Releasing today, Intel's latest addition to its top-end gaming processor lineup is the Core i9-9900KS, a "Special Edition" incremental refinement of the company's already excellent Intel Core i9-9900K. In our testing, the Core i9-9900KS scored top marks relative to the i9-9900K, and it's heartening to see Intel still firing on all cylinders for gamers and streamers alike. But the Core isn't the only desktop-PC chip game in town anymore, and AMD is offering processors that handle gaming almost as well and that deliver more multicore punch for the money. If you've been waiting to grab your own eight-core monster processor, the $329 AMD Ryzen 7 3700X offers up better value for the money, and it powers the top games at speeds lusty enough to keep most mainstream gamers, from AAA to esports, happy.
I've Seen This Core Before
Right out of the gate, best to know: In form, function, and almost all of its specs, the Intel Core i9-9900KS essentially is an Intel Core i9-9900K. Even the dodecahedron-shape packaging scheme, like a giant Dungeons and Dragons die, is the same. So, then, why the "KS" distinction?
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It all comes down to binning. Product binning is the process of categorizing silicon chips (in this case, CPUs), into different tiers based on their overall performance output after the dies have left the factory floor. The reason chips get binned? Despite all the astounding advances made in silicon manufacturing over the past half-century, CPU production still doesn't yield 100 percent consistent results. Some chips may overperform on their spec, others may underperform, and those that underperform get sent to a lower category of performance, or "down-binned," sometimes repurposed as next-step-down chips.
A good example of this is Intel's Core line of chips. If a CPU die that was destined to be a certain level of Core chip underperforms (say, a Core i7), instead of scrapping the chip, Intel might simply disable some of the cores onboard and rebrand it as a lesser Core grade (say, a Core i5), or maybe a Core i7 with lower rated clock speed. No harm, no foul.
Conversely, CPU dies that overperform during the binning process can be bounced upward in the pecking order, or you might get a chip that's binned a certain way but with a bit of overhead that you can tap into. In enthusiast lingo, that's called winning the "silicon lottery"; in other words, getting your hands on an overperforming sample of a given die. In the world of CPUs, certain chips may be able to hit higher boost and base clocks without pushing the thermal limits of the die, and are therefore more overclockable and will push higher levels of performance than standard samples.
Another reason the word "lottery" gets thrown around here is because you'll never truly know the exact potential of a chip you're buying, beyond what it is rated for, until it's installed in your machine. If you hit the lottery, you'll be one of the lucky ones who can overclock their CPU further than someone else might, even though you both bought the same model chip for the same price.
The Intel Core i9-9900KS is a processor that takes the chance out of the lottery, and instead just hands you the winning numbers for a slightly higher cost. The standard Intel Core i9-9900K still carries a $499 MSRP, while the Core i9-9900KS is tagged with an oddly specific "recommended customer price" of $513. We'll have to see at launch whether that price holds or if supply issues cause it to rise.
At this writing in November 2019, the average street price of the Intel Core i9-9900K had dropped slightly, to around $485, putting a $25 to $30 gap between the two processors, or roughly a 6 percent difference in cost. But that will sway according to supply, and according to the seller.
A Guaranteed Jackpot
So, what do those winning numbers get you? For starters, while the original Core i9-9900K topped out at a maximum boost clock of 4.6GHz on all cores, the Core i9-9900KS bumps things up to a solid 5GHz, from a base clock of 4GHz. (The base clock is rated at just 3.6GHz in the straight Core i9-9900K.)
Technically, the original Core i9-9900K also advertises a maximum boost clock of 5GHz, but the caveat is that this boost will happen only when just one core is active. If four cores are turned on, the chip will max at 4.8GHz, and if all eight cores need to be activated, the chip will bring all of them back down to a maximum boost of only 4.6GHz. This is why the Core i9-9900KS is special: Out of the box, all eight cores can accelerate to a maximum of 5GHz all on their own, no overclocking necessary (and assuming adequate cooling hardware supporting it).
The only other key difference between the Core i9-9900K and the Core i9-9900KS is (understandably) the thermal design power (TDP) rating of the chip, up to 127 watts in the Core i9-9900KS, from 95 watts in the Core i9-9900K. The faster the clocks, the more juice the chip will need to get everything running at those increased speeds when taxed to the max.
Aside from these subtle distinctions, these two chips are functionally the same. For an in-depth look at what we liked (and didn't like) about what the Intel Core i9-9900K had on offer back when it launched in late '18, you can head over to our full review of that CPU.
