About a week and a half ago Intel gathered up a lot of the press and live streamed the introduction of their new 9000 series of CPUs as well as new Core-X CPUs. They also brought out details on the 28 core CPU that they teased earlier this year. We had a chance to dive into the details and then check out the new CPUs being used in a variety of demos including some overclocking demos showing off their new soldered TIM. By now I’m guessing most of you have seen some of those details but today I’m going to run through what Intel introduced and then after that I’m going to put the new i9-9900K through our tests and see how the new 8 core CPU performs. It’s been a busy month for big launches and this one has been a long time coming, I can’t wait to see how it performs compared to the growing competition from AMD so let's get into it!

Product Name: Intel i9-9900K

Review Sample Provided by: Intel

Written by: Wes Compton

Pictures by: Wes Compton

Amazon Affiliate Link: HERE

Disclosure: In addition to providing the i9-9900K for our review. Intel did also bring me out to NYC for the launch event. This includes paying for dinners, hotel, and transportation. There was also a small gift bag with a branded tumbler and a few other small things. None of this is payment for a review or coverage and plays no role in how I will test or judge testing performance. I just prefer to make sure everyone knows than to leave anything unsaid.

On a related note, the view of WTC 1 from our hotel was great. Sadly the day of the meeting had this fog and visibility of what I imagine was an expensive meeting space on the 68th floor of WTC4 had a nice all white view most of the day.

A look at Intel’s new CPUs

Before diving into the i9-9900K I guess we should run through some of the stuff introduced at that meeting right? Intel had a lot more to announce than just one CPU. So they touched on three different launches. The 9th generation desktop launch, “the” 28 core, and then a new X-Series launch. Of course, by the time this meeting had taken place a lot of the secrets of the 9th gen launch had already been leaked. But I don’t think most people were expecting much from the other two areas.

So Intel touched on a few big trends in the market that they have seen and are projecting. They have noticed that retail gaming PC sales have grown in market share around 29 percent in the last three years. This isn’t too big of a surprise, mobile devices have slowed down normal PC usage, but PC gaming has continued to grow. I imagine that played a role in their observation that in the last 5 years unlocked CPUs have grown in sales 11 percent. All of that then ties in with the middle part of this slide. They are projecting video content grow to four times. This combines video production like YouTube videos with live streaming to services like Twitch. All of these tie into Intel’s upcoming launches, of course, unlocked CPUs, gaming focus, and a focus on CPUs that can stream and produce video content. All similar things to what AMD has been doing with Ryzen as well ?.

So then they went over their introduction of STIM. This is what they are calling their Solder Thermal Interface Material. They announced this like it was new but we know Intel used to solder before and AMD has continued to do that. But I’m just happy to see Intel bringing it back. They of course touch on the benefits like better conductivity between the die and heat spreader. This allows for better heat dissipation and higher thermal headroom. This allows coolers to better pull heat away and allow better clock speeds.

With that, they introduced the new 9th Gen CPUs. Currently, this is just a small list with three CPUs. Obviously, the focus has been on the i9-9900K but there is also an i7-9700K, and the i5-9600K. All three have soldered TIM. The 9900K has a base clock of 3.6 and is Intel’s first full production CPU with a 5GHz turbo frequency. The i7-8086K did it first, but that was a limited run. In addition to that this is also their first 8 core mainstream CPU. It has 16 threads and is unlocked. The 9700K is similar but with 4.9 on the turbo clock speed and while it has 8 cores it doesn’t have hyperthreading so you have 8 cores and 8 threads and a slightly lower cache as well. This is another first, i7’s up until now have always had hyperthreading. Also interesting with the 9700K is how well this fits with the 8700K that has 6 cores but 12 threads. Lastly, there is the 9600K, this has a higher base clock of 3.7 but a lower turbo clock at 4.6 GHz. This also doesn’t have hyperthreading and is a 6 core 6 thread CPU. All three CPUs are listed with up to 40 lanes, but that is a little deceptive, the CPU still has the same 16 lanes as past Coffee Lake CPUs, you can get up to 40 with motherboard tricks. In the fine print down at the bottom the Intel legal team also had to break down Spectre and Meltdown fixes. These are the first CPUs with hardware fixes for Meltdown v3 and L1 Terminal Fault but everything else is still mitigated with microcode and software.

