Intel Core i9-9900K's leaked Cinebench score shows strong multi-core performance at 5 GHz

The upcoming 'Coffee Lake-S Refresh' Intel Core i9-9900K had its fair share of leaks over the past few months and apparently, some reviewers have managed to get their hands on engineering samples. Lau Kin Lam of HKEPC has posted a YouTube video of a Cinebench R15 multi-core run of the Core i9-9900K, which shows an impressive score of 2166 on an all-core clock of 5 GHz. There was no single-core benchmark shown, however.

The Core i9-9900K is already known to boost to 4.7 GHz on all cores so achieving 5 GHz should not be too difficult when combined with the Z390 motherboards and a proper cooling solution. The Core i9-9900K and the Core i7-9700K seem to be highly overclocker-friendly as they now sport STIMs, which helps in better heat conductivity than thermal paste. This was also recently confirmed by a photo posted by XFastest showing a completely de-lidded Core i9-9900K. 

With such high boosts, and possibly lower memory latencies, the Core i9-9900K beating the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X is not too much of a surprise. For perspective, the Ryzen 7 2700X scored 1801 points in Cinbench R15 multi on stock and was shown to score around 1900 points when overclocked to 4.3 GHz on all cores. 

We expect Intel to announce the new 'Coffee Lake-S Refresh' CPUs sometime in October but expect more leaks in the run-up to the official release. The real question, however, is whether AMD would be looking to retaliate in some way or the other. Rumors of a 10-core 20-thread Ryzen 7 2800X have been doing the rounds but it is highly likely that AMD will save the best for the upcoming 7nm Zen 2 in 2019.