There's a Ryzen in the House
So why, after a year of the Intel Core i9-9900K being on shelves, is Intel just starting to offer the Core i9-9900KS now? For one, it's likely that as Intel has continued to produce the Core i9-9900K, the company has simply gotten better at it. Improvements in the manufacturing process means better yields, and better-quality yields. And better yields means more silicon-lottery winners to sell (though not too many, hence the "Special Edition" nature of the Core i9-9900KS).
However if I were a betting man (hint: I am), I'd wager that the release of the Core i9-9900KS, especially at this particular point in time, is also about Intel competing as best it can, with the silicon it has on hand, in the wake of AMD's Zen 2 launch and the latest Ryzen CPUs, such as the excellent, 12-core/24-thread AMD Ryzen 9 3900X. It also keeps the company's name in the news cycle ahead of the upcoming release of the 16-core/32-thread AMD Ryzen 9 3950X, which AMD says will launch sometime in November.
In our review of the Ryzen 9 3900X, we noted that under most circumstances, the processor was nearly as good in most gaming scenarios as the Intel Core i9-9900K, and it cost the same. (Both have MSRPs of $499.) The thing is, the Ryzen 9 3900X took things a step further, offering up that close gaming performance while also beating the Intel Core i9-9900K in multi-threaded tasks like content creation and rendering.
The modest gaming gains that the Intel Core i9-9900K achieved over the Ryzen 9 3900X were, for some users, washed out by the Ryzen's victories in multi-threaded tasks, and with the threat of the Ryzen 9 3950X release looming just around the corner, Intel is doing what it can to keep its products on the lips of gamers and content creators alike.
So, how much performance, exactly, can you expect out the Core i9-9900KS? Does it shift the essential AMD-versus-Intel balance in their respective mainstream CPUs? Let's get into our testing.
CPU Performance Testing
For my test setup, I installed the Intel Core i9-9900KS into an MSI MEG Z390 ACE ATX motherboard, and populated two of the DIMM slots with 16GB of dual-channel G.Skill Sniper X DDR4-3400 memory. I installed the components into an SilverStone case and used a Deepcool GamerStorm Captain 240EX closed-loop liquid cooler to flush away heat from the processor's STIM-fused integrated heat spreader.
Keep in mind, like many of Intel's enthusiast-centric processors, the Intel Core i9-9900KS does not include a stock CPU cooler in the box, so you'll need to have one on hand or buy one. (Factor in at least $75 to $100 for an all-in-one liquid cooler for the 9900KS; the Ryzen chips, on the other hand, bundle a decent stock air cooler that should do fine if you don't overclock.) For our CPU-performance testing, I supplemented the Core i9-9900KS with an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080, operating at the Founders Edition clocks.
We test CPUs using a variety of synthetic benchmarks that serve up proprietary scores, as well as real-world tests using consumer apps like Apple's iTunes and 3D games like Far Cry 5.
Cinebench R15
One of the best universal measures of a CPU's performance under strain is the Cinebench R15 benchmark. Though most folks don't use the Maxon Cinema4D software from which it is derived, it nonetheless offers a representative relative performance measure for the many different types of demanding apps that can hit all cores and threads on a CPU. It's a CPU-centric test that gauges both the single-core performance and the multicore performance of a processor. The resulting scores are proprietary numbers that represent the CPU's capabilities while rendering a complex 3D image.
Almost immediately, the gains that the Core i9-9900KS makes in all-core performance over the Core i9-9900K became apparent in our Cinebench testing, though the gain is not enormous (a bit over 4 percent). Given that the main draw of the Core i9-9900KS is its ability to run every core at 5GHz simultaneously, I was expecting a multi-threaded tour de force like Cinebench R15 to show a larger gap between 9900K and 9990KS. But we'll take the gain.
POV-Ray
The POV-Ray benchmark is a synthetic, highly threaded rendering test that offers a second opinion on the Cinebench results.
The Core i9-9900KS performed about the same as the original Core i9-9900K on the single-core "One CPU" test, a margin-of-error difference of 2 seconds. Moving into the multi-core ("All CPUs") tests, the gains by the KS over the K were real but modest, with just a 3-second gap separating the two for an approximate 5 percent difference. The Ryzen 9 3900X, with its extra four cores, demonstrated multi-threaded dominance on the All CPUs setting, scoring a full 13 seconds faster than the Core i9-9900KS. That better core/thread count shows in tasks like this one.
Although many modern complex apps are designed to run on multiple cores, single-core performance is nevertheless still important. Many older games, especially those built on DirectX 9, use just one or two cores. Then again, you shouldn't be buying any of these high-end chips mainly for single-core tasks!
iTunes
For a real-world look at single-core performance, we use an aged version of Apple's iTunes to encode a series of music tracks from WAV to MP3.