With the new CPUs, Intel also introduced their new Z390 chipset. This is really just an extension on the Z370 platform to touch on a few areas that Z370 was missing. The new chipset adds USB 3.1 Gen 2 on to the chipset as well as support for Wireless AC. Both had to be added on with Z370 boards. That said the new CPUs will work on the same boards that 8th Gen CPUs worked with as long as you have BIOS updates available for the support.

So the 28 Core CPU that Intel was teasing earlier this year that stirred up all of the controversy with them showing it running at 5 GHz on all cores while they had a chiller running to keep it cool. Well the Xeon W-3175X is what came from that. This is an interesting launch because I don’t think people expected it to have Xeon branding for one. It felt like Intel was bringing this out to compete with Threadripper so sticking with the Xeon branding and not starting a new name or putting it at the top of Core-X was interesting. The official speed is 3.1 on base clock and 4.3 turbo with 28 cores and 56 threads. The interesting part though is that this is an unlocked part. That’s right, an unlocked XEON! Intel didn’t really show off to many details other than that it is coming soon and that details like the price will be announced at a later date. It does run on its own platform with Gigabyte and Asus working with them on crazy motherboards to go with it. Six channel memory support matches with the giant CPU size as well. The Xeon Platinum 8176F that is currently on the market with 28 cores runs you at least $10,000 so it will be interesting to see where the W-3175X lands and how it changes Intel’s Xeon lineup.

The last announcement was the new Core-X series of CPUs. Now I’ve spent a lot testing the last Core-X CPUs and we even use them in our GPU test bench. These have been Intel’s high core count lineup. With the new lineup, there were two main takeaways. All of the CPUs now have soldered TIM and Intel dropped those low end 4 and 6 core CPUs at the bottom of their lineup. The second part helps set a line between the mainstream and Core-X lineups though it does mean you can’t get into Core-X with a cheap CPU and then upgrade later. Now the entry level is the $589 8 core 9800X. As a whole, the lineup jumped the 8 series so the 7980XE is now the 9980XE and everything got a slight clock speed bump. The 9980XE has the biggest jump from 2.6 base clock to 3.0 and it is now up to 4.5 on max boost with its 18 cores 36 threads. The price is also slightly down from 1999 to $1979.

Also while we were there Intel touched on their Mesh Architecture. This was interesting because this isn’t new but it is the first time I have heard them focus on it. This is because of AMD pushing their Infinity Thread usage. Mesh is similar but the difference as described to me is that mesh is laid out in a way where when you scale up to high core counts it keeps the latency lower. Imagine a normal layout being a circle where each bit passes all the way around where mesh allows communication up, down, left, right, and then at each angle. Having those options makes for a shorter distance on high core count CPUs.

Anand Srivatsa did bring out the new packaging for the i9-9900K during the event. I was honestly expecting from the pictures that the box would be larger like Threadripper so I was happy to see it was a little smaller.

Sadly the only chance to look at the packaging was at the event itself. I feel like Intel really missed out on a marketing opportunity by sending out the full retail experience to each reviewer. Look at all of the unboxing videos and articles and social media pictures that Threadripper has gotten with both of its launches. The packaging is interesting though with its transparent blue to let you peek inside. It opens up and lays out flat.

Rather than send out the retail packaging Intel send the CPU out in this box with the 9th Gen i9 covering the front of the box. Having LanOC was a nice touch and they did stick with the same polygon shape here with the pentagon-shaped cover over the CPU but I would rather have that retail box up on the shelf with some of our other cool tech gadgets, boxes, and swag.

The CPU itself doesn’t look any different than any other mainstream Intel CPU. It is impressive that they have packed 8 cores into this small size though. I have to imagine that their socket size is going to have to get a little larger in the future if the core wars continue.

Test Rig and Procedures

Test System (with affiliate links)

Motherboard: Asus ROG Strix Z390-I Gaming

Cooling: Noctua NH-U12S for cooling

Noctua NT-H1 Thermal Paste

Memory: Kingston HyperX Fury 16GB 2666MHz

Storage: Kingston A1000 960GB M.2 SSD

Video Card: Nvidia GTX 1080 Ti

Power Supply: Corsair TX750M

Case: Dimastech Test Bench

OS: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

I’ve also got CPUz screenshots to document the BIOS revision at testing, to show memory configuration, and CPU stepping and revision information.

