Intel Core i9-9900K 8-Core 16-Thread Processor Review

Peter Donnell / 6 years ago

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark: 24021 (New Record!)
Unigine: 5556
PCMark 10 (Express): 5665
WPrime: 3.081 83.564
CineBench R15: 214 (New Record!)/2071
Handbrake: 74.3

There’s no doubt that this is a very fast CPU, with the i9-9900K smashing through our 3DMark record and beating the previous record holder, the i9-7980XE. Quite a way ahead of the 20889 scored by the Ryzen 2700X, although the two Threadripper CPUs did perform between the two. It didn’t take the top score in Unigine, but that benchmark is more testing GPU than CPU, and the i9 performed right on target here.

Intel continues to dominate the PCMark 10 benchmark, with the i9 taking 4th place. This benchmark favours faster single core performance overall, and it shows. However, the WPrime score was even more impressive, beating the Ryzen 7 2700X’s 96.554 with a time of just 83.563. That’s the fastest consumer level CPU we’ve tested, with only TR4 and X299 solutions scoring any higher.

It ripped through Cinebench in fashion too, scoring a staggering 214 points on the single core performance; the second CPU to break 200 since the 870K. It’s also the first CPU to break 2000 points at all-cores that isn’t an X299 or Threadripper CPU, making it the fastest mainstream CPU in this benchmark. This goes some way to explain why it’s able to transcode 4K video at 74.3 FPS; very impressive indeed.