen 9 Intel Graphics GT2 (Up To 24 EUs) Corporate/vPro & Consumer 8C, 6C (Full corporate/consumer SKU stack at launch) Memory Up To DDR4-2666 (Native) Up To DDR4-2666 (Native) Up To DDR4-2933 (Native) p To DDR4-3200 (Native) Media, Display & Audio DP 1.2 & HDMI 1.4 HDCP 2.2 (HDMI 2.0a w/LSPCON) HEVC & VP9 10-bit Enc/Dec, HDR, Rec.2020, DX12 Integrated Dual-Core Audio DSP DP 1.2 & HDMI 1.4 HDCP 2.2 (HDMI 2.0a w/LSPCON) HEVC & VP9 10-bit Enc/Dec, HDR, Rec.2020, DX12 Integrated Dual-Core Audio DSP SoundWire Digital Audio Interface DP 1.2 & HDMI 1.4 HDCP 2.2 (HDMI 2.0a w/LSPCON) HEVC & VP9 10-bit Enc/Dec, HDR, Rec.2020, DX12 Integrated Dual-Core Audio DSP SoundWire Digital Audio Interface DP 1.2 & HDMI 2.0, HBR3 HDCP 2.2 (HDMI 2.0a w/LSPCON) 12-bit AV1/HEVC & VP9 10-bit Enc/Dec, HDR, Rec.2020, DX12 Integrated Dual-Core Audio DSP With USB Audio offload SoundWire Digital Audio Interface I/O & Connectivity Integrated USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) Thunderbolt 3.0 (Alpine Ridge) Integrated USB 3.1 Gen 1 (5 Gbps) Integrated Intel Wireless-AC (Wi-Fi / BT CNVi) Integrated SDXC 3.0 Controller Thunderbolt 3.0 (Titan Ridge) w/ DP 1.4 Integrated USB 3.2 Gen 2 Integrated Intel Wireless-AC (Wi-Fi / BT CNVi) Integrated SDXC 3.0 Controller Thunderbolt 3.0 (Titan Ridge) w/ DP 1.4 Integrated USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 (20G) Integrated Intel Wireless-AC (Wi-Fi6E/ BT CNVi) Integrated SDXC 3.0 Controller Thunderbolt 4.0 (Maple Ridge) Storage Next Gen Intel Optane memory PCIe 3.0, SATA 3.0 Next Gen Intel Optane memory PCIe 3.0, SATA 3.0 Next-Gen Intel Optane memory PCIe 3.0, SATA 3.0 Next-Gen Intel Optane memory PCIe 4.0, SATA 3.0 Security Intel SGX 1.0 Intel SGX 1.0 Intel SGX 1.0 N/A Power Management C8 Support C10 & S0ix Support for Modern Standby C10 & S0ix Support for Modern Standby C10 & S0ix Support for Modern Standby Launch 2017 2018 2019 2020 Intel LGA 1151 Socket Again - Now With 9th Generation Processor Support Intel isn't moving away from the LGA 1151 socket anytime soon. We are once again looking at the same socket which has been doing the rounds in the mainstream market since 2015. There is, however, a major difference. There's no backward compatibility with Skylake and Kaby Lake processors. That brings us to the next significant detail about the Intel 300-series platform. Intel is confirming that the 9th Gen Coffee Lake processors retain compatibility with the 300-series chipset. It's nice to see compatibility retained but it was also expected since 9th Gen is a refresh of Coffee Lake CPUs and high-end motherboards based on the Z370 chipset still allow for full overclocking support on the 8 core processors, even though the Z390 series is tailored around those CPUs with better PWM supplies. A more detailed analysis was posted by David Schor a few days ago which confirms the change in pin configuration on Coffee Lake processors. This allows support for both 8th and 9th Gen CPUs without any major issues. According to David, the reason we don't have Coffee Lake processors compatible with older series motherboards that feature the LGA 1151 socket is the change in pins. For instance, if the pin config changes on a processor, the sockets on the motherboard need to be configured as such. It's not a process that can be done via software as its more of a hardware level change. When compared, the Coffee Lake processors have 391 VSS (Ground) pins which is an increase of 14 compared to Kaby Lake, 146 VCC (Electrical) pins which is an increase of 18 pins compared to Kaby Lake and about 25 pins that are reserved and a decrease of 21 pins from the 46 reserved on Kaby Lake. Kaby Lake -> Coffee Lake VSS (Ground): 377 -> 391 (+14) VCC (Power): 128 -> 146 (+18) RSVD: 46 ->25 Intel LGA 1151 CPU Pin Configuration (Coffee Lake vs Kaby Lake):<doc-sep>Photo : Alex Cranz ( Gizmodo ) The product