We have three Coffee Lake-S Series 9000 reviews available today, this review will cover the new flagship desktop processor that does not sit in the HEDT range. Yes, in this review we take the new flagship mainstream processor for a test-drive, meet the premium Coffee Lake-S eight-core processor that has been discussed so abundantly lately. This little beast has eight cores, sixteen threads and gets turbo bins that reach 5.0 GHz. Pair it with a nice Z390 motherboard and you will be looking at mighty fine performance and a downright excellent gaming processor.

Core i9 9900K... where is the 9800K, right? Well, I guess Intel has got some reserves left for later. The new 9900K is the much-discussed answer to the AMD Ryzen 2700X. It has eight cores, SMT is enabled thus you have sixteen threads and Intel would not be Intel if they did not cash in on high clock frequencies. That makes the Core i9 9900K the enthusiast product in their new mainstream processor series. I realize that is a weird line to read, but don't forget, there is an HEDT platform as well, with a multitude of cores available seen from this 8-core part. So, as enthusiast class as this processor is, it is segmented into a mainstream product line. The 9900K should be seated into your Z390 motherboard. A Z370 (update your bios first please) chipset based motherboard would work as well, but we do recommend you use one with a proper VRM implementation. Now, I've called the new processors a refresh, however, an 8-core part based on Coffee Lake-S has never been released by Intel before. So by refresh, I do mean the similar 14nm Coffee Lake processor architecture that was brought into the Core 9000 series, from that 8000 series. Six and eight-core processors in the mainstream segment, it's an all-new thing for Intel, and we do have to give credit where it's due; if you are going to purchase one of the three procs as listed today, you will need to thank AMD for that. Their aggressive product positioning with Ryzen and many cores forced Intel into fabbing more core processors. And you know what? That's a very good thing, as competition in the market makes companies go that extra mile. We expect the three processors to become extremely popular and in demand for the PC gamer, as each and every one of the processors will offer fantastic gaming performance if your graphics card is fast enough. Intel is able to boost the Turbo frequencies towards that 5 GHz domain. And that is a big advantage Intel has over AMD, which is wedged shut at that 4.2 GHz range with Ryzen 2000 (which is overall really good, but the high clock per core is where it matters in CPU bound gaming; e.g. with super high-end graphics cards like the RTX 2080 Ti).