Intel Core i9 9900K processor review - Final Words & Conclusion

Conclusion

There's no denying it, the Core i9 9900K is a little gem. It ticks all the right boxes in performance both on the threaded application and gaming end. It has hyper-threading with sixteen threads and then the very high turbo bins to go along with that. In many aspects, this is the processor to get as it covers all bases. There is, of course, the matter of pricing as the MSRP will be in the sub 500 USD range. That is a lot of money alright for a desktop processor. The direct competitor will be the Ryzen 7 2700X, that puppy is priced roughly 150 USD cheaper though as its MSRP is 329,- It's all about your install base though; if you use a graphics card in the Vega 64 or GTX 1080 range, that Ryzen will be fine. However, as our game benchmarks have shown, graphics cards that are not GPU limited will benefit from the high turbo frequencies that Intel can apply. So for that uber-expensive desktop market and the guys and girls that have a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or GeForce RTX 2080 (Ti), that's where this processor series starts to make really significant differences.  

When we reverse that and step away from gaming, a Ryzen 7 2700X setup makes more sense value for money wise with threaded applications versus its price tag. So that makes the 9900K arguably the best or at least a beast of a gaming processor in that uber-high-end graphics card domain. But beastly performance does come at a price of 469 USD. We mentioned it already, if enthusiast gaming is what it is about and if you are not willing to spend 500 USD on a CPU, the Core i5 9600K will also bring heaps of performance, close to similar to the 9900K if you tweak it to 5 GHz of course. The all-core clock is still a staggering 4.7 GHz. If your motherboard is set at reference registers, it'll do that frequency for basically 30 seconds. However, all motherboard manufacturers have a Turbo enhancement mode enabled in the BIOS, basically offering long duration of 4.7 GHz bins. This is why you'll notice some colleague reviews today with higher than average performance. Not everybody pays attention to reference settings in the BIOS. But yes, the Core i9 9900K absolutely rocks at both threaded application performance (thanks to SMT/hyper-threading) as well as gaming. 

Power consumption

With this eight-core and sixteen threads proc you get a 95 Watt TDP processor. With the system at idle with a GeForce RTX 2080 Ti installed / 16 GB memory / SSD and the Z390 motherboard, I hovered at roughly 60~65 Watts in IDLE. That's okay, the load values are okay as well but definitely higher. When we stressed the processor 100% we reach roughly 200 Watts with this 8-core part. That's the entire system. That is on the high side alright. Then again, does anyone actually care about it when you get performance metrics like shown today?

DDR4 Memory

For Coffee Lake-S (8th and 9th Gen Intel procs) and DDR4 we always say volume matters more than frequency. A 3200 MHz kit, for example, is more expensive and does offer better bandwidth but the performance increase in real-world usage will be hard to find. Unless you transcode videos over the processor a lot. As always, my advice would be to go with lower clocked DDR4 memory with decent timings, but get more of it. Don't go for 8 GB, get two or four DIMMs and in total a minimum of 16 GB. The reason we test at 3200 MHz is simple, we do the same for AMD Ryzen and want to create a fair and equal playing ground for both. 3200 MHz is, however, a very nice equilibrium for both processor brands.

Performance & tweaking

We tested multiple Z390 motherboards all with the latest BIOS. I'd rate this 8-core processor as 'exceptionally good' for gaming, as well as exceptionally good for your typical threaded applications. It puzzles me as to why Intel did not simply enable hyper-threading on the 9600K and 9700K, as they would have been far more capable of competing with AMD Ryzen, something that the 9900K certainly does.

Temperatures with SMT in this 8-core part is quite a bit higher but fine under default circumstances and clock frequencies. We do recommend liquid cooling. Once tweaked we noticed that the eight cores like a bit of extra voltage, we expect all-core tweaks in the 5 to 5.2 GHz range to need 1.325V with higher tweaks in the 1.35~1.40 Volts range on the processor. While that does increase power consumption, it wasn't something that scared me away. Temps at such voltages reach a serious 80 Degrees C marker. We, however, did use an ES sample and did use LCS cooling. If you plan a tweak at that 5 GHz marker then remember my remarks on cooling, you will need LCS, that or a very good heat-pipe cooler. The infrastructure that Z390 offers is easy to use, you increase the CPU voltage and multiplier and you are good to go. Another plus for the Intel platform is that over the years they have been able to refine their memory controllers, pop in anything XMP 2.0 and you have a 90% chance it'll work straight out of the box with very fast memories. Bear in mind that all our tests are performed with 3200 MHz DDR4, similar to Ryzen and Threadripper to remain objective and for fair play on both sides. Realistically though, Ryzen is more memory frequency dependent in gaming than Intel is. 

Final words

Normally I'd say that the Core i9 9900K is the new king of desktop processors. However, price versus performance wise the Ryzen 2700X does hold ground. Also, we cannot shy away from the fact that from 4 to 32 cores, AMD has some sort of Ryzen (Threadripper) processor available. Strictly speaking, from a gaming point of view, if you have that GeForce RTX 2080 (Ti), then there's no better CPU than what Intel released today, and that is a simple truth. Whether or not you need 8 cores for that is something only you can decide, as really I am liking that Core i5 9600K just for what you can achieve with it (gaming wise). If you want the best of all worlds, then the Core i9 9900K clearly is the winner here today, but at a significant price. The generic Core 9000 series picture is that any of these procs overall simply delivers fantastic results there due to their high clock frequency. Six cores is the new four cores, but eight cores are more future proof. The 9900K does come with SMT/hyper-threading enabled and it did show the benefits of that immediately, but that makes this purchase more difficult to recommend. In closing, stability and functionality wise anything and all ran as expected with even better performance, if you are just gaming, the 9600K or 9700K are fantastic. If you need that extra bite that is close to the HEDT level, well, then there is no other choice than the Core i9 9900K as it'll bring enthusiast class level performance onto the mainstream desktop PC. Highly recommended, and let's hope that Intel will have good volume availability as this processor cannot afford to be even a slight bit more expensive than it already is.

Handy related downloads: 

• Prime95
• AfterBurner
• AIDA64
• HWiNFO64
• SiSoft Sandra
• 3DMark Download v2.3.3732 + Time Spy
• CPU-Z
• HWMonitor
  
  
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