Intel Core i9 Coffee Lake Refresh i9-9900 BOX (BX80684I99900)

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Intel has long pretended that the mass market didn't need more than four cores. Say, more is already any pro-level for all sorts of renders. Then AMD came on the scene and started shooting inexpensive six- and then eight-core chips. And it turned out that these additional cores are not superfluous at all. Intel thought for a long time what to do with this, until at the end of 2019 they finally announced the Coffee Lake Refresh line, in which their first mass-produced 8-core Core i9-9900K chip appeared.

Turbo boost up to 5 GHz and multithreading

And that's great. Competition is always in the hands of the end customer. It’s not great that the new product belongs to the mass market rather conditionally and costs 2 times more than the popular Ryzen 7 2700X. Still, $500+ is serious money. Although, the performance of the Core i9-9900K is higher in all scenarios. Here you have a 5 GHz turbo boost, and 16 MB of third-level cache, and, finally, multi-threading support. Perhaps more relevant here would be a comparison with the brand new Ryzen 7 3700X of the Matisse family, which is asked for a little less, and which is slightly inferior in performance, but can close the gap due to overclocking potential.

Without overclocking

And it is with overclocking that the main, in our opinion, stumbling block is connected. The fact is that from the point of view of architecture, the i9-9900K is related to the Skylake processors, which saw the light as much as three years ago. This led to the fact that he became the first "stone" of the company for a long time with almost no overclocking potential, because the nominal frequencies here are actually pulled up to the maximum. And even the return of solder under the processor cover, which fans of the brand demanded, does not save. And it turns out that last year's Core i7-8700K after overclocking reduces the gap to a minimum. Therefore, if you want to save money and tinker with overclocking, then it's better to take it. If you need the most powerful gaming processor out of the box, and the price does not play a decisive role, then in the direction of the i9-9900K.