Intel Core i9-9900KS Special Edition review: Is this really Intel's fastest gaming CPU?

Note: This article was first published on 30 October 2019.

5.0GHz on all cores!

The Intel Core i9-9900KS Special Edition is the world's best gaming processor, according to Intel. It's an upgraded version of the Core i9-9900K, which, we have proven in an earlier shoot-out, is the fastest chip you can buy today if you just want the highest possible frame rates in game.

The Core i9-9900KS tries to raise the bar further with an aggressive boost to clock speeds across the board. For starters, the base clock has increased from 3.6GHz to 4.0GHz, and the processor now boosts to 5.0GHz on all cores. In comparison, the older Core i9-9900K was only capable of boosting to 5.0GHz on two cores at the most, in addition to a 4.7GHz Turbo frequency across six to eight cores.

Here's an overview of how their boost frequencies compare:

The higher frequencies mean that TDP has also increased from 95W to 127W. Everything else remains the same however, and the chip still has 16MB of L3 cache and exposes 16 PCIe 3.0 lanes through the CPU. It's also based on the same 14nm++ process and will work with existing Intel Z390 motherboards. 

Since the Core i9-9900K already boosts to 5.0GHz on a couple of cores, the biggest benefit is going to come in games that can effectively scale across more scores. At the moment however, many games still prioritise clock speeds and IPC, which is why the Core i9-9900K still beats the Ryzen 9 3900X in games. But with the Core i9-9900KS, Intel's tackling the performance question from AMD's side of the equation, by explicitly targeting games that can scale across a greater number of cores. 

It remains to be whether that will pay off though. As you'll see in the next few pages, the Core i9-9900KS delivers a small improvement in encoding and rendering tasks compared to the Core i9-9900K, but it mostly falls short in games.

Furthermore, there have been reports that the Core i9-9900KS has lower IPC performance than the Core i9-9900K, which means the latter will perform better clock-for-clock. Tom's Hardware was the one to point this out with a pre-production chip, and there may actually be a reason for the IPC dropoff. As it turns out, the Core i9-9900KS uses a new stepping – Stepping 13 – of the 14nm++ process, which comes with hardware-based mitigations for the security flaws found in Intel chips over the past few years, including Spectre and Meltdown.

Core stepping basically refers to a revision of the original CPU design, so new steppings can offer things like bug fixes or improvements to the manufacturing process. The Core i9-9900KS uses the new R0 stepping, which is different from the P0 stepping of the Core i9-9900K. The R0 stepping is said to come with additional in-silicon security mitigations that can affect performance, which might possibly account for the performance drop in certain games. 

I should also point out that Gigabyte listed the Core i9-9900K as transitioning to the R0 stepping earlier this year, so it's possible that later versions of the chip would see a small drop in performance too, which might help the Core i9-9900KS appear more competitive in comparison.

That aside, the all-core 5.0GHz Turbo boost speeds are a convenient, headline-grabbing way for Intel to remain in the conversation, especially with AMD's 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X expected to drop in November. Intel needs to work every angle it can, and pushing an already very powerful gaming CPU to 5.0GHz is one way to do it.

Test setup

The configurations of the test setups we used are listed below. All results were obtained with the Ryzen Balanced power plan and Precision Boost Overdrive disabled. For the Core i9-9900K and Core i9-9900KS, multi-core enhancement was turned off on the ASUS motherboard. 

Intel Core i9-9900KS Special Edition

• Thermaltake Water 3.0 360 Riing RGB Edition with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
• ASUS ROG Maximus XI Extreme
• 2 x 8GB G.Skill Ripjaws V DDR4-3000 (Auto timings: CAS 15-15-15-35)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition
• Samsung 860 EVO 500GB M.2 SATA SSD
• Windows 10 Home (64-bit)

Intel Core i9-9900K

• Thermaltake Water 3.0 360 Riing RGB Edition with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
• ASUS ROG Maximus XI Extreme
• 2 x 8GB G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR4-3600 (Auto timings: CAS 16-16-16-36)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition
• Samsung 860 EVO 500GB M.2 SATA SSD
• Windows 10 Home (64-bit)

Ryzen 9 3900X/Ryzen 7 3700X

• Thermaltake Water 3.0 360 Riing RGB Edition with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut
• ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (Wi-Fi)
• 2 x 8GB G.Skill Trident Z Royal DDR4-3600 (Auto timings: CAS 16-16-16-36)
• NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition
• Samsung 860 EVO 500GB M.2 SATA SSD
• Windows 10 Home (64-bit)

[hwzcompare]

[products=676564,650200,668796,668798]

[width=200]

[caption=Test CPUs compared]

[showprices=1]

[/hwzcompare]

Here's a list of the benchmarks used:

