Alleged Intel Core i9-9900K 8-Core Coffee Lake Benchmarks Hit 3DMark Smoking AMD Ryzen
It is time to get excited about Intel's next flagship processor for the mainstream market. Why is that? Unless all of the leaks and rumors have been flat out wrong, the 8-core/16-thread Core i9-9900K is coming, and if the latest unofficial appearance is any indication, it will bring the goods. The unreleased processor showed up in Futuremark's 3DMark database and put a smack down its eventual competitors.
First let's go over the specs. The database entry indicates the "processor is not recognized," but based on the specs, it appears to be the Core i9-9900K. Not all of the specs were in line with previous leaks, however, and specifically the 3.1GHz base clock indicated by the listing is slower than the 3.6GHz base clock that has shown up in other listings.
intel 8C16Thttps://t.co/s96jzfdyHE
— TUM APISAK (@TUM_APISAK) July 28, 2018
There are few possibilities with that:
- It's not a Core i9-9900K processor.
- 3DMark is not able to pluck completely accurate specs from the processor.
- It's an early engineering sample that is not indicative of the final silicon.
- Previous leaks indicating a 3.6GHz base clock were wrong.
While the base clock is different, the rest of the specs are consistent with previous leaks. Namely, it has 8 cores, 16 threads, and a 5GHz Turbo clock. And though it was not listed, the Core i9-9900K is expected to arrive with 16MB of L3 cache and a 95W TDP.
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The chip posted a CPU score 10,719 in 3DMark's Time Spy test, and 9,862 overall. It was running in an ASUS ROG Strix Z370-F Gaming motherboard with 16GB (2x8GB) of G.Skill DDR4-2666 memory, a 500GB Samsung 960 Evo SSD, and a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card.
To put that CPU score into perspective, here is a look at some performance numbers for a couple of other high-end processors:
- AMD Ryzen 7 2700X (overclocked to 5GHz): 9,387 (-1,332)
- Intel Core i7-8700K (overclocked to 5GHz): 8,935 (-1,784)
The performance gaps widen even further if comparing stock clocked chips to the Core i9-9900K. Of course, this is just a single benchmark, but it certainly looks promising.
