Raptor Lake-R clocked at up to 6.2 GHz

For Intel’s last few generations of desktop processors, the company released a higher-clocked special edition SKU called KS, which the company positioned as the untethered performance portion of that generation’s processors. For the 14th generation Core series, Intel is keeping this tradition alive with the release of the Core i9-14900KS, which has been eagerly anticipated for months and is finally being released today. The Intel Core i9-14900KS is a special edition processor with P-Core Turbo clock speeds of up to 6.2 GHz, making it the fastest desktop processor in the world… at least as far as the advertised frequencies it can reach.

With its latest KS processors, Intel hopes to further push the limits of what’s possible with the company’s already-venerable Raptor Lake 8+16 chips. With top-end clock speeds increased by a further 200 MHz, Intel hopes to deliver unparalleled desktop performance to enthusiasts. In the meantime, since this is the fourth iteration of the “flagship” configuration of the RPL 8+16 chips, Intel is hoping to get even more speed boosts from the Alder/Raptor series to achieve even higher results later this year when the entire building starts to disappear. before sunset. To achieve this goal, Intel needed a lot of power and $689 in capital.

Intel Core i9-14900KS: 6.2 GHz P-Core Turbo for $689

Perhaps the last chip launched based on Intel’s Raptor Lake architecture (built using Intel’s 7th generation process) – Intel Core i9-14900KS, on paper, it is certainly not inferior. The Core i9-14900KS builds on the capabilities of the flagship Core i9-14900K and completes the Raptor Lake-R series with a P-Core Turbo frequency of up to 6.2 GHz, which is 200 MHz higher than the previous generation’s P-Core Turbo frequency. Core i9-14900K. It also has a slightly higher E-Core Turbo 4.5 GHz with a 100 MHz boost. Otherwise, it is the fundamental frequency of P core and E core.

Aside from clock speed, the Core i9-14900KS also has the same core/thread count as the Core i9-14900K. This is an 8P+16E chip that can support up to 32 threads. Everything else, including the 36 MB L3 cache and Intel UHD 770 integrated graphics, also remains unchanged.

As has been the case throughout the KS processor’s life, arguably its main advantage is that potential buyers don’t need to overclock the processor to achieve the 6.2 GHz P-core Turbo clock speed; Intel does all of this before taking it out of the box. This is the best of the best chips Intel has to offer, at least in terms of clock speed headroom. The Core i9-14900K is above the current 14th-generation Core series family stack in terms of clock speeds, but it also supplants it as the fastest out-of-the-box x86 processor available at retail.

However, these impressive clock speeds do come at the cost of power consumption. Intel’s base TDP rating for the Core i9-14900KS is 150 W, which is a 25 W increase over the Core i9-14900K. Meanwhile, PL1/PL2 turbo power is limited to 253 watts out of the box, and like the previous i9-13900KS, Intel is once again offering further “extreme” power profiles that raise these limits to 320 watts. Even so, enthusiast motherboards are likely to violate any and all power limits in the name of keeping clock speeds high and getting the highest possible performance from the chip, so the published 253W/320W figures are largely academic.

Case in point: In our review of Intel’s first 6.0 GHz processor, the Core i9-13900KS, we saw peak power values ​​of around 359 W in testing. By comparison, when testing the Core i9-14900K using the same power test, we saw a peak power of 375 W, well over the 253 W PL2 limit.

One factor to consider is the motherboard vendor and their MCE implementation, which will often provide the chip with more features than Intel specifies in the official specs to keep the motherboard ahead of the competition. Basically, the Core i9-14900KS is a “special tier” version of the regular Core i9-14900K, which means Intel is tiering or testing batches of chips that are capable of hitting 6.2 GHz P-Core Turbo clock speeds without encounter any problems. Serious error. Binning itself is a quality control process used to weed out less powerful chips from more powerful ones because they are not all functionally identical when the chips are manufactured.

Probably the biggest thing to consider with KS processors, including the latest Core i9-14900KS, is cooling. For optimal performance, users will want to employ state-of-the-art high-end cooling, such as a custom water cooling loop or even Intel’s (discontinued) cryogenic cooler. Interestingly, since Intel abandoned the development of Cryo cooling, EKWB has picked up the slack and offers an EK-Quantum Delta TEC D-RGB solution that certainly tames the Core i9-14900KS better than traditional AIO CPU coolers. Using more aggressive cooling methods should effectively allow users to hit the advertised 6.2 GHz core clock speed for a sustained period of time. It’s not easy to keep a processor cool at 375 W, let alone for an extended period of time, so users have to consider this.

All of this is why the Intel Core i9-14900KS 6.2 GHz P-Core Turbo state relies on the Intel Thermal Boost (TVB) feature; unless there’s enough thermal headroom, the top clock speed isn’t even achievable. Otherwise, users who can’t cool the chip sufficiently for maximum clock speeds may be limited to a true Turbo Boost Max 3.0 frequency of 5.9 GHz, just 100MHz above the 5.8 GHz limit of the Core i9-14900K and Core i9-14900KF processors.

Since Intel hasn’t given us samples of the Core i9-14900KS for release yet, the company has provided some expected performance figures from its internal testing. Comparing the latest Core i9-14900KS with the previous KS SKU Core i9-13900KS, in terms of gaming performance, Intel achieved a small improvement in some games, including a 3% performance increase in “Starfield” and “Starfield”. Performance improvement up to 15%. The subway leaves. Interestingly, Intel’s slides don’t compare performance to the current Core i9-14900K, which isn’t surprising. Still, it’s helpful to know how the extra 200 MHz on the P-core turbo frequency affects actual performance. It’s also worth noting that Intel is using its application optimization software to boost these gains, as Intel itself claims that in Metro Exodus, frame rate performance actually improved by about 11%.

In terms of computing performance, Intel compared the Core i9-14900KS directly to AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X and posted performance improvements across a variety of workloads and applications. In the UL Procyon Office benchmark, Intel saw a 5% improvement over the Ryzen 9 7950X, while in CineBench 2024’s single-threaded test it claimed a 16% improvement, which is likely to improve for single-threaded workloads given the 6.2 GHz core clock speed. View Maximum benefit to performance.

In terms of motherboard support, the Intel Core i9-14900KS is compatible with Z690 and Z790 chipsets, and also supports DDR5 and DDR4 memory types. As was the case with the previous generation i9-13900KS, this is primarily driven by power requirements – KS chips require a lot of power, and non-enthusiast motherboards rarely have the ability to deliver that power as they do with more mid-range chips. As the power requirements of KS chips increase, the Z690 and Z790 series motherboards are also more suitable for the larger and more powerful power delivery of such processors as well as more optimized power delivery heat sinks.

The Intel Core i9-14900KS is available now at PC component retailers, with Intel’s suggested retail price of $689. Interestingly, that’s $10 less than the previously launched Core i9-13900KS processor, so the price of Intel’s flagship desktop CPUs is slowly dropping over time. Unfortunately, as with previous iterations of KS processors, Intel hasn’t yet made it clear how many Core i9-14900KS processors it will make available for purchase or how many it plans to manufacture. However, a year later, the Core i9-13900KS is still available on Amazon for $640.