CPU Performance

Okay, we can finally dive into the testing. I’ve expanded our CPU testing with more multi-core focused workloads and I had the time to do retesting with the AMD Ryzen 2000 series CPUs to get a good look at the 9900K compared to the 2700X. I’ve also added a few more games into our testing as well, Intel is advertising this as the best gaming CPU on the market so I wanted to see it in a few more modern games.

My first two tests were both X264 encoding focused. I used the older HD Benchmark 4.0 test and then the HD Benchmark 5.0 test. In both tests, the 9900K topped the charts. This was surprising because some of the high core count CPUs from Intel are in the mix of these tests as well. The 7960X and 7980XE did outperform in the 5.0-second pass, but with the longer first pass the combination of 16 threads and clock speeds beat out the Ryzen 2700X by 22 FPS.

Sticking with the encoding theme I did tests in the always popular Blender application to render in their new dedicated benchmark on the quick benchmark setting. This is time based so lower is better and the 9900K bested the 8 core 16 thread 7820X as well as the 8 core CPUs from AMD to be the third fastest CPU tested. The 18 and 16 core CPUs, of course, were significantly quicker still but the 9900K bridged the gap between the 7820X and the 7960X. In Handbrake I rendered a 4k video down to 1080p30 with similar results again. The two high core count CPUs were still faster but not by as much of a margin. The 9900K outperformed the 2700X by almost 10 FPS and even more impressively was just over 15 FPS faster than the 8086K. Then I ran the entire Cinegy Cinescore benchmark that tests rendering performance across a long list of file formats and resolutions in a broadcast focused benchmark. Here the 9900K did especially well compared to the Ryzen CPUs while still being over 6,000 points higher than the 6 core Intel CPUs and just 1,000 and 2,000 points behind the 16 and 18 core CPUs.

I’ve always loved any benchmark that gives us a look at multi-core and single-core performance and Cinebench R15 has always been a great one for that with its rendering scores. The 9900K I nowhere near the 16/18 core CPUs but it did get close to the 10 core 7900X. It was also well above any other 8 core CPUs in the multi-core test. As for the single-core test, the 9900K topped the chart. No surprised here. Single core performance is still dominated by Intel with the top Ryzen CPU down at the middle of the chart.

With Ray Tracing being talked about more the POV-Ray and V-Ray tests are both timely. They also are a good look at CPU performance. POV-Ray especially gives us a look at single and multi-core and I just explained how much I love those tests. So no big shockers in POV-Ray the 9900K is fast and up above everything except the 7960X and 7980XE. Single core performance the 9900K was the fastest tested, Intel overall was ahead in the single core testing with the 8700K and 8086K still ahead of the 2700X. The 9900K single core score was 525 vs the 2700X’s 411. V-Ray tests using seconds and again the 16/18 cores were at the top. The 2700X did really well here, matching the 7820X and beating both Intel 6 core CPUs by a big amount but the 9900K finished up 9 seconds quicker still.

The CPUz benchmark is nice because a lot of people are running CPUz for other reasons and it is just tucked away in the software where anyone could run it. It also tests single and multi-thread performance. Now, this test looks a lot better on our single threaded performance. The 9900K topped the chart by a good margin ahead of the 8086K and 8700K with the 2700X back a few more. Then in multi-thread testing the 9900K and 2700X are a little closer with the 9900K winning and then the 16 and 18 core CPUs changing the bell curve with their scores.

In wPrime, we take a look at mathematical compute performance by timing calculating pie out to 1024 million points. Again 16, 18, and even 10 core CPUs are still faster but then when getting into the 8 core CPUs the 9900K is ahead of the 2700X by about 4.5 seconds. The 9900K did a LOT better than the 6 core 8086K and 8700K here.

7-Zip is also somewhat math focused, these tests focus on compressing and uncompressing files. I have the combined score as well as individual results as well. High core counts are up top again by the 9900K did really well in the combined test. It did even better in the compressing results. I was surprised though at just how well the 2700X and 2700 did for decompressing. Three of the Ryzen CPUs ended up with higher decompressing scores than compressing. I know I spend a lot more time decompressing files so while in the combined test the 9900K wins out, I would call this a win for the 2700X as day to day I think more people are likely to need better decompressing performance.

