Intel's PRE-OVERCLOCKED CPU... Core i9 9900KS

it used to be that overclocking the processor in your computer was kind of like a dark art black magic it involved moving around dip switches and jumpers on your motherboard or replacing crystals so that the cpu might run at as much as double the frequency that the manufacturer intended giving you effectively double the performance and all you have to pay is a little bit of your time now naturally manufacturers for a long time fought against that they don't want you to have something for free they want you to pay for it but enthusiasm for overclocking grew and manufacturers from asus to gigabyte to amd to intel embraced it culminating in what we've got here in front of us today this is a custom system and i'm assured it is one heck of an experience to unbox it from digital storm that contains what i consider to be an intel first a pre pre-overclocked processor this is the core i9 9900 ks and oh if the system inside i can't even lift this is anything to go by it's going to be one heck of a beast let's open it down here shall we this video is brought to you by glasswire with glassware you can instantly see your current and past network activity allowing you to detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your pc or android device use offer code linus to get 25 off glassware at the link below [Music] so let's begin this video with what the 9900 ks is not i was being a little bit facetious before it is not actually just an overclocked 9900k it is in fact new silicon that aside from allowing intel to apparently reach higher clock speeds so it runs at 4 gigahertz base and 5 gigahertz all core boost the first time we have ever seen that in a mass mass-market cpu it also contains new hardware mitigations for some of the vulnerabilities that have affected intel cpus over the last couple of years now should i open this brown box before i go any further you know what let's open this what even is this oh my god that is the cutest little pelican case is that not adorable oh interesting wait a second they just took the sleeve on the outside of the packaging fold it up and put it in here oh and also the cpu so digital storm has done something pretty special with our 9900 ks they have actually provided it to us factory lapped so lapping is a technique whereby sanding and very very evenly flattening out the cpu by removing the top layer of it you can get ever so slightly better contact between your cooler and your processor improving its thermal transfer and therefore it's overclocking performance all right i guess we get to install the cpu ourselves okay i got a little bit sidetracked there so back to what i was talking about before yes this is technically new silicon but it's not on a new manufacturing process and it's not fundamentally architecturally way different so in order to hit these kinds of all core boost speeds it's not like intel didn't have to make some concessions compared to their normal mainstream consumer cpus which are rated at a tdp of around 95 watts this one is a whopping 127 watts and also because presumably every chip is not going to hit these kinds of ludicrous speeds the price for it is quite dear at around 513 us dollars recommended retail price um andy do you mind giving me a hand with this thing it is possibly the heaviest computer that i have ever encountered one two three don't blow out your sphincter okay you good yeah my hands are good okay all right they have promised me this is something very special and i will now be sharing it with you because i have not yet seen it so i really hope it's not something totally lame and we went and built up to this throughout the entire video okay get out from under there and one two three oh no way oh that's cool that looks freaking awesome now it's time to turn it around and have a look at the other side oh all right this side will need some work i mean by the time your computer weighs 200 pounds what's another five pounds of packing foam right orange coolant very interesting [Music] oh okay anyway let's have a look at what's in the accessory box okay in a big surprise to no one this one is full of accessories power supply cables and the like i'm really hoping there's a cpu block in the other one hey there it is look at that they even pre-filled the tubes for me were they afraid i would have dropped it or something otherwise so for those not familiar these are quick connect fittings and these are some particularly fancy ones these are super cool because what they allow you to do is without losing more than about the moisture that would be on this piece of metal right here you can take pre-filled so this is not colored coolant this is full of water see that bubble moving around in it they allow you to take pre-filled tubing and just connect it and actually the pressure drop over a high quality quick connect fitting is surprisingly little now it is there but considering the digital storm configured this thing with only the cpu water cooled anyway um we ain't that concerned fam as the kids say the kids say that right not for a couple years yeah all right one not idiot proof thing seems to be that i don't know which way the coolant is going to flow and our cpu block is directional so that needs to be the inlet and that needs to be the outlet so what i might do is just do a quick uh quick test and see which way it goes all right there's a 50 50 shot let's see if we got it right hey got him all right now for the moment y'all have been waiting for this is as fast as it gets it's got some thermal goop there it's fine but i used the inside of this pocket on my ltt stealth hoodie lttstore.com oh shoot i just realized we've got a problem here that's dual rtx 2080 tis and this is just a 1440p monitor oh there we go 4k 144 hertz g-sync now we cooking with fire oh that's cool this is new since the last time i checked out one of their systems check this out we've got a little display over here with our coolant temperatures and digital storm's just like tubing that's for plebs so they're using hard acrylic i don't know what i would call it it's not tubing it's fluid routing here here and then all over the back of the system here is this gigantic coolant distribution block what's really cool he did it um is that those two that are a loop on the other side you could easily use those to tie gpus into your cooling loop in the future if you so desired you know what i couldn't quite oh yeah that's another dual 140 millimeter radiator i love this we're literally idling below the minimum temperature that it can display it's great there's no doubt in our minds that the 9900 ks