While Intel still has a slight edge in gaming in the high-end market with the Core i9-9900K, the gap is pretty slim and AMD’s offerings win out heavily in other workloads, which usually leads people to go with team red. With the Core i9-9900KS Special Edition, Intel is looking to widen the gap…of course for a premium.
The 9900KS Special Edition has been assigned a price of $513-$524, which is only about $25 more than the original 9900K. For those twenty-five dollars, you get a binned chip with a guaranteed boost clock of 5.0 GHz on all cores, and potential to overclock even further. Besides that, though, it’s pretty much identical to the 9900K. So without any further ado, let us jump into the benchmarks.
Power Consumption
As you can see above, the 9900KS draws in less power than the 9900K at higher clocks due to being better silicon because of binning but does consume more at stock.
Let us now look at the gaming benchmarks:
As you can see, the Core i9-9900KS is a step from the 9900K, but as expected the multi-threaded performance is more or less unaffected. Moreover, as the benchmarks indicate, you can achieve almost the same scores with an overclocked Core i7-9700K. After all, hyperthreading isn’t very useful when it comes to gaming workloads. Furthermore, here it seems to hinder performance in some games as the cache gets distributed between two threads per core, the amount available to each core gets reduced, resulting in a slight drop in certain workloads.
Overall, a new standard has been set for gaming performance. But, due to limited availability, we expect the processor to have a heavy mark up on its price from the one set by Intel. Whether you should buy it will depend on your needs, your computer specs, budget as well as your location as the prices will vary from country to country.
Further reading:
- Best Gaming PC Build Under Rs. 2,00,000 (2 Lakh) in India: October 2019
- Why are AMD’s Zen Based Ryzen CPUs are So Competitive Vs Intel Processors
Benchmark source: Tomshardware.com