Next was Jetstream, this is an interesting browser-based benchmark that tests flash and HTML5 performance. To me, this might be one of the most important tests because all of us spend way too much time online. The 9900K did really well here and overall this is an area that Intel does better consistently. The Ryzen CPUs are all near the bottom here. Single core performance is important here.

My next test was Passmark Performance Test 9’s CPU test suite and it gives an overall score. This does a full mix of tests some of which are detailed synthetic benchmarks and others are things like gaming performance. The 9900K came in behind the 10/16/18 core Intel Core-X CPUs and right in line with the 7820X showing that this benchmark focuses more on core count than clock speed. That said the 2700X was still a few CPUs behind and about 4k behind the 9900K in the overall score. The 6 core Intel mainstream CPUs are even farther behind that.

Then in PCMark 10, I love running this test because it does a wide range of real-world workloads like video calls, excel and word performance, web browsing, gaming, and more. In this test, the 9900K was at the top with a significant lead ahead of everything else. Behind that the 8086K and then the 8700K with their 6 cores. This shows that single core performance is favored in these tests. Looking a little closer at the 2700X and 9900K results the 9900K was out ahead in all three of the testing areas.

The Dolphin 5.0 Benchmark is a nice look at how well each CPU can handle emulation. This tests Wii emulation and the Intel mainstream CPUs did really well here. The 9900K topped the chart once again, putting even the good numbers from the 7700K to shame.

Next, I ran the synthetic gaming focused benchmark 3DMark with its Fire Strike test. I focused just on the physics score that is CPU focused and as you can see the 10/16/18 core Core-X CPUs were out ahead but the 9900K was the next fastest CPU with the 7820X being the next closest one and then finally the 2700X and 2800X.

Then from there, I ran through a whole series of actual in game tests. Like I said earlier I was especially interested to see how well the 9900K would do here given Intel’s promotion of the best gaming performance. In Ashes of the Singularity, the CPU focused benchmark takes advantage of all of your threads and with that, the Core-X CPUs did better here. This is also a test known for being optimized for Ryzen CPUs but the 9900K did still come in a little over 6 FPS higher than the 2700X. The 6 core Intel CPUs were 3 FPS behind and the 9900K was right in line with the 7900X and the 7820X. Dues Ex was similar but the gap between any of the CPUs is really small. Then in the four other games, the 9900K was at the top of the charts. Three of those games are newer games. In Far Cry 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, I was impressed with just how far out ahead the 9900K was. Far Cry 5 the 9900K was 24 FPS faster than the 2700X, with even the i5-8400 being faster. SotTR was a lot closer with the gap being 3 FPS for the 2700X and 9900K but then everything else came in at 116 FPS. In TF2, a much older game, the 9900K did really well as well. In fact, there was a 42 FPS gap between the 9900K and 2700X. The other Intel mainstream CPUs, however, were much closer up at the top.

I also did run through a few tests in AIDA64. These were focused on cache and memory performance and latency. There is just too much data to fit into a graph so I have the tables below. A few noticeable things, L1 and L2 cache for the 9900K were both faster than the 2700X with the exception of the L2 read speed where the 2700X was just slightly ahead. This also translated to Cache latency where the 9900K was quicker as well. As for L3 Cache, the 9900K was behind here with the L3 writes being about twice as fast on the 2700X. Memory read and write speeds on the other hand favor Ryzen, at least until you get up into the Core-X CPUs where Intel pulls way ahead. Single and double precision FLOPs and all of the IOPs tests have the 9900K way out ahead of the 2700X, sometimes double. Then AES-256 encryption favors the 2700X by a good amount.

Onboard Performance

Okay so just to be completely upfront here. The integrated GPU on the i9-9900K isn’t any different than on the 8086K, 8700K, or even the 7700K. They all have the Intel HD Graphics 630. It wasn’t amazing with the 7700k and that isn’t going to change with this launch. Not to mention that I don’t think anyone should be buying a high-end CPU only to use dedicated graphics, unless it is a workstation situation where you don’t need any gaming or GPU compute performance. That said I did still test the 9900K in our onboard GPU test suite, just to be thorough.

My first test was the Cinebench R15 OpenGL benchmark. Here the 9900K came within a few FPS of all three of the 630 based CPUs and with the Intel 5775C and both of the Raven Ridge CPU ahead.

In both 3DMark tests, the two Raven Ridge CPUs are WAY ahead but you can see that the 9900K is slowly catching up to the 5775C, most likely because of overall CPU power.

