Intel Core i9-9900K and ASUS Z390 Strix-E Review

Test Setup

Intel Core i9-9900K
ASUS Z390 Strix-E Gaming
Corsair LPX 4000MHz
Corsair LPX 3200MHz
Corsair MP500 M.2
nVidia GTX 980
Corsair HX1000i
Corsair H110i GT
Corsair ML Fans

 

Overclocking

At stock the i9-9900K still runs at a meaty 4.7 GHz, which is pretty special for an eight core, sixteen thread CPU. Of course we’re here to try and do a little better than that, so after a poke around in the UEFI…

  

Overclocking the i9-9900K is as easy as all Intel overclocking, especially as this is a revision of a processor style – Coffee Lake – with which we are familiar. Having 8 cores to overclock necessitates a mental recalculation if you’re used to the heights of a quad core i7. It’s better to think of the i9-9900K as closer to the X299 or Ryzen 7 models, where the huge core count meant that very little clock speed could be gained. The i9-9900K still manages to easily hit the 5 GHz mark, far ahead of those other eight core models. So it might not be the 5.2 or 5.3 GHz overclock that you would expect from mainstream Intel CPUs, but it’s still massively impressive when compared to the competition.