Despite running this test multiple times (and under multiple overclocking profiles, just to be sure), the Core i9-9900KS consistently lost by a few seconds to the chip that it's supposed to be a refined version of, the Core i9-9990K. As we mentioned above, this test best exemplifies what legacy programs like iTunes can do on just a single core, and in the scope of this test it may just mean that our original Core i9-9900K sample had a particularly strong single core.
Handbrake & Blender
Here, let's raise the issue of the $329.99 AMD Ryzen 7 3700X. It's eight-core, like the Core i9 chips here, and at the low end of prosumer CPUs, but if you are looking to handle complex content-creation workflows, it's more than capable in a pinch. Let's look at Handbrake first...
As a one-to-one test, between the Ryzen 7 3700X (AMD's comparatively-cored eight-core/16-thread CPU) and the Core i9-9900KS, the 9900KS ekes out a win here. But if you consider the price difference (the Ryzen 7 3700X's $329 MSRP versus the $500-plus for the i9-9900KS), the Ryzen starts looking a lot more attractive for the relative cost. Once again, the Core i9-9900KS is simply outpaced by the Ryzen 9 3900X with its 12-core/24-thread muscle.
Things got a bit tighter between all the processors we've tested in this category when it came time to tally the Blender run, a popular open-source 3D rendering application for crafting 3D visual effects, animations, and models. Our test file consists of a cartoonish flying-squirrel render that takes less than a minute to complete with most modern processors.
This test, as run with our test file, is mostly useful for highlighting the vast differences between low-end and high-end chips, and the similarities between chips within these two categories. Finally, a straight out win for the Core i9-9900KS!
7-Zip
And here on the 7-Zip compression benchmark (another task that munches on all the cores and threads it can get), the Core i9-9900KS returned results that set it well apart from the original Core i9-9900K.
That said, it's not really close when compared to the Ryzen 9 3900X or the much costlier AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, but with all eight cores running at a full 5GHz during this benchmark, the processor put enough of a gulf between itself and its predecessor, as well as the like-core-count Ryzen 7 3700X.
How Well Does the Intel Core i9-9900KS Game?
Let's get this bit out of the way first (before we roll in with a cavalry division of caveats): The Intel Core i9-9900KS is the fastest gaming processor for play in 1080p that we've tested to date, full-stop.
In every game we benchmarked at 1080p, and especially those that can take advantage of all four cores at the same time, the Core i9-9900KS posted record results across the board. 4K results were expectedly dead-even for most tests, however, since the 4K resolution demands far more out of your graphics card than it does your CPU. (We used an Nvidia GeForce GTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition in our testing.)
Now, here's where things get tricky. The maximum refresh rate for any gaming monitor out there right now is 240Hz (though there are rumors of 400Hz monitors being developed). This means that any game running over 240 frames per second (fps) is, while impressive, in essence wasting those extra frames, since the monitor can't display anything past the 240fps limit.
In fact, most gamers will actually lock their games to stop them from exceeding the 240fps boundary, in an effort to minimize display artifacts, such as ghosting and screen-tearing.
So, how does this relate to the Core i9-9900KS?
Well, as impressive as it is that the Core i9-9900KS is achieving results like 474fps in Counter Strike: Global Offensive (and don't get us wrong, it is impressive), does it actually mean anything in a practical sense? Until 500Hz monitors hit the scene...no, probably not.
The story is different with demanding AAA titles. Consider a game like Far Cry 5. In our tests, it just barely scraped the edge of the 165Hz checkpoint (165Hz is another popular monitor refresh rate), at 163fps. Other processors like the Ryzen 7 3700X "only" scored 122fps on this same test, which is fine if you have a 120Hz monitor. But it might leave you wanting if you're equipped with a screen that can handle refresh rates above that. Again: This is at 1080p. At 4K, the results were functionally identical with the RTX 2080 Ti card.
There's an almost infinite variety of combinations of CPU and GPU, at a given resolution and detail settings, with a given game. But the general trend is that 1080p will show more variability, and more reason to opt for the Core i9-9900K, if absolute, utter maximum possible frame rates are what you need. If you are gaming at 4K, though, your GPU will be the limiter in most demanding games, and even more so as you go down the stack from an elite card like the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.
The key thing to remember is that if you play less-demanding games, you can reach a point of diminishing or no returns, once you exceed the maximum refresh rate of your monitor. And if you are running a video card less than RTX 2080 Ti (as most folks will), the more likely you will be bound by the limitations of your card, not your CPU. So scrabbling for that extra 5 or 10 percent of frame rates only matters under certain limited circumstances: when your game is CPU-constrained, when your monitor can actually show all the frames, and when it matters for the kind of game you play.