In Unigine Superposition the 630 based Intel CPUs are all grouped up and then again the 2400G is at nearly double that score.

The rest of my testing was taking a look at actual in game performance. This was across a range of games from the past as well as a few new games mixed in as well. What I found was onboard performance was good enough to play older games like F1 2013 and tomb raider with the FPS being in the 30 FPS range. Not smooth but playable. This should translate to games like LoL, CS:GO, and DOTA 2 that are all flexible to handle lower power computers being playable as well. Newer games like Wildlands, Far Cry 5, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, on the other hand, were all unplayable at 1080p, even at their lowest detail settings.

Power Usage and Temperatures

For some people, performance is all you have to worry about. But for some builds power usage and heat are a concern. Especially in smaller builds where there isn’t room for a full-sized power supply or traditional cooling. So let's take a look at how the 9900K did in our power and temperature testing. For the power testing, I had our test system hooked up to our Kill-A-Watt and ran three tests. The first was idle power usage, the 9900K did very well here, pulling 15 watts less than all of the Ryzen CPUs. Remember all of these results are for the entire system. Putting the 9000K under load I tested again, for a load I used wPrime to light up all 16 threads and the system pulled 239 watts. This is right up there with Intel’s Core-X CPUs and 64 watts higher than the 2700X. I then followed up that test by putting the CPU under load with the AIDA64 Stress Test, focusing on the FPU load. Here the 9900K was again up near the top of the charts with the Core-X CPUs, as it turns out cranking the clock speed up and packing 8 cores into a CPU can pull a lot of wattage.

My last test was temperature testing. Now, this test is done using AIDA64 again with that same FPU load. For cooling to keep things consistent all of the CPUs tested were tested with a Noctua NH-U12S and even with a higher core count and that 5 GHz turbo clock speed the 9900K didn’t really keep up, even with the 8086K and 8700K. Adding two more cores really adds to the heat. Now the soldered TIM does help I’m sure, without that I suspect it would be overheating. The end result was 89 degrees while under load for a half hour. The 2700X was in its own class here at 54 degrees with the same cooler.

Overall and Final Verdict

March 2nd, 2017, that is the day that Ryzen officially launched and I think anyone including Intel can admit that day and that launch has changed the PC market. Up until then higher core counts were limited to AMD's much slower bulldozer CPUs and Intel’s workstation focused Xeon lineup and to a lesser extent a few high-end CPUs on the X99 platform. When Ryzen launched Intel had the i7-6900K and the i7-6950X. The 6900K had 8 cores and retailed for $1089 and the 6950X had 10 cores and retailed for $1732. Now today we have an 8 core CPU on the Intel mainstream lineup and it even has a 5GHz turbo clock speed. What a crazy couple of years!

So the i9-9900K doesn’t exactly come completely unexpected. There have been rumors about this CPU for nearly as long as Ryzen has been around, but finally seeing it announced and getting it on the test bench is exciting. My main concern was would this response feel thrown together. The Z370 launch with the 8700K felt a little rushed, especially with the sudden chipset change without backward compatibility. But the 9900K feels a little more like Intel has had a little time to look at where they are at and hit back at AMD. This is still a Coffee Lake based CPU and it is still built on the 14nm process but that has been updated a second time to the 14nm++ process. What does this mean for CPUs? Well for starters Intel had to bring back soldered TIM to handle the additional heat that 8 cores can offer, especially to make thermal room for the 5 GHz turbo clock speed of the 9900K. Did that work? Well yeah, but they are really pushing the limits for the amount of heat in that small of a package. It was about 10 degrees hotter than the 8086K on our Noctua NH-U12S cooler, to really take advantage of the CPU I think water cooling is the only option. That also puts true small form factor builds out of the question unless they can fit a large air cooler or water cooling. But at that point, they aren’t that small.

Then when it came to performance I was curious how the mix of 8 cores/16 threads while also having a high turbo clock would work out. What I found was that the 9900K handled both highly threaded and single core focused workloads well. This isn’t normally the case, even with Intel’s high-end Core-X CPUs. I spent a lot of time focusing on the performance between the 9900K and the 2700X because they are both AMD and Intel’s top of the line mainstream focused CPUs (I will dive into the pricing here in a minute) and the 9900K is faster in every single one of our tests. The 16 and 18 core Core-X CPUs were faster than the 9900K in highly threaded tests still, but overall the 9900K is as fast as you can get in most situations. The 9900K even outperformed the Core-X 7900X in a lot of situations with its 10 cores. This was especially true for the gaming tests where the 9900K came in 24 FPS higher in Far Cry 5 and 63 FPS in TF2. Of course some of the others the gap was much smaller like the 6 FPS in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. But I think we can confirm Intel’s claim that this is the fastest gaming CPU on the market.

