A while back, we saw the first Geekbench scores of the Intel Core i9-9900KS where it seemed to perform worse than its non-S variant, the 9900K. The Ryzen 7 3800X was also able to beat it in the multi-threaded bench with a marginal delta in the SC test. As I expected, that CPU wasn’t tested under proper conditions, hence the dismal performance. Yesterday, another benchmark surfaced where the 9900KS is faster than both the 9900K as well as the Ryzen 7 in the single-threaded as well as the multi-threaded workloads.
The KS part is just 2-3% faster than the existing i9 flagship in the SC bench, but the multi-threaded score is a good 10%+ higher. This makes sense considering that the 9900KS runs at an all-core boost of 5GHz, same as the SC peak of the 9900K. In comparison, the Ryzen 7 3800X maxes out at 4.5Ghz and the 3900X has a boost clock of 4.6GHz (not all core).
The Core i9-9900KS is slightly faster than the 3800X in the multi-threaded test but still lags behind the similarly priced Ryzen 9 3900X by a significant margin. Considering that the vanilla i9 costs north of $450, the 9900KS will cost around $500, the same as the present AMD flagship, with Intel justifying the high pricing with its better single-core performance in “real-world” benchmarks.
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