Overclocking the Overclocked
Using Intel's own Xtreme Tuning Utility (XTU), I was excited to see what kind of overclocking headroom that the Core i9-9900KS might support, given that the i9-9900KS processor, at its stock settings, behaves much like an overclocked non-KS Core i9-9900K.
For starters, we need to establish the parameters of my overclock. Despite dozens of attempts (and an equal number of crash/reboot/retest cycles), I was never able to achieve a stable overclock of 5.2GHz on all eight cores, though a few early reviews claimed that 5.2GHz was achievable. (Perhaps they got the golden sample of the golden samples...gold squared, if you will?) After much trial and error, the closest I was able to get was 5.2GHz on the front four cores, and 5.1GHz on the back four cores at a voltage of 1.365V.
Once I was able to get this overclock profile running smoothly, I put the Core i9-9900KS through several more tests to see how much performance was gained. First there was Cinebench R15, which scored 2,201 in the OC profile versus 2,150 at stock, representing a boost of just 2.4 percent.
Next up: gaming testing. Far Cry 5 originally posted a result of 123fps in 1080p at stock speeds, and the overclocked profile returned a result of 126 frames per second. Not too substantial a difference, and close enough that it could even be chalked up to the margin of error if we weren't giving the Core i9-9900KS the benefit of the doubt. The 9900KS is already pushing the limit of the die, so I wouldn't expect much more than that out of it unless you get an outlier sample or employ some truly exotic cooling.
A Great Performer...But for Who, Exactly?
The Intel Core i9-9900KS is unmistakably a scorching gaming-focused CPU for 1080p play. And as a multi-tasking engine, you won't find much competition in the mainstream space out there, outside of the Ryzen 9 3900X and the Ryzen 7 3700X. But with that said, is it the "best" gaming CPU on the market?
In my opinion: Yes, in a purist's sense, but no, in a value sense. The Ryzen 5 3600X, for example, is only $239, nearly $300 less than the price of the Intel Core i9-9900KS. (We're in the process of reviewing that CPU now.) And in our tests of high-refresh gaming titles like Rainbow Six: Siege and Counter Strike: Global Offensive, it was still easily able to swing over the 1080p/240Hz fences in both titles by a wide margin. This means for the same price you would pay just for the Core i9-9900KS you could get a Ryzen 5 3600X, a decent middle-tier AMD AM4 motherboard, and 16GB of DDR4 RAM, with enough left over to cover express shipping.
The Core i9-9900KS is a powerful CPU in both gaming and multi-threaded rendering tasks, there's no doubting that. But the gains aren't substantial enough to warrant the price premium over competing AMD processors on the shelves right now, unless you're a highly motivated esports competitor playing at 1080p in low-spec games. For most other folks, sure, it crushes the competition in 1080p gaming results, but in reality if you're buying a $500-plus processor, you probably should have upgraded to a 1440p or 4K monitor a long time ago (and at those resolutions, the GPU is handling most of the heavy lifting, anyway).
Meanwhile, since the debut of the i9-9900K in 2018, the desktop-CPU world has changed. AMD has three reasons on offer that prove why throwing the most money at a problem isn't always going to get you the best result. The original Core i9-9900K came out in October of 2018, way before the July 2019 launch of the third-generation Ryzen line. Now that those Ryzens are here, we've seen that AMD processors can handle core-dependent multi-tasking and content creation better for the money, as well as gaming at a raging-enough pace for most folks, and do it all at aggressive prices.
If you're a high-refresh, esports-focused gamer, save yourself the money and get a Ryzen 5 3600X or Ryzen 7 3700X instead. If you're an extreme multitasker, or work in a lot of content-creation apps (with a dash of gaming on the side), get a Ryzen 9 3900X. And if you already own a Core i9-9900K, enjoy it: The Core i9-9900KS doesn't do enough to justify an upgrade.
With all this in mind, the Core i9-9900KS has its place. If you've already got a Z390-chipset, LGA 1151 motherboard and have been waiting to upgrade to the i9-9900K, the Core i9-9900KS is absolutely worth the extra $30 or so over the i9-9900K, assuming that is how the price difference actually shakes out. Outside of that, AMD still sits strong as our recommended pick for the best mainstream desktop power processors money can buy in the second half of 2019.
The Intel Core i9-9900KS adds a booster rocket to one of the fastest gaming processors out there, but at a cost that most gamers don't need to pay to get the most out of their machines.
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