Intel has even attempted to make buying the i9-9900K an experience with their new 12 sided transparent blue packaging. This is following AMD's lead with their Threadripper packaging for the past two launches. I think a lot of people will look at it as a waste of money and it is. But there is something to be said about a little glitz and glamor when you open up your expensive hardware. It’s a lot less exciting when you spend a weeks pay on something and you won’t even be able to see it later when the cooler is installed. You can at least put this up on the shelf of your office if you want to show it off and I’m very sure we will see people building SFF PCs in the packaging.

The heatsink comment brings up another one of my concerns. So the 2700X is the closest competition to the i9-9900K and AMD provides a cooler with that CPU. In fact, it is a fairly capable cooler with lighting as well. But with the 9900K you don’t get a cooler at all. I’m not saying I would like Intel to include one of those extruded aluminum coolers that are only really capable of keeping basic CPUs cool. But not having a cooler does immediately add to the cost of the CPU. Coolers and motherboard pricing are what I would consider to be hidden costs. They can swing the overall cost of your build and picking your CPU locks you in on those. Luckily the i9-9900K will work on Z370 motherboards as well so that gives you a lot of cheaper options and Z390 has boards in the $125/$130 range so you aren’t going to have hidden costs as high as X399 and X299.

Okay, I’ve put it off long enough, its time we talk about pricing. With RAM pricing still out of this world, Nvidia’s recent launches, and now the i9-9900K it feels like building a high end but mainstream based PC is going to require a second job. So the price for the i9-9900K is a little confusing right now. Intel has their RCP or MSRP listed at $488 on their launch slideshow but looking at preorders available even the night before launch has the CPU available for $529.99 on Amazon and $579.99 from Newegg. On the other hand, the Ryzen 2700X is $304.99 on both retailers. We have established that the i9-9900K is extremely fast, but is it fast enough to justify that pricing? Honestly, even at the $488 price point, I don’t think it justifies its price and the prices the retails are currently charging should be considered price gouging. Now do I think there isn’t a market for the 9900K? Not at all, there are a surprising amount of people who don’t mind spending a lot of money to get the fastest hardware out there and the i9-9900K falls into that category. The same goes for spending $1200 on an RTX 2080 Ti, even at that price they are completely sold out.

So if the 9900K is out as a performance per dollar CPU do any of the other 9th Gen CPUs have a chance? Well, I reached out to Intel even at their event asking about getting the 9700K and 9600K in to see how they perform. Right now AMD seems to have the overall performance per dollar market cornered and Intel seems to be happy to take the high end. Especially now that they have a mainstream CPU with 8 cores for gamers who want to edit videos or stream. So my final verdict is that if you are made of money and want the fastest gaming PC you can build, pick the i9-9900K up and pair it with one or two RTX 2080 Ti’s and you are going to love your PC (maybe we need a Richie Rich award for hardware that is the best but is priced too high). If you actually have to worry about how much you spend and $488-$579 is going to be half or more of your PC budget then you might want to look for i7-9700K and i5-9600K benchmarks and see how they compare with what AMD has to offer right now.

Being the fastest gaming CPU, the i9-9900K is perfect for a budget out the window LAN rig. In fact, I think it will get paired with an RTX GPU in our orange In Win D-Frame build. Because of that, the 9900K does earn our editor’s choice award. Any hardware that goes into use after the review earns that. Check back with our end of year follow-up where I revisit all of our editor’s choice award winners to see if they worked out. Maybe by then, the pricing will have worked itself out. Just a reminder, this is an awesome CPU, but only if you can afford it. If Intel does any pricing corrections going into the holiday season the 2700X vs 9900K argument could change.

Live Pricing: HERE

**If you read our coverage this morning, it has been updated to reflect all new testing. I ran into a boost clock issue that reinstalling the same BIOS fixed that had our numbers being lower than they should including power and temperature results**