• PCMark 10
• SPECviewperf 13.0
• Cinebench R15
• Cinebench R20
• Handbrake 1.2.2
• Blender Benchmark
• POV-Ray 3.7
• 3DMark
• Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation
• Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
• Far Cry 5
• Metro Exodus
• Middle-earth: Shadow of War
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider
• Tom Clancy's The Division 2

PCMark 10 Extended

PCMark 10 Extended assesses the performance of systems in a variety of workloads, including basic computing tasks, productivity applications, digital content creation, and gaming. Compared to PCMark 8, it also adds in new test metrics, such as app startup times, which quantifies how long it takes to launch a variety of real-world apps, and a rendering and visualization workload to simulate professional graphics and engineering applications. In addition, existing workloads have been updated to reflect modern usage.

The Core i9-9900KS was barely faster than the Core i9-9900K in terms of overall scores. In fact, the difference is so minuscule – just under 1 per cent – that it's probably even within the margin of variance for different test runs. All things considered, there's also little meaningful difference between the Intel and AMD CPUs. 

SPECviewperf 13.0

SPECviewperf is used to assess the 3D graphics performance of systems in professional applications. Each individual workload, called a viewset, represents graphics and content from an actual real-world application. SPECviewperf actually runs a total of eight different viewsets, but we’ve picked the four which have the greatest performance variation across CPUs display here.

The new SPECviewperf 13.0 incorporates new models and raycasting for volume visualization. Select viewsets have also been updated with new models and fresh application traces. 

The Core i9-9900KS didn't do too well here, and it lagged behind all the other processors, including even the much lower clocked Ryzen 7 3700X at times.

Cinebench R15/R20

Cinebench R15 is a better indicator of multi-threaded performance because of its ability to utilize up to 256 threads to evaluate a processor’s performance in a photorealistic 3D rendering. We ran both single-core and multi-core benchmarks to evaluate single-threaded performance and multi-threaded scalability here.

The newer Cinebench R20 is even more demanding, featuring increased workload complexity, higher memory use, and the latest rendering engine from Cinema 4D R20. Under the hood, the R20 engine also supports AVX, AVX2, and AVX512 instruction sets and the benchmark now supports up to 256 render threads.

Single-core performance is the same for both Intel CPUs in Cinebench R15, which is not entirely surprising given that the Core i9-9900K also boosts to 5.0GHz, albeit on just two cores. The Core i9-9900KS inched ahead in Cinebench R20 though, edging out all the other CPUs. In terms of multi-threaded performance, it has just a small lead over the Core i9-9900K though, coming in at just under 3 per cent faster in Cinebench R15. 

I also used Cinebench R20 to check the boosting behaviour of all 8 cores in HWiNFO, and all 8-cores ramp up to 5.0GHz quite readily. There's no issues with the cores not boosting to their rated speeds, as there was with AMD's Ryzen 3000 chips, and I often saw all 8 cores running at 5.0GHz at the same time. 

Handbrake 1.2.2

Handbrake is a video transcoder that converts videos into a format for use on PCs and portable electronic devices, and is a good indicator of a processor’s video encoding capabilities. YouTube content creators, Twitch streamers, and other video creators will be most interested in this performance metric. For this benchmark, we used a 1.7GB .mkv file.

Both Intel CPUs are still behind their AMD counterparts, but the Core i9-9900KS manages to shave a bit more time off the Core i9-9900K's result. 

Blender Benchmark

Blender likes having many cores as well, and the open-source software has been used for modeling and to create effects in movies. The new Blender Benchmark offers the option between Quick and Complete runs, and the numbers seen here are from the Quick benchmark, which puts the CPUs through scenarios like the BMW and Classroom demos.

AMD still has the edge in the Blender benchmark, but as in Handbrake, the Core i9-9900KS manages to post a slightly faster timing than its lower-clocked counterpart. 

POV-Ray 3.7

POV-Ray's built-in benchmark also favors having more cores. The Core i9-9900K again managed to inch ahead of the Core i9-9900K, but it wasn't quite enough to overtake the Ryzen 7 3700X.

Gaming benchmarks

We only ran our gaming benchmark suite at 1080p, since that's where the CPU is more of a factor. At the higher resolutions that are more graphically intensive, the performance differences start to even out.

3DMark

The synthetic 3DMark benchmark tests graphics and computational performance at different resolutions, starting at 1080p and going all the way up to 4K. A series of two graphics test, one physics test, and then a combined test stresses your hardware in turn to assess its performance.

We’ve also teased out the Physics and CPU scores for the Fire Strike Ultra and Time Spy Extreme tests and compiled them in a separate table to give a better idea of how each processor performed.

Gaming performance was relatively even across the board. In fact, the Core i9-9900KS was just 3 per cent faster than the Core i9-9900K in terms of Fire Strike Physics scores. 

Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation

Ashes of the Singularity has long been the poster child for the performance benefits a low-level API like DirectX 12 can bring. It is based on the Nitrous engine and can be extremely punishing thanks to the huge number of onscreen units and the sheer level of detail accorded to each unit. However, the CPU does become the limiting factor at lower resolutions and settings.

This is where it starts to go downhill for the Core i9-9900KS. Despite being touted as a better version of the Core i9-9900K, the Special Edition chip fails to measure up and often falls short, albeit by a hair. 

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided

Mankind Divided features just about every trick to make your game look pretty, including things like volumetric and dynamic lighting, screenspace reflections, and cloth physics. Even though it was released in 2016, the game is capable of bringing even the most powerful systems to their knees. 

There's an oddly large disparity between the two Intel chips here, and the Core i9-9900K was actually 8 per cent faster than the Core i9-9900KS at High settings. 

Far Cry 5

Things were generally pretty close between the Core i9-9900KS and Core i9-9900K, but the latter still came ahead by just under 4 per cent.

Metro Exodus

The same goes for Metro Exodus, where the Core i9-9900K maintained the sliver of a lead over its higher clocked sibling.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War

The Core i9-9900KS continued to trail the Core i9-9900K in Shadow of War, although it was still 8 per cent faster than the Ryzen 9 3900X at High settings. 

Shadow of the Tomb Raider

In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the Core i9-9900KS was 18 per cent faster than the Ryzen 9 3900X. This is also the only game where it managed to edge ahead of the Core i9-9900K, although it did so by a mere 3 per cent. 

Tom Clancy's The Division 2

The Core i9-9900KS went back to trailing the Core i9-9900K in The Division 2. That said, it was quicker than the Ryzen 9 3900X by just under 6 per cent.

Temperature and power consumption

Despite having a higher TDP and clock speeds, the Core i9-9900K posted similar temperatures to the Core i9-9900K under load. It also didn't consume that much more power in the energy-02 viewset. 

Not quite the best gaming CPU in the world

The Intel Core i9-9900KS is best thought of as just another flavour of the Core i9-9900K. There's already the Core i9-9900KF, which lacks any integrated graphics, so the Core i9-9900KS is more or less just a higher clocked version of both its siblings. Intel is touting this as the best processor for gaming, and while the specifications certainly look promising on paper, it doesn't quite deliver. 

It's by no means a poorly performing CPU, and it's still faster than what AMD's Ryzen 3000 processors have to offer in 1080p gaming. Unfortunately, it fails to convincingly beat the Core i9-9900K in games, so it falls short on what is supposed to be its biggest selling point. After all, while AMD's Ryzen processors handily trounce Intel's mainstream chips in heavily-threaded workloads, Intel has still managed to hold on to its lead when it comes to games. The Core i9-9900KS should extend that lead, but it fails to live up to that promise.

To be sure, it serves up slightly better encoding and rendering performance, but the gains are small – it is after all still just a top-binned Core i9-9900K – and not quite enough to get excited about. It's not clear whether the lacklustre gaming performance is due to the hardware mitigations for the security flaws I mentioned earlier, but if it is, it's just another example of how the fallout from those flaws continue to trouble Intel even now. The only consolation is that these mitigations will soon come to the Core i9-9900K, which could dampen its performance and therefore put the Core i9-9900KS in a better light.

The all-core 5.0GHz boost does sound great, and there are fortunately no issues with the cores boosting to their rated speeds, unlike with AMD. But it seems like this much-touted feature is most useful for sprucing up headlines, and it doesn't quite translate into any significant gains in the real world. Furthermore, the Core i9-9900KS only comes with a 1-year warranty, down from the usual 3 years for Intel. The chipmaker says this is because of the limited volume of the chip, but you can't help but wonder if the aggressive speeds have somewhat tempered Intel's expectations for the CPU's longevity.

At a recommended price of US$513, the Core i9-9900K is slightly more expensive than the 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X, which costs US$499. AMD's processor still offers better value, mostly owing to its superior multi-threaded performance. Furthermore, its gaming numbers aren't that far behind either, especially if you game at more demanding, GPU-limiting settings, at which point the difference practically disappears.

The Core i9-9900K debuted at US$488, and it's still listed for around that price on Amazon. It still seems like the better choice to me if you want the absolute best gaming CPU. What's more, you get a 3-year warranty with it. The Core i9-9900KS is no doubt a cool proposition and 5.0GHz on all cores is really nice. But it just doesn't seem like a smart choice given all the good options available right now, unless you just want the bragging rights to a specially-binned Core i9-9900K.

Intel needs every advantage it can get to push back against a resurgent AMD and the Core i9-9900KS just isn't it.

Our articles may contain affiliate links. If you buy through these links, we may earn a small commission.