Intel’s upcoming i7-9700K shows impressive Geekbench scores and 5.3GHz overclock

Intel’s i7-9700K has shown some impressive scores on leaked benchmarks last week, hitting a staggering 5.5GHz across all cores thanks to water-cooling. It turns out the all-but-announced processor doesn’t need some fancy water-cooling setup to turn heads, however, achieving as high as 5.3GHz on air cooling alone and dominating Geekbench results.

Earlier this week, Intel’s unreleased i7-9700K made its way onto the Geekbench database, via PCGamesN, with the 8-core/8-thread CPU showing a score of 6,297 on single-core performance and 30,152 on multi-core. This is a step up from the respective 5,508 and 25,034 scores achieved by last generation’s i7-8700K, which retained single-core performance over AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X but was outdone in multi-core with Team Red attaining a score of 26,011.

Overall, these scores show the i7-9700K to fare up to 14 percent and 20 percent better on single-core and multi-core performance respectively, despite its boost clock sitting at 4.9GHz over the i7-8700K’s 4.7GHz. Of course, rumours are still persisting that Intel’s proprietary hyper-threading will be relegated to the flagship i9 variant, potentially making the i7-9700K the first i7 processor to lack the technology.

It seems that this out-of-the-box boost clock hasn’t deterred overclockers from pushing as much as it can out of the CPU, as EXPreview has shared a photo showing the unreleased processor hitting a clean 5.3GHz on air cooling. No benchmarks accompanied the poor quality CPU-Z photograph, and it wasn’t clear as to whether this was single-core achievement or multi-core similar to that of last week’s leak. Either way, this is an impressive 400MHz improvement over the default boost clock using an ordinary tower CPU heatsink.

Leaked roadmaps suggest that we will see Intel run with a staggered launch for its 9th generation line-up, starting with the Intel Core-i9 9900K in October. The remaining chips will supposedly follow throughout the rest of the year.

KitGuru Says: It seems that Intel has really stepped up its game for consumer 9th generation processors. While the i7-9700K will no doubt cost a pretty penny, it’s good to know that healthy competition from AMD will keep prices in check. Do you think you’ll be upgrading your processor any time soon?

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