The new 9th generation Intel i9-9900K CPU is upon us! AMD has been pushing into Intel's desktop market and Intel knows it. Today Intel is pulling the curtain back on "not paid for" reviews and we are happy to be serving you one of those up here today. Is the i9-9900K better than the Ryzen 7 2700X, and is it worth the staggering price premium.

This "9th Gen" processor is a "Coffee Lake-Refresh." Do not look for any big upticks in IPC or clocks in enthusiast terms, however out of the box, the stock Boost Clocks are getting very speedy. Although Intel will not say this, we all know that this release is a keep-up-with-the-Joneses move on Intel's part to answer the 1st and 2nd Generation Ryzen 7 CPUs from AMD, and that is a great thing in our opinion. Having competition in the CPU market again is a tremendous thing for all of us, especially us computer hardware enthusiasts. We truly owe the launch of the i9-9900K to AMD in a twisted way.

The i9-9900K is an 8 core / 16 thread part while the i7-9700K is an 8 core / 8 thread CPU. The i5-9600K is 6 core / 6 thread and can be looked at as a direct replacement for the i5-8600K. The specification chart below has all the stock Boost Clocks listed, and we will certainly be checking those ourselves on the following pages. TDP is listed at 95 watts for all the K SKU parts, and we will be testing package power on the 9900K that we have in hand. Intel has sampled us for the first time in years, but it chose not to send us the 9700K or 9600K today. We are fairly certain this is being done to keep the attention on the 9900K in order to keep focus on this part in hopes that it trumps the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X across the board, and we will of course know that by our conclusion page.