categories in the CPU marketplace are rapidly eroding. Intel and AMD have spent the last year and a half furiously releasing new products, and tweaking their lines to take on the competition. In some cases, prices have been slashed. In others, it’s meant CPUs have had more cores or threads packed in. The result is a murky marketplace with no clear winners or losers, just a lot of CPUs that go real fast. Advertisement And that’s important! CPUs are cheap for now—though shortages from the foundries producing the silicon could mean rising prices for many CPUs in the coming months. But for the time being things are pretty great! For a couple of hundred dollars, you can get a CPU that will tolerate playing games, handle demanding tasks decently, while dispensing with more common tasks, like internet browsing or word processing, easily. Computer Components Processors Intel i9-9900K What is it? Intel's first OFFICIAL 5GHz CPU. Price $500 Like It's fast and uses the same socket as last year's Intel CPUs. No Like It's a little pricy. But Intel and AMD need to tout more than “it’s good” to sell CPUs. This is where Intel’s latest consumer CPU comes in. The 9th-Gen i9 9900K retails for $500, has 8 cores that can run up to 16 threads concurrently, and it’s one of the first CPUs ship with a turbo frequency of 5GHz. It isn’t just fast, it’s coming close breaking a long believed theoretical limit. 5GHz has been something of a pipe dream for many years. A theoretical barrier that most CPUs could not surpass without significant tweaking to the fundamental design of processors. But Intel shipped a limited edition i7-8086K earlier this year with the same clock speed, and AMD shipped the FX 9590 back in 2013, though the CPU was ultimately not as fast as that clockrate promised and largely considered a failure. So when Intel touted the i9-9900K as the first 5GHz CPU earlier this month it wasn’t entirely accurate, unless you step back, kind of squint and tilt your head just so. But this is Intel’s first 5GHz CPU that anyone can buy. It’s not a limited edition. There are no hoops to jump through. It’s a nice 8-core CPU that’s almost twice the price of its competitor, the $280 AMD Ryzen 7 2700X. That product is an 8 core, 16 thread CPU as well, but its turbo clock speed is lower—just 4.3GHz, while the base clock speed is higher, 3.7GHz versus 3.6GHz. It’s a little more power hungry, being a 105W processor while the i9 9900K is a 95W processor. Our review unit of the AMD processor was unfortunately damaged when I went to benchmark it, which means it’s going to be difficult to compare the two products directly. Instead, let’s look at the nearby field of products to get a sense of just how close in performance all these CPUs are in many day-to-day tasks . There’s the Ryzen 5 2600X with 6 cores and 12 threads that retails for $190, the i9 9900K’s predecessor, the $370 i7-8700K with 6 cores and 12 threads, and finally the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X. Advertisement Photo : Alex Cranz ( Gizmodo ) That last one is a beast of a CPU with 16 cores, 32 threads, a higher 180W power requirement and a big price tag of $900. When it launched in August AMD compared it not to the $370 i7 8700K (the i9 9900K had not been announced), but to the $1,300 i9-7960X, which has a 165W TDP, 16 cores, and 32 threads. Advertisement That’s a whole lot of numbers is it? But don’t worry! It’s not as confusing as it might seem. The price difference between each CPU and its elected competitor is often enormous, with that choice to force them to compete based more on power requirement than price. That’s important to consider if you’re planning to use the same power supply, but many of the other elements of a computer build, like motherboard, cooler, and the case, are highly dependent not on the power requirement of a CPU but on its architecture, and nearly