TECH NEWS – It’s more common for workstation (server) processors to consume a lot of watts at peak performance, but we’re talking about a traditional desktop CPU!

OCCT has leaked the performance of the Intel Core i9-14900KS. This one has 24 cores and 32 threads (8 P/performance and 16 E/efficiency cores, the former with hyperthreading, so 8×2 + 16 threads), with 36 MB L3 and 32 MB L2 cache. The base clock speed is 3.2 GHz, but it is overclocked to 6.2 GHz, making it the fastest processor ever, as the i9-14900K and i9-13900KS both had a 6 GHz ceiling.

But the higher frequency means higher power consumption. The base TDP (PL1) is also 150W (125W for the i9-14900K!), on average it’s 330W under load, and in the benchmark test the i9-14900KS consumption shot up to 410W! That’s enough to power an older computer (a more energy-efficient Ryzen processor and a GeForce GTX 1660 Super together don’t add up to 300W!) In addition, the temperature results are frightening: the chip reached 101°C, while the maximum frequency of all P-cores was 5.9 GHz.

It is not known what kind of cooling system was used for the processor, but it is known that the CPU was on a MSI MAG Z790 Tomahawk WiFi motherboard with 32 GB of DDR5 memory. It’s safe to say that an i9 processor needs a good liquid cooling system, otherwise it will quickly overheat and lead to performance degradation. The release date for the processor may not be too far away (Intel has not said when it will be available), and since they are asking $589 for the i9-14900K, you will probably have to pay $800 for the i9-14900KS.

However, the 400W peak power consumption is really on par with the Intel Xeon and AMD Epyc product lines. But these are multi-core, low clock speed server processors! They are not hardware tailored to our budget and configuration (the motherboard size is not usually the traditional ATX standard either…).

Source: WCCFTech, OCCT