(Image credit: Lau Kin Lam/YouTube)

Prolific Chinese overclocker Lau Kin Lam claims he has taken Intel's forthcoming Core i9-9900K processor to a staggering 5GHz on all eight cores using watercooling. As with all leaked test results, take these with a grain of salt. However, the corresponding YouTube video lends some credence to the score.

The Intel 9000-series or Coffee Lake Refresh, whichever you want to call it, is almost here. Needless to say, the spotlight is set on the Core i9-9900K, Intel's first mainstream eight-core processor. As we're nearing the purported launch month of October, supposed benchmark figures are starting to appear left and right. The latest performance leak comes by the hands of Lau Kin Lam from Hong Kong media outlet HKEPC.

Lau Kin Lam claims to have successfully overclocked the Core i9-9900K to 5GHz across all cores with a mere 1.28V with watercooling, producing a Cinebench R15 result of 2,166 points. Lau Kin Lam's result is 158 points higher than a previous result posted by a Facebook user named "18yearsoldangus," who managed to rake in a score of 2,008 points. It's difficult to assess the Core i9-9900K's true multi-core performance based on either result. The processor was running at 5GHz on all its cores when the Core i9-9900K supposedly has an all-core turbo of 4.7GHz. For the sake of comparison, let's see how the overclocked Core i9-9900K fairs against Intel's own Core i7-8700K and AMD's Ryzen 7 2700X.

Both Lau Kin Lam and 18yearsoldangus allegedly used engineering samples of the Core i9-9900K, so it's still subject to tuning. The results should be taken with a degree of skepticism since the final performance numbers could differ greatly. The overclockers also failed to mention the test systems' specifications, which could be what caused the substantial difference between the scores.

At stock speeds, the Core i7-8700K and Ryzen 7 2700X produced a Cinebench R15 result of 1,443 points and 1,859 points, respectively. Based on Lau Kin Lam's figures, a Core i9-9900K running at 5GHz is around 50.1 percent faster than a stock Core i7-8700K, which is understandable considering that the Core i9-9900K has two extra cores, which are overclocked in this case. However, the performance gap closes significantly if we compare the Core i9-9900K to a true eight-core rival. Even with a hefty 5GHz overclock, the Core i9-9900K is only 16.5 percent faster than a stock Ryzen 7 2700X.

With the Core i7-8700K overclocked to 4.9GHz, the processor put up a score of 1,648 points, shrinking the Core i9-9900K's by 31.4 percent. Things get spicy with the Ryzen 7 2700X. At 4.2GHz, the AMD chip scored 1,907 points. If you want to look at it from an overclocking perspective, the Core i9-9900K clocked at 5GHz is basically 13.6 percent faster than a Ryzen 7 2700X at 4.2GHz.

Unfortunately, Lau Kin Lam didn't run the single-core Cinebench R15 test on the Core i9-9900K. so we have yet to see the processor's performance in single-threaded scenarios.