is fast but we wanted to quantify it of course so we grabbed a regular 9900k installed all of our test games and benchmarks and all that good stuff and ran both the regular k and the ks through our suite to determine well at a higher price is it worth it and the difference in performance in many cases was not huge but something that's really interesting is that compared to getting one of those pre-overclocked 9900ks from somewhere like siliconlottery.com is the cost for a 9900 ks that runs 5 gigahertz all core boost compared to a regular k that's looking lottery validated at 5 gigahertz all core boost is actually lower and that's pretty impressive considering that in the past silicon lottery told us that only about 30 of 9900 ks are capable of reaching that mark but back to what i was talking about at the beginning of this video about how overclocking is kind of dead because intel is effectively shipping a pre-overclocked cpu does that mean that there's more headroom let's go ahead and see if we can push it any further let's try doing this the simple way i'm going to key in 51 into my cpu ratio which should give us a boost frequency of 5.1 gigahertz on all cores and if the conventional overclocking wisdom holds we should be able to push a processor by what does that work out to like three percent without making any adjustments to system voltage or anything like that wow we made it and that might not seem impressive oops in a bench with a two percent overclock but the thing is when we ran our blender tests before we were looking at mid to high 80 degree temps on our cpu and that's in spite of this wicked cooling system because it's not about the radiator's capability to move heat out of the water and into the surrounding environment it's more about just how dense and tiny that heat generation is on the cpu die itself so let's try another two percent overclock shall we now we're trying to boot at 5.2 gigahertz and what's interesting is that even at 5.1 the value proposition of this chip starts to become much more interesting because while i certainly wouldn't necessarily recommend paying this much for it silicon lottery puts the value of a 5.1 gigahertz validated 9900k at about 900 us dollars considering how few of them can get there whereas if you buy a chip that was five gigahertz in the first place a two percent overclock doesn't seem like as much to ask and in fact we're booted into windows now at a whomping 5.2 gigahertz which to my knowledge silicon lottery doesn't even offer with that said we have no idea if this is stable and i suspect it probably isn't wow i'm actually pretty surprised we completed that run um i honestly wasn't expecting to get this far maybe we should do a blender run 96 degrees on core number two dang and with how much radio it froze attempt number two this time we bumped the voltage a little bit to 1.35 volts and i am not necessarily expecting this to work but then i haven't really been expecting any of this to work so and we're done is as high as we can go without applying an avx offset then which is kind of cheating in this case because as soon as you're applying evx offsets well now it's an apples to oranges comparison because that's basically a way of telling the cpu okay well in certain very demanding workloads you can turn the frequency down you might get a little bit more gaming performance but i suspect there's not a lot of headroom there which is i guess entirely the point of this video intel went and released something very unusual for them a cpu that is basically already absolutely screaming at the limits of what the architecture can handle we got a two percent overclock out of this thing and we were already thermally constrained in spite of the fact that we've got an enthusiast class system including very high-end cooling built around the thing now with that said that doesn't mean that the product is necessarily pointless because instead of paying 900 for something that i would suspect you'd have pretty good odds here runs at 5.1 gigahertz on my high-end cooling system i mean those guys were gonna spend a bunch of money on the cooling system anyway i'm spending well a little over 500 on something that runs 5.1 gigahertz as long as i've got the cooling system for it because that's the big gotcha with this chip if you guys are looking to get a 9900 ks don't assume that like intel's other stock speed you know normal operation chips you can just throw whatever cooler you want on it you're going to need a beefy cooler in order to get the best performance out of it so this chip won't be winning any bang for the buck awards but at the high end that wasn't the expectation and as an enthusiast product it actually looks not bad so thanks intel for sending it over for us to check out and especially thanks digitalstorm for providing us with what has to be the absolute sickest cpu test bench we have ever had the pleasure of using like this thing is absolutely unreal between the rgb lighting the insane cooling system the ease with which we were able to get everything up and running and liquid cooled these guys absolutely know what the heck they're doing so they didn't sponsor the video or anything but like massive shout out to them for sending over such a cool showpiece for us to put our 9900ks in we'll link those guys below speaking of sponsored though this video is brought to you by squarespace squarespace is the easy-to-use all-in-one website building platform that has a ton of great templates so no matter what kind of project you're trying to tackle squarespace has got you covered and it's easy to use if you need additional help squarespace offers webinars a full series of help guides and you can even contact their 24 7 customer support via live chat and email if you've got a third-party domain it's easy to transfer over to squarespace and squarespace has e-commerce built-in so you can manage your orders and your inventory directly through your squarespace store so check it out at squarespace.com forward slash ltt we're going to have that linked below and get 10 off your first purchase using squarespace so thanks for watching guys if you like this video maybe check out our recent video taking like a 5 000 dream machine from 11 years ago for a test drive we're gonna have that linked below as well

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,594,181

Keywords: intel, cpu, workstation, gaming, digital storm, aventum, custom, water cooling, custom loop, liquid cooling, lapped, performance, benchmarks, core i9, 9900KS, overview

Id: zbEf5aOiY2Y

Length: 15min 30sec (930 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 18 2019