Review: Intel’s 9th Gen Core i9 9900K processor hits 5GHz—just at a price
Let's be honest here: modern processors aren’t exciting. Speed bumps no longer thrill us, and we’ve become blasé about adding more cores. But we are living in a time when computers casually offer amounts of processing power that would have made previous generations swoon.
It’s also a competitive time, primarily with two companies fighting for your silicon spending and giving you great computing bang for your buck. On one side we have Intel, the 800-pound gorilla of the processor world. On the other side, we have AMD, the upstart that occasionally steals the crown by doing something unexpected that changes the rules.
The $580 Intel 9th Gen Core i9 9900K is Intel's play for the processor socket of gamers. It’s the top model in the S-series, built for speed with eight cores. With hyperthreading (which splits the work on a single core into two parts), that is doubled to 16 threads, each of which can crunch away at a different task. There are two other chips in this series, the 8-core 3.6GHz $410 i7-9700K and the 6-core 3.7GHz $280 i5-9600K. These are similar, but they eschew hyperthreading, a technology that seems to be falling out of favor at Intel as the number of real processor cores on their consumer processors rises and the company looks for ways to justify the price of premium models. While this new Intel offering does increase your speed based on our testing, it'll cost you.
