TheOverclocker Issue 45 Alternate Cover | Page 6

F E A T U R E // T H E I N T E L 9 T H G E N E R A T I O N C O R E E X P E R I E N C E The Intel 9th Generation Core Experience H ere we are again, another milestone, another generation and one more time where Intel can rightfully claim to have made the fastest desktop CPU in history. Don’t look at this as a review, but rather a celebration of the undisputed desktop e m e le de the Core i9 9900K. de te m it actually about all three available 9th generation Core CPUs As always e e , the light shines brightest on the mightiest of them all, the tel Core i9 9900K. There’s not much technically I can tell you about this CPU you’ve not already read elsewhere. There isn’t even much I can tell you about how this CPU performs outside of the benchmarks you’ve already seen and the ones you’ll see here in the pages that follow. To say to you that this particular CPU and perhaps this generation offers the highest performance levels for gaming and mainstream computing needs would be wasteful. The 8th generation Core CPUs were providing that already and so too did the 7th generation Core CPUs. To only focus on that and evaluate the CPUs based purely on this would be a waste I believe. Regardless of how consumers, media or anyone else may feel about these CPUs, the reality is that these are complex pieces of silicon and what we have today is new. Be it 10% or 100% new, we are where we have never been before and that alone is e iti . Since this is TheOverclocker, our primary concern with this new generation of CPUs is the overclocking credentials. In as far as that is concerned, these CPUs have the 06 The OverClocker Issue 45 | 2018 minerals to go the distance with the best of them and e in fact better at this than any i generation tel . Something one reads on forums, message boards and of course in the comments section of YouTube videos is that the 2nd generation Core CPUs based on the Sandy Bridge ite t e were the best overclockers. I’m not of that mind, even though I will admit and concede that they were much easier to overclock than any family of CPUs before and after. However, overclocking isn’t just a high CPU internal clock, it is tied to performance inherently. Simply having a high clock while impressive wouldn’t be much of a competition, as it’s literally a CPU-Z validation. After all, even the highest CPU frequency recorded on HWBOT is over 8GHz and that came about m y years ago. The CPU which achieved that was anything but performant hat 8GHz even if it were by some magic operational e t le e y would deliver the computational power of a 4GHz modern day CPU i t le , especially if you are talking about the 9th generation Co e . So what we or rather I am interested in is not just high clock frequencies but performance at those frequencies as well and this is where the 9th