AMD has had a firm grip on the ‘Best Gaming Processor’ title in our best processor buy guide for some time, with its hugely popular Ryzen 7 7800X3D processor. Right now, Intel can’t compete with AMD’s 3D V-Cache, so it’s come up with a new trick with its ultra-fast Core i9 14900KS: This should be the best processor for both gaming and “creativity,” that is, good. Performance in games and multi-threaded workloads. Is there anything in that?

S for special edition

In recent years, Intel has made it a tradition to release an additional “special edition” of its premium model a few months after introducing its regular desktop lineup. The upper form usually ends with the letter K, referring to the freely adjustable multiplier, so for the special variant it becomes KS. In 2019 i9 9900KS The first example of this. Three generations later, this evolution has been picked up again with the i9 12900KS and last year we tested the i9 13900KS.

In that time, Intel has always managed to take the performance crown in gaming, with or without marginal differences. Now it seems difficult to do this with conviction. Therefore, the “fastest gaming processor” claim has been replaced with the “best processor for gaming and content creation” claim.

Differences with the “regular” Core i9 14900K.

In fact, the Core i9 14900KS is identical to the existing Core 14900K in many ways, the only difference being clock speeds. In Turbo mode, it can increase slightly over the regular model: P-cores up to 6.2 GHz instead of 6.0 GHz and E-cores up to 4.5 GHz instead of 4.4 GHz. If all the P cores are loaded simultaneously, a full-core turbo of 5.9GHz will be applied to the P cores. Just like single-core turbo, this is 0.2GHz higher than the regular 14900K.

However, the 14900K was already known to be a very high power consumption chip, and these higher clock frequencies clearly don’t make this any better. officially Maximum turbo power The 14900KS is the same as the 14900K, i.e. 253W, but if your cooling system and motherboard can handle that, you can use the Ultra Power Delivery Profile. The power limit has been increased from 253W to 320W, and ICCMax (maximum current) from 307A to 400A.

The recommended retail price for the Intel Core i9 14900KS is €739, but it can now be found for slightly less at Pricewatch. In practical terms, it is about 100 euros more expensive than the regular 14,900K.

Overclocking? Intel has already done that for you

However, even 320W of Ultra Power Delivery profile is not enough for the i9 14900KS. With a heavy workload on all cores, the cores continue to bottleneck a bit. If you remove the power limits completely, as some high-end motherboards do on their own, the processor easily exceeds 400W.

Such high power consumption is practically uncoolable on the surface of the LGA1700 processor, even if we use dedicated water cooling with a 360 mm cooler. We completely removed the throttling in this scenario by manually increasing the temperature limit to 115°C. In practice, the processor temperature then reached approximately 107 degrees Celsius, and more than 1.4 volts passed through the processor.

Clearly, we were now maneuvering on the edge of what was possible. Moreover, the processor was not entirely stable: during prolonged loading of all cores, the CPU sometimes continued to crash, or the performance dropped to a level that made it clear that something was wrong in the background. We tested two samples to verify that this was not an unfortunate trait in our sample specifically, which is partly why our review took a little longer.

In the end, we tested the 14900KS on its Extreme profile, which made it quite stable and temperatures remained fairly acceptable.