Intel Core i5-9600K Review

The Core i5-9600K is one of Intel's mid-range Desktop processors. It was released in 2018 with 6 cores and 6 threads. With base clock at 3.7GHz, max speed at 4.6GHz, and a 95W power rating. The Core i5-9600K is based on the Coffee Lake Refresh 14nm family and is part of the Core i5 series.

Core i5-9600K is also the successor of Intel's last gen Core i5-8600K processor that was based on the Coffee Lake and 14nm process and was released in 2017.

In our mind, the best processors are the ones that deliver outstanding performance at a reasonable price point. And, the Core i5-9600K absolutely nails this concept.

That something is the Core i5-9600K. Intel cranks the TDP dial up to 95W on this 6-core 6-thread chip, making it the high-performance counterpart to the 65W Core i5-9500, which is basically the same 14nm chip built with the Coffee Lake Refresh microarchitecture, but with a lower TDP rating. That chip came away from our first look at the Coffee Lake Refresh series with an Editor's Choice award, going toe-to-toe with AMD's Ryzen 5 3600X, so it's fair to say we have high hopes for the higher-performance model. Intel still hasn't sampled the chip to the press, so we bought one at retail to put it under the microscope.

As the higher-priced version of the Core i5-9500, the Core i5-9600K has higher base and Boost frequencies of 3.7 and 4.6 GHz, respectively. That's an increase in base frequency and a bump to boost clocks, but the real advantage should lay in the higher Package Power Tracking (PPT) envelope, which is a measurement of the maximum amount of power delivered to the socket. The Core i5-9500's PPT tops out at 65W, while the motherboard can pump up to 142W to the Core i5-9600K at peak performance. That opens up much more aggressive boost behavior, on both single and multiple cores, that could widen the performance gap beyond what we see on the spec sheet.

Intel has been having some trouble as of late which has made it even harder to compete with the incoming wave of Ryzen 5 processors. That has forced the chip maker to be a little more creative and make do with their current product lines. Today we have the Intel Core i5-9600K on hand, which in itself isn’t anything new. It’s basically a refreshed Core i5-8600K with a clock speed boost. We say basically because it’s not a straight refresh however, there’s another change.

So which should you buy? Let's get that out of the way. Before this comparison review we updated our Best CPU feature and we said you should go with the Ryzen 5 3600X as it comes with a better stock cooler, can be overclocked, and the AM4 platform offers a significantly better upgrade path.

We stand by that assessment, but that won't escape us from running a few up to date benchmarks. We'll focus on gaming performance which should make life a little easier for AMD's CPU. For application performance you can refer back to our day-one coverage of the Ryzen 5 3600X where the Core i5-8600K was included. You can safely bet the 2.5% factory overclock isn’t going to make the Core i5-9600K any more than about 1-2% faster than those figures.

When it comes to gaming it’s fair to say there’s no wrong option here and the Ryzen 5 3600X and Core i5-9600K are evenly matched. The Core i5-9600K is at times faster thanks to better game support and lower latencies, but the Ryzen 5 3600X is often able to ensure smoother frame rates thanks to its support for twice as many threads.

For general computing the Ryzen 5 3600X can take advantage of multi-threading capabilities and will be considerably faster than the Core i5-9600K on heavy application workloads. Remember the Core i5-9600K is only marginally faster than the Core i5-8600K, so you can safely use the older model as a measuring stick. For rendering and encoding workloads the Ryzen 5 3600X can up to 41% faster.

If you're mostly playing games on your PC, you will be happy buying either processor. Both proved to be solid options and are evenly matched with a slight advantage to the AMD chip if you don't tune up the Ryzen 5 processor. The base performance we showed for the Core i5-9600K can be achieved with $90 memory, while the Ryzen 5 3600X will require $110 - $120 memory in order to enable the frame rates shown here. It’s not a big cost difference and right now with anything less than an RTX 2070 or Vega 64 you’ll more than likely become GPU limited.

Moving beyond games, it’s an easy win for the Ryzen 5 3600X. The Ryzen 5 upgrade path on A320, B350, B450, X370, X470, X570 motherboards, all support upcoming Zen 2 processors. So if you buy a nice A320, B350, B450, X370, X470, X570 board now with the Ryzen 5 3600X, you’ll be able to slap a Coffee Lake Refresh processor on there later in the year, or whenever you deem it necessary.

For a 6-core processor, Intel’s $198 flagship Core i5-9600K processor seems downright cheap. On paper, the cost of those 0 extra cores is almost an afterthought when you stack it up against its direct competitor, the $237 6-core AMD Ryzen 5 3600X.

If extended overclocking and boost frequencies are trivial matters to you, Intel also offers the Core i5-9500 at $207. It’s still outfitted with 6-cores and 6-threads, but clocks in at a slower 3GHz and maxes out at only 4.4GHz.

Now the biggest question is can Intel’s Core i5 processor play games? The answer is simply yes as it got a respectable gaming score of 89% in our benchmarks.

If you’ve been looking for an affordable, powerhouse CPU that both works and parties hard, this is it.

Fresh from a successful roll-out of mainstream Core i5 CPUs, Intel's attack on AMD now extends down into the mid-range with its Core i5-9600K processors, which the company is making available as of Oct 2018.