New and fastest gaming CPU • iGamesNews.com

Intel's Core i9 9900KS arrives-this is really a beast. This $ 599 limited-edition processor was created by the best-performing 9900K model and was advertised to run at 5GHz full-core turbo frequency, out of the box-only a small number of 9900K samples hoped to be handled manually Overclocking to achieve. The 9900KS should also be able to hit a given frequency at a lower voltage than most 9900K devices, making it an ideal choice for enthusiasts who want a high clock at low temperatures. Considering how well the 9700K and 9900K perform in most games, the 9900KS should become the fastest gaming processor on the market with faster full-core turbo and higher 127W TDP-but the question is whether it is actually worth it Higher prices when you already have powerful gaming performance from a range of much cheaper processors from AMD and Intel.

Before we choose a series of comprehensive benchmarks and game benchmarks to answer this question, it is important to accurately assess what you expect from the 9900KS. From the beginning, the claimed 5GHz full-core Turbo number was a bit misleading. The 9900KS can indeed increase to that frequency on all eight cores, but whether it will remain there depends on your motherboard. On the ASUS ROG Maximus XI Extreme board we used, the “Multi-Core Enhancement” setting is disabled. When faced with a full-core load, the 9900KS will maintain this speed for about half a minute and then lower the throttle to a higher and reasonable frequency (for example 4.5GHz) to stay within its power range. However, after the MCE setting is enabled, the chip's power requirements will be greatly relaxed. Assuming sufficient power transmission and cooling functions, the chip is allowed to remain in the 5GHz acceleration period indefinitely.

We believe that most users considering using 9900KS will use high-end motherboards with similar options to relax the power limit-including some out-of-the-box configurations-so our gaming tests were conducted with MCE enabled and relaxed Power limitation. If you did buy the processor, remember to check the frequency of the game with software like Riva Tuner Statistics Server to ensure that your processor is at its best. Conversely, if you live where electricity is expensive, or the power supply is inadequate, then you will need to disable MCE to maximize efficiency-if this is the case, you'd better buy only the existing Core i9 9900K or i7 9700K. F

* As of this writing, Amazon and New Egg have the lowest prices. Limited supply of some Ryzen processors has resulted in higher prices for some models, so be sure to check local prices for the latest look.

Let's also cover the rest of the test setup. We are running a fresh install of Windows on the fast Aorus 2TB NVMe drive provided by AMD for Ryzen testing, with the latest security patches installed. The GPU here is Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition, which is the fastest consumer graphics card. Our motherboard for Intel processors is the premium ASUS ROG Maximus XI Extreme Z390, and AMD processors have been tested on MSI MPG X570 Gaming Plus and MSI Prestige X570 Creation. The Ryzen chip is cooled (and bundled!) With the excellent AMD Wraith Prism air cooler. Intel's high-end processors do not come with a heat sink, so we chose the Gaming Storm Castle 240mm AiO, which performs very similarly to the AMD solution (although you must add the cost of a qualified heat sink to any version under consideration). In each case, we used G.Skill Trident Z Royal 3600MHz CL16 RAM provided by AMD, huge 850W power supply and an open-air test bench.

Although game performance is clearly the focus here, it is also important for us to quickly look at the content creation workload. As more cores and threads are used, AMD's latest processors perform well here, but the 9900KS with eight cores and very high frequency should also be a reasonable choice. To see if it clearly outperformed the 9900K and how it performed on the third-generation Ryzen, we chose the Cinebench R20. This benchmark measures the time it takes each CPU to render a static 3D scene, one core at a time, and all available cores. Although the test is technically a comprehensive test, the high scores here do predict the faster performance of the professional video package Cinema 4D.

We tested the 9900KS with Multi-Core Enhancement (MCE) enabled and disabled, so you can see the performance difference between sticking to the default power limit and exceeding the default power limit-which is quite impressive. After enabling MCE, we found that Cinebench R20 multi-core performance increased by 6%, and hand brake transcoding speed increased by 9%. In general, the longer the continuous load time, the greater the performance improvement from enabling MCE (but the more energy it consumes).

Our tests show that 9900KS is faster than 9900K due to the high content creation workload, but its advantages are negligible at best. Regardless of the codec, the transcoding operation in Handbrake only runs at about 1 fps, and the Cinebench score improves by 6%. This means that the speed of 9900KS in these workloads is far from enough to challenge its Ryzen similar product 3900X, Cinebench's speed remains about 35%, and Handbrake x264 encoding speed remains about 33%. 9900KS is more competitive in processing AVX instructions, but still lags behind our 3900X, which is only 9900KS ahead of our h.265 encoding test. The Ryzen 3900X is also more power efficient, especially when the 9900KS is running with power restrictions disabled. In general, the MCE-enabled 9900KS system measures 355W on the wall, while the 3900X is only 228W, which is 55% higher.

We also overclocked the 9900KS example we provided using Intel Performance Maximizer software. After making our installation compatible with the software (which involved making sure the BIOS was set to the default settings and converting the old MBR partition to GPT), the software spent an hour testing various frequencies and voltages, and frequently during Restart. We finally got a full-core 5.1GHz overclocking. According to Silicon Lottery data, the first 31% of the 9900KS unit can reach a speed of 1.344V. This improves our performance in Cinebench and Handbrake by a few percentage points, while increasing power consumption by about 10W.

So the content creation workload is still AMD's domain, which is almost what we expected-but how does 9900KS handle games? The 3900X competes well with the 9900K at the top of each team's product stack, but eventually the 9900K is a better gaming CPU with higher frame rates in almost all games (the average also improves the worst percentage one). That should make 9900KS a better choice, but is the advantage sufficient to justify higher prices?

To find out, we need to find some popular games that actually show significant differences between different processors. This is harder than it seems, because CPU-bound operations are inherently more susceptible to random disturbances than CPU-bound cases (that is, processes started in the background degrade performance). The CPU load is also more variable. When the game starts, the processor will not accelerate to 99% speed, and once you hit the desktop, it will only return to idle speed. Instead, the processor will accelerate and decelerate throughout the session because different Game subsystem.

Different processors will address these challenges in different ways, so Intel's best choice is likely to be temporarily troubled by AMD and vice versa. Therefore, we recommend that you check the video comments embedded above, or browse the videos embedded near each set of results to understand how the different CPUs we tested process each scene in real time. Compared to simple average fps numbers, this can provide better insight into real-world performance, such as nasty stuttering or sagging prevalence.

We tested each game at 1080p, 1440p, and 4K resolutions because the number of pixels on the screen has an interesting relationship with the relative performance of the CPU and GPU. At 1080p, chasing high frame rates requires a powerful CPU and fast memory, and the high-end graphics cards we use (such as the RTX 2080 Ti) are often underused. This setup makes sense for anyone who wants to make the most of a 144Hz or 240Hz display, despite the introduction of CPU-limited stuttering-although many games may run at almost the same speed on fairly inexpensive GPUs. 1440p is the best point of current resolution. In some titles in high-end games, our high-end system is still limited by CPU, but stuttering is not as common as 1080p. Here, even mid-range systems can push 60fps or higher speeds to high refresh rate monitors. 4K is still the most balanced solution for our test platform. Under normal circumstances, except for some older e-sports games (CS: GO, we are looking for you), there is usually enough CPU overhead to make the GPU a limiting factor.

Analysis of Intel Core i9 9900KS