Last year’s Intel Core i9 9900K had the base clock of 3.6GHz and Turbo of all cores up to 4.7GHz, and one of them would jump to 5GHz. Now all eight can go as high as 5GHz. Besides, the Core i9 9900KS comes with 16 MB Intel Smart Cache and up to 40 platform PCIe lanes for gaming and overclocking.
The TDP has increased from 95W with last year’s CPU to 127W with the new one, but this is not something that serious games could cool down.
"Intel has raised the bar for desktop gaming with the new 9th Gen Intel Core i9-9900KS Special Edition processor. Based on the 9th Gen Intel Core i9-9900K architecture, it's the world's best gaming desktop processor made even better and created specifically for extreme gamers who want the most performance possible. This processor demonstrates another innovation milestone for Intel, following last year's limited edition 8th Gen Intel Core i7-8086K."
–Frank Soqui, Intel vice president, and general manager of the Desktop, Workstation and Channel Group
We chatted with Frank about the Core X and the latest workstation updates a few weeks ago, and it is clear that Intel’s vision about gaming stays unchanged. It wants to offer great value to gamers, and getting the pricing and technology right is one of the important steps to that. Hitting 5GHz with eight-core and sixteen treads helps sales.
The Z390 boards support the new KS processors, and you can expect up to 27 percent faster mega-tasking when you simultaneously game, stream, and record compared with a three year old PC. Intel, Nvidia, and AMD share the opinion based on data that gamers usually upgrade every three years. Intel compared Core i9 9900KS with Core i7 6700K based system that is the three-year-old comparison
The new CPU should offer up to 35 percent more frames compared to a three years old PC and up to 78 percent faster 4K video. 78 percent makes a huge difference, and compared to last years’ Core i9 9900K, the new Core i9 9900KS scores up to 17 percent faster in 4K video editing.
Intel offers one year warranty, and if you are not confident to overclock manually Intel recommends to use Intel Performance Maximizer to do it for you.
Intel did go on the record saying that only selected chips can achieve this specification to run up to 5.0 GHz all-core turbo and warns that quantities are limited. The tech industry calls this process binning, as Intel is looking and qualifying the best of the best chips to sell as the Core i9 9900KS. The company wants to make sure that gamers are happy and that not many of them will return fried up.
Core i9 9900KS goes after Ryzen 9 3900X and similar Ryzen processors from that series, but from what we have seen so far, Intel had an advantage in gaming even with Core i9 9900K let alone the KS. We will have to wait a bit more to see the reviews.