Intel Core i9-9900KS Review: The Fastest Gaming CPU Bar None

Cinebench 3D Rendering Benchmark

The Core i9-9900KS performed well in the Cinebench R20's multi-threaded test, where it nearly caught up to the 12-core Threadripper 2920X. Its high clocks weren't enough to make up for the 4-processor core deficit, however. Intel's new Core i9-9900KS led the pack in the single-threaded test though, outpacing the Ryzen 9-3900X by a small margin.

POV-Ray Performance Ray Tracing Benchmark

POV-Ray, or the Persistence of Vision Ray-Tracer, is an open source tool for creating realistically lit images. We tested with POV-Ray's standard 'one-CPU' and 'all-CPU' benchmarking tools on all of our test machines and recorded the scores reported for each. Results are measured in pixels-per-second throughput; higher scores equate to better performance.

 

The Core i9-9900KS looked even stronger in the POV-Ray benchmark. Here, the Core i9-9900KS not only offered the highest single-threaded performance, but its multi-threaded performance scales particularly well and the 8-core Intel processor is able to overtake the 12-core Threadripper 2920X.

Blender 3D Rendering Benchmark

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite that can handle everything from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation. It has a built-in benchmarking tool that will track the time it takes to complete rendering a particular model. We used a CPU-focused BMW model for these tests here...
The Core i9-9900KS was able to churn through the Blender workload about 12 seconds faster than the Core i9-9900K. In this test, however, the Core i9-9900KS’ higher-clocks weren’t enough to help it catch the Threadripper 2920X, but the delta separating the two processors is only about 6 seconds.

STARS Euler3d Computational Fluid Dynamics

STARS Euler3d is a computational fluid dynamics benchmark which uses a CFD grid that contains 1.23 million tetrahedral elements and 223 thousand nodes. The benchmark executable advances a mach 0.50 Advisory Group for Aerospace Research, or AGARD, flow solution for an aeroelastic test wing. The benchmark score is reported as a CFD cycle frequency in Hertz.

This benchmark is multi-threaded, but is also dependent on platform bandwidth, and cache and memory latency, so the final results are not determined by compute performance alone. Cache sizes and memory bandwidth affect the score as well...

Memory and cache bandwidth, latency, and CPU throughput all play a role in this benchmark. Although peak memory bandwidth is unchanged from the 9900K, since both parts officially support DDR4-2,666MHz, the Core i9-9900KS’ higher-clocks still help it considerably here. The Core i9-9900KS finishes about 13% ahead of the 9900K and overtakes all of the other processors we tested, save for the Ryzen 9-3900X and Core i9-9980XE. The higher memory latency penalty associated with Threadripper’s compute dies, which don’t have memory directly attached, really hurt it here. This is another test that will likely show vastly different results for Threadripper once the Zen 2-based 3000 series parts arrive in a few weeks.