Intel Core i9-9900K Review – Mighty Processor, Mighty Price

Rating: 8.0.

In October 2017 we raved about Intel Core i7-8700K and the watershed move from the quad core 7th Gen to the 8th Gen i7-8700K that came packed with six cores. In our conclusion we said “Core i7-8700K is fabulous and performs like a champ … It is painful to consider that if Intel soldered the package and allowed it to cool properly that we would be able to move to a new era of PC gaming.”

And here we are 12 months later with the launch of Intel’s 9th Gen Core i9-9900K that boasts eight cores, a soldered heat spreader and a maximum Turbo Frequency of 5GHz. More cores, better thermals and higher clock speed sounds like the perfect recipe for a gaming CPU, however we had a moment of concern at the Intel launch when the stratospheric price was confirmed.

We hit a further bump in the road when Intel’s chosen testing house chose some inexplicable settings for their benchmarking and we had to wonder whether Intel was trying to hide something. At the very least, they seemed to be less sure of themselves than we would have expected.

On the face of it Core i9-9900K looked like a sure-fire winner but just beneath the surface we found there was quite a bit more to the story. 

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Specification:

• 8 Cores and 16 Threads
• 3.6 GHz Base Clock Speed
• 5.0 GHz Maximum Turbo Frequency
• LGA 1151 Socket
• 9th Generation (Coffee Lake Refresh)
• 14nm++ Fabrication Process
• 16MB Cache Memory
• x16 PCIe 3.0 for CPU
• up to x40 PCIe for Platform
• 95W TDP
• 130W Thermal Solution
• Intel UHD Graphics 630 (350-1200 MHz)
• Dual-Channel DDR4 2666-4600MHz Memory
• 64GB Maximum Memory Support
• Supports Intel Optane Memory
• Intel 300 Series Chipset Compatible Only
• 3 Year Warranty

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