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

Peter Donnell / 6 years ago

Final Thoughts

How Much Does it Cost?

This is an interesting one for Intel and AMD, and furthermore, for consumers. Sure, AMD has 8-core CPUs on the market now for around £300 and sometimes less. However at £599.99 the Intel Core i9-9900K is a lot more expensive, but it’s also the most affordable 8-Core CPU we’ve seen from Intel. Right now, you can get zero change from over £1000 for something like a 10-core X299 CPU, and you won’t see much performance improvement as a gamer for your investment either.

It’s more expensive, sure, but it’s faster. I think a metric of diminishing returns holds true, and to go a bit faster costs more, a little faster again, even more, and so on. The same is true in the car world, if you want to cut those 0-60 times and increase that top speed, the difference between a sports car and a tuned up custom is night and day.

Overview

Intel really has come out guns blazing here, and the Core i9-9900K is a mighty impressive processor. It’s not as impressive as some early benchmarks may have suggested, but today’s number speak for themselves pretty fairly I think. When it comes to blasting through the latest games at extreme frame rates, it’s certainly no slouch. Its many-core design brings benefits to the consumer range that were once the reserve of Intel’s workstation and X299 platform. For rendering 4K video, encoding digital scenes, and all other kinds of CPU intensive number crunching, it really is one of the fastest consumer CPUs on the market today. The single core performance alone makes it feel exceptionally rapid, especially when it comes to day-to-day simple PC tasks, big core counts don’t come into play.

With Great Power Comes Great…

The kicker with this CPU is that it takes in a fair amount of power and kicks out a lot of heat. Of course, the middle of that is the amazing performance, but some forward planning with your system build will ensure optimal performance. You’ll want to invest in a big cooler such as the Noctua NH-D15s, most likely with dual fans. That’s the best air cooler on the market in my opinion, and I wouldn’t use much less on this CPU. For water cooling, 240mm high-performance coolers as a bare minimum, and even then I would favour the Noctua. For overclocking 280mm/360mm and above is the way to go, either custom loop or AIO. This will ensure you can get more voltage in, more heat away, and much more performance out too.

Performance

The statement here is clear, this is the fastest 8-core CPU on the market right now. The AMD offerings are certainly just as appealing to many though, and at half the price you still get many of the thrills. However, Intel has the strongest hand when it comes to easy overclocking, more stable memory management, and higher clock speeds and single core performance. The temperatures on this CPU are hot, but I can’t imagine AMD chips doing any better if they’re pushed to 5 GHz+.

Gaming

The single core speeds are a big boost to most gaming tasks, as are the addition of 8 cores total. While many games don’t use that many cores, many gamers do. If you’re playing your favourite game, running streaming applications, recording software, rendering, overlays, chat applications, and more, it’ll be a big help. Ryzen was a big attraction for this reason, as some Intel platforms suffered stutter and frame drop in the multi-tasking gamer workloads. That’s no longer going to be the case, and it’ll be interesting to see how many streamers make the switch.

Should I Buy One?

At £599.99 the Intel Core i9-9900K isn’t cheap. However, compared to the X299 chips on the market, it’s a bit of a bargain. This level of performance has long been the reserve of £1000+ chips from Intel, on more extreme and expensive X299 motherboards. Now you can run this chip on your existing Z370 motherboard. Intel recommends the use of Z390 though, most likely as they’re built to deal with the more demanding power draw and thermals.

If you haven’t upgrade for a few years though, a new Core i9-9900K, a new Z390 motherboard and maybe a new RTX (such as the RTX 2080) graphics card still comes in £1500-2000, which isn’t completely out of the world compared to previous generations flagship builds. What do you think? Is the new i9 the CPU for you? Or are you more tempted by the more affordable AMD solutions? Let us know in the comments!