If you’re curious about how well Intel’s upcoming Core i9-9900K flagship 9th-generation processor will perform, then a new leaked benchmark will definitely be of interest, as it shows a very nippy CPU indeed.

Bearing in mind the usual caveat of this potentially being fake – which is always a possibility with these sort of pre-launch rumors – the result from 3DMark (as highlighted by TUM APISAK) shows the Core i9-9900K hitting an overall score of 9,862 in the Time Spy benchmark. The chip recorded a graphics score of 9,725 and a CPU score of 10,719.

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For the benchmark, the processor was nestled in an Asus Z370-F Strix Gaming motherboard – which incidentally confirms backwards compatibility with existing Z370 boards, as previously speculated – and paired with a Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1080 Ti graphics card.

The result represents an impressive turn of speed, and as Wccftech.com, which spotted this leak, points out, it beats out AMD’s Ryzen 7 2700X by more than 1,500 points.

This leak also confirms the spec – to a large degree – and like the Ryzen 7 2700X, Intel’s flagship is an eight-core (16-thread) processor. It also suggests that the Core i9-9900K is capable of boosting to 5GHz out of the box, although apparently that will only be across two cores (4.7GHz will supposedly be the maximum boost across all cores by default).

Engineering sample

What’s different with this leak is the base clock isn’t 3.6GHz as previously rumored, but 3.1GHz. That could throw some doubt on the validity of the benchmark for some folks, but as this early leak is likely from an engineering sample of the CPU, it’s not really surprising to see such a relatively low figure for the base clock.

What it also underlines is that the final production chip will be even faster when it comes to benchmarking. Exciting stuff, particularly when you consider all this comes in a package with an alleged TDP of 95W (again beating out the Ryzen 7 2700X, which weighs in at 105W).

If all this speculation pans out, that is. We’re keeping our fingers firmly crossed.