every one of these CPUs I’ve mentioned uses a different architecture requiring a different socket and thus a different motherboard, cooler, and even RAM. So when it comes down to choosing what to buy you have to ask yourself two very basic questions: how much do I want to spend and what kind of speed do I need? Advertisement Because if you’re just looking for a CPU to play games on, then every single CPU I’ve mentioned, from the $190 one to the $900 one is going to play games pretty similarly. In our benchmarks using Civilizations VI and Rise of the Tomb Raider on a rig with an Nvidia 1080, with settings cranked to their highest and tested at 4K, we found the difference between the products almost negligible. GPU matters much, much more. Average frames per second in Rise of the Tomb Raider. Higher is better. Graphic : Alex Cranz ( Gizmodo ) Average time per frame rendered in milliseconds in Civilizations VI. Lower is better. Graphic : Alex Cranz ( Gizmodo ) Average time per frame rendered in milliseconds in Civilizations VI. Lower is better. Graphic : Alex Cranz ( Gizmodo ) 1 / 3 Advertisement In synthetic benchmarks, we see the Intel products always beating their AMD competitors. Largely because synthetic benchmarks like Geekbench 4 or WebXPRT tend to favor Intel more (something AMD has previously complained about). Multi core score in Geekbench 4. Higher is better. Graphic : Alex Cranz ( Gizmodo ) Single core score in Geekbench 4. Higher is better. Graphic : Alex Cranz ( Gizmodo ) Score earned in WebXPRT 2015. Higher is better. Graphic : Alex Cranz ( Gizmodo ) Time in seconds to resize and convert RAW files to JPEG in Photoshop. Faster is better. Graphic : Alex Cranz ( Gizmodo ) 1 / 4 Advertisement These benchmarks are supposed to give us a better understanding of how well these products will perform with day-to-day tasks like web browsing, but let’s be real—if you’re spending $100 or more on a CPU you’re going to have a perfectly fine experience and will be throttled more by RAM or storage speeds than by CPU. We saw the proof of that in our Photoshop test (see above), where we resize and convert a series of RAW images into JPEGs, and the timed results were nearly identical. Time in seconds to convert 4K video files. Faster is better. Graphic : Alex Cranz ( Gizmodo ) Time in seconds to render 3D image in Blender. Faster is better. Graphic : Alex Cranz ( Gizmodo ) 1 / 2 Advertisement In fact the only place you really see the difference in performance for all these CPUs, which, again, range in price from $190 to $900, is in our two most demanding tests. In one we note how long it takes to render a 3D image in Blender. In the other we convert a large 4K video into 1080p. They’re both decently tasking processes that really take advantage of all those cores and threads I’ve mentioned. They’re the only place where you see any significant difference in all these CPUs. Here things play out very much as expected—an AMD CPU with a similar power requirement and the same core and thread count will beat the pricier Intel product. But surprisingly the i9 9900K is a rare exception. It’s tremendously fast and actually rivals the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, a product that is $400 more and has nearly double the power requirement and cores and threads. Advertisement But for most people, it’s more a bragging right than a viable purchase. Unless you’re spending a lot of time rendering the i9 9900K simply isn’t worth its $500 price tag. The AMD options will be nearly as fast for nearly half as much—which—okay that’s the same thing I said when comparing the i9 9900K to the Threadripper. You see what I mean? The landscape isn’t as clear-cut as it once was! So what do you buy?<doc-sep>
