Officially announced at Computex 2019, Intel recently unveiled its latest 9th gen processor, the i9-9900KS, and boy, is it a powerhouse. The new chip’s capabilities are already blowing its impressive predecessor, the i9-9900K, out of the water, given the fact that it’s optimised to run every one of its 8 cores at a Turbo frequency of 5GHz straight out of the box. By comparison, Intel’s current flagship i9-9900K can only hit 5GHz on a single core with a Turbo speed that’s a whole 300MHz slower.
What’s the difference?
Beyond the startling ability to achieve 5GHz all-core Turbo, with claims that this speed can be reached consistently in any scenario, there isn’t an overwhelming difference between the i9-9900KS and the i9-9900K. A “special edition” variant, the i9-9900KS is set to deliver 5GHz during both single and multi-core workloads, and has a base frequency of 4GHz in contrast to the i9-9900K’s 3.6GHz, but still uses a 14nm++ process as well as the same silicon, only better binned. Maintaining both 16MB of L3 cache and UHD 630 graphics, the new CPU is also ready for the same motherboards as its older cousin, but does include a small firmware update.
Still speculating
Intel surprisingly didn’t offer much more information at Computex than had already been previously revealed about the i9-9900KS. We’re still yet to know a definitive price point or its thermal design power (TDP), although based on the performance and power consumption of the i9-9900K, we’re pretty certain that the chip will get seriously hot and require a lot of power. Following our successful implementation of water-cooling functionality in a recent customer project that involved overclocking the i9-9900K, we anticipate that similar measures will need to be employed to ensure the i9-9900KS doesn’t cause your machine to overheat.
The i9-9900KS is due to launch in Q4 of this year, so we should see more information about it emerging over the next few months. In the meantime, if you would like to learn more about the CPU or when this will become available in our line-up of products, please speak to one of the team.
