Intel announces the Core i9-9900K, i7-9700K and i5-9600K

Intel has released their new lineup of 9th Gen CPUs, and they claim that their flagship Core i9-9900K is the world’s best gaming processor. Let’s have a look at Intel’s newest entries in the CPU Market, how they compare against each other, their pricing and how to pre-order them.

Pricing & How to Pre-Order

1. Intel Core i9-9900K – $488 USD
2. Intel Core i7-9700K – $374 USD
3. Intel Core i5-9600K – $262 USD

Those are the prices of Intel’s newest 9th Gen CPUs. To pre-order the CPUs, head over to Amazon. Keep in mind that current pre-order prices are a bit higher than Intel’s listed prices though. The CPUs will start shipping from October 19th.

International Shipping seems to be available for these pre-orders, but if you’re not in the US I recommend checking up with your local vendors & shopping websites until they have the CPUs in stock too.

Core i9-9900K, Core i7-9700K and Core i5-9600K

The new 9th Gen CPUs are a refresh of the 8th Gen Coffee Lake CPUs released last year, so Intel is still using the 14nm++ manufacturing process. They do come with plenty of new features though. Reports indicate that Intel will release true 10nm Cannon Lake CPUs next year.

Intel has released the all new Z390 Chipset for motherboards along with these 9th Gen CPUs, which feature native USB 3.1 Gen 2 support, 802.11 ac Wi-Fi and other improvements. Still, all of these new processors will still be supported on the existing Z370 Motherboards after a BIOS Update. Some journalists believe that the Z370 Motherboards might have issues with the i9-9900K because of VRM Throttling issues, but we’ll have to wait and see if this is true when these CPUs start shipping.

The Core i9-9900K is the flagship processor in this new lineup. With Turbo Boost, it supports 5GHz right out of the box and with some overclocking. We’re looking at some serious performance. It has 8 cores, 16 threads and thanks to the high clock speeds and strong single-core performance, Intel’s claim of the i9-9900K being the world’s best gaming chip should be true.

Over at New York where Intel launched all of these new CPUs, they had professional overclockers who were able to overclock the Core i9-9900K to a beastly 6.9GHz on all eight cores, at a core voltage of 1.7V. Splave, a professional overclocker told Tom’s Hardware that the Core i9-9900K can push up to 5.3GHz with water-cooling at a core voltage of 1.4V, meaning that these new CPUs should be great overclockers.

The Core i7-9700K & Core i5-9600K are the other two 9th Gen CPUs released by Intel. The i7-9700K has eight cores, eight threads and is clocked at 3.6GHz with turbo boost up to 4.9GHz. And the i5-9600K has six cores, six threads and is clocked at 3.7GHz with turbo boost up to 4.6GHz.

I’m definitely very excited to see the i5-9600K’s in action. At less than $300, this processor is going to be a very popular choice in many mid-range and even high-end Gaming PC Builds. The i7-9700K will be an incremental upgrade for those who are looking for multi-tasking, streaming or video-editing capabilities alongside the beastly gaming performance.

“Our goal is to deliver leadership performance across all computing segments and product lines.

Today’s announcements underscore our ability to do exactly that, including, hands-down, the world’s best processor for gaming. Whether a gamer, a creator or an expert using the most advanced workstation applications possible, Intel and our partners are focused on delivering balanced platforms with real-world leadership performance and robust capabilities that exceed their needs.”

– Anand Srivatsa, Vice President at Intel’s Client Computing Group

Update – Reports indicate the benchmarks for the Core i9-9900K by Intel might be wrong. So, I recommend waiting for real benchmarks & reviews before buying the new 9th Gen CPUs. Here’s a video by YouTuber Tech YES City explaining what’s happening –

Comparison between all new 9th Gen Intel Core Processors

All of the new 9th Gen CPUs released support Intel’s Optane Technology, support up to 2666MHz of DDR4 Memory, support up to 40 PCI-E Lanes and they’re unlocked for overclocking. Apart from all of that, here are the differences between all the new 3 CPUs –

Final Verdict

The new 9th Gen CPUs from Intel are absolute beasts, no doubt there. The Core i9-9900K is a behemoth of a processor, and more when it’s overclocked. The Core i5-9600K seems to have great value for the price and the Core i7-9700K will be a great choice for streamers or those who are willing to put some more money.

But Intel has more. They also released a 28-core Xeon W Processor along with seven new Core X CPUs. They will also eventually release other more affordable Non-K variants of the Core i3 & Core i5 9th Gen CPUs.

Intel’s new 9th Gen CPUs look very promising. Stay tuned for our final review of the Core i9-9900K, i7-9700K and i5-9600K CPUs – these new processors will start shipping by October 19th and then we’ll have some actual performance numbers.

What do you think about the new 9th Gen Intel Core i9, i7 and i5 Processors? Are you planning to upgrade? Let’s discuss in the comments.