The Intel Core i9 9900K is simply the fastest gaming processor that you can buy. That’s not really in dispute, but, while that is the aim for Intel’s top CPU, we’re almost at a point where being ‘the fastest’ is no longer as relevant a boast as it once was, especially with AMD’s Ryzen 3000 chips breathing down its silicon neck. Intel released a Core i9 processor into both the mobile and high-end desktop markets in the last generation, but the middle-ground mainstream processors were left with the Core i7 sitting at the top of the CPU tech tree. No more, with the launch of the Core i9 9900K Intel not only added a new high-end tier to its mainstream desktop range, it also added another pair of cores to the refreshed Coffee Lake lineup. Yes, Intel has finally caught up in the core-count stakes to AMD’s disruptive Ryzen processors… until the next generation pushes ahead again. After rushing the six-core Coffee Lake chips out at the tail end of last year it’s now following up with the eight-core, 16-thread Core i9 CPU so that it can dominate both in the gaming performance, as well as multi-threaded metrics. But, unlike previous generations where the extra cores came into the top tier and drove prices down on the lower-spec chips, the Core i9 9900K has come in above them all, like some processing colossus, with a price tag to match its new specs list. And that makes it a tough chip to love. At $535 (£550) the i9 9900K is bounding right into HEDT territory and getting mighty close to pricing of the new 9th Gen X-series CPUs. So, what does the new Intel chip really offer to justify that super high price tag? Intel Core i9 9900K specs Despite the Intel 9th Gen moniker I’m really struggling to see where the justification is for referring to the refreshed Coffee Lake CPUs as a whole new generation of processors. They are all still using the same 14nm++ process node that was introduced with Coffee Lake and are still essentially using the same CPU microarchitecture which was first released with the Skylake chips back in 2015. The big news for the top of the 9th Gen range is the fact that Intel has introduced a chip with eight cores and 16 threads below its HEDT lineup, one that will fit into the existing Z370 motherboards as well as the new Z390 update. It’s also the first mainstream processor to arrive with a 5GHz Turbo clock out-of-the-box, though that might be construed as a little disingenuous given that it’s incredibly rare for the 9900K to actually clock itself up to those heights in normal use. Cores Threads Base Turbo Cache TDP Price Core i9 9900K 8 16 3.6GHz 5GHz 16MB 95W $535 Ryzen 7 2700X 8 16 3.7GHz 4.3GHz 20MB 105W $305 Core i7 9700K 8 8 3.6GHz 4.9GHz 12MB 95W $374 Core i7 8700K 6 12 3.7GHz 4.7GHz 12MB 95W $359 Ryzen 5 2600X 6 12 3.6GHz 4.2GHz 19MB 95W $210 Core i7 8700 6 12 3.2GHz 4.6GHz 12MB 65W $303 Core i5 9600K 6 6 3.7GHz 4.5GHz 9MB 95W £262 Core i5 8600K 6 6 3.6GHz 4.3GHz 9MB 95W $257 We’ve seen it knocking around the 4.7GHz mark under all-core loads, and around 4.8 – 4.9GHz for rigid single-core tasks. Which, admittedly is mighty quick, but isn’t quite the 5GHz you might have hoped it would be tracking at. You’re also get a little bit of extra cache memory; another 2MB per core compared with the top of the 8th Gen product stack. Impressively, Intel has managed to keep the new cores, and the higher clock speeds within the same power envelope as the previous generation of Core processors, matching the same 95W TDP as the old six-core i7 8700K. That speaks to the efficiency that Intel has built into its extra mature 14nm process; there’s life in the old node yet. But that’s pretty much your lot. The same number of PCIe lanes on offer, the same level of DDR4 support (though reportedly up to 128GB if you really are a memory hog), but with a few hardware mitigations built into the design process to avoid any issues with the Spectre or Meltdown bugs. It is, after all, just a mild refresh of Coffee Lake, but with a 9th Gen badge attached to it.