Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Is Intel’s BLAZING FAST i9 13900KS REALLY Worth It for Gaming?”.
Foreign KS, almost a stealth, release a rushed release. They’Ve cut some Corners they’ve made some mistakes. Even the Intel Arc website has some some oopsies we’ll talk about that. 3. 900 KS. This is a legend in the making because it’s six gigahertz out of the box, but this reminds me of a launch from very nearly 20 years ago, the Intel Pentium 4. They released a real hot, real, fast, Pentium 4. It was record-breaking, then six gigahertz out of the box – that’s record-breaking now, but I think there’s a little bit more to the story. So if you ordered the 3900 KS the millisecond, it was available thanks, python script, robots! That’S! This is pretty much your unboxing experience, foreign there’s really not much to it.
You know it’s plastic core I9. This box looks the same. They they slapped a special edition sticker on it and boom. That’S pretty much it.
Okay, we’re gon na do something fun. We’Re gon na do a build for the one percent seven hundred dollars right here by the way, which is quite an upgrade in price over the I9. Maybe Intel is going to do a Stealth price increase where you can only buy the ks. You can’t buy the I9 anymore and it’s just 200 more anyway, if we’re doing a one percent build. Of course it’s going to feature the Nvidia 4090, because there is literally nothing faster, there’s, also nothing. It uses more electricity so to support that.
I’M going to go with the fsp group, Hydro PTM Pro now. This has the extra pcie5 connector on it. These just came back in stock, so they can’t make them fast enough. Fsb group has a well-known name for itself: good reputation, I should say in the server Market, server power supply market, and so this is fsp groups. Engineering for the server Market, distilled down into desktop PC power supplies, 1200. Watts.
1200 watts is overkill for just a single GPU system. This is more like something I would use in. Some of my higher end builds and in fact I do use this in the higher end build, but this this dongle cable thing is utterly ridiculous. I don’t like this, but if you’re gon na deal with this kind of a power connector on your GPU, because there’s not a lot of other options, this power supply has the connector for that built in as I’ve shown in other videos for the rest of our Build we’re going with the MSI z790 Godlike why the MSI z790 God like, because this is obviously a motherboard for the one percent build it comes with a cool little LCD screen.
It says a bunch of stuff on it has built-in 10 gigabit Ethernet. There is a lot to like here about this motherboard for the absolute maximum highest end. Now you could go for the 0.1 percent build which would include custom Loop, cooling. I’Ve instead opted for the the MSI aceitec partnership – 360 millimeter cooler with a built-in LCD screen.
That’S got the bling, but a second runner-up that I would mention is also the Arctic liquid freezer 2, that I’ve reviewed previously the 420 millimeter version. 420 millimeters is the larger cooling area and we really do need that for the 13900 KS. So if you look at the Intel Arc page for this processor, you can see that it does actually have some significant upgrade trades over to the 13900 for one, the e-cores, the efficiency cores their base, clock and boost clock is higher.
We’Ve also got a little bit more wattage. It’S not listed on the arc page, but 320 watts is an option. Some other board vendors are building that option directly into BIOS, where you can just pick the 320 watt profile, which means that you need enough cooling to be able to handle that, and you know, sort of d-litting and direct dye, Cooling and stuff like that makes sense. Again, that’s maybe more on the 0.1 percent side for memory we have G skill, Trident Z, 7200. I’Ve reviewed that separately as well.
That makes perfect sense for this, build which you’ll see in just a minute. I’Ve opted to use the mesh Phi 2 white from fractal. Now you can pick a higher end case, I like to Define cases for noise dampening, but for airflow, this one’s hard to beat unless you go with the torrent or another case from you know whatever you like for cases, but I like this, oh yeah. What are you using for storage in a one percent? Build? I’M glad you asked this? Is the Intel optane p5800x? It’S about sixteen hundred dollars for 800 gigabytes or several thousand dollars if you enter the multi-terabyte range, but I’ve got two P 5800 X’s here they are unmatched, they’re PCI Express 4 in terms of latency and throughput they’re Enterprise grade nvme and they do need cooling.
I’Ve got two of them on an X8 pcie add-in card, but I’m only going to run one at PCI Express by four in this configuration, because I want my GPU to have all 16 lanes for these benchmarks that we’re doing now. As we look at the benchmarks, with the out of the box, configuration again from the overclock to ddr5 two sticks of memory at 7200, plus our six gigahertz thermal velocity boost now really real world, that’s more like 5.8 gigahertz, and our game boost is really more on The order of like 5.6 – so that’s a very modest gains over the 13900k for real world gaming, and so you might expect that the benchmarks, especially around 1080p with the 4090, are not dramatically different. And yet, as we see here and here with our game benchmarks, the performance is actually quite a bit higher 3900 KS secretly the star of the show. No, it’s actually our G skill memory, our ddr5 7200.
I mean, with this platform, we’re talking about a maximum theoretical memory bandwidth with the overclock of just about 100 gigabytes per second theoretical in real world, we’re seeing north of 70 gigabytes per second with this memory kit, which is substantial for games that are limited by this Round trip between system memory, pcie peripherals and the CPU sort of the triumvirate of high frame rate gaming, then yeah. This performance uplift really is breathtaking, but it’s not really the 13900 KS. That’S enabling that it’s the better memory controller, maybe theoretically silicon Lottery. You know because it’s still technically an overclock, we look at ARC here. The ddr5 performance numbers aren’t really any better. It’S like okay, this is what it supports. So 7200 is definitely an overclock. It also depends on your board. You have to get the highest in board. Eight or more PCB layers there’s a whole lot of dependencies that go into being able to run the thing at full memory. Speed. The good news is that you don’t necessarily have to dump 300 watts of power into the CPU.
I mean sure that’s kind of cool for your all core sustained. You know: 16 efficiency, cores eight performance cores number and you get some pretty cool stuff in the Benchmark, but for gaming those efficiency cores generally don’t really make a huge difference. The difference they make is that they run interference for all the crap going on. In the background, the game can get all the performance cores and all the crap you got going on in the background with Discord and capture – and you know whatever else those can live on efficiency cores and that will help your one percent lows: that’ll help everything else.
Assuming that the windows scheduler can get everything correct, which you know from game to game, doesn’t always do it, I mean here we are. I don’t want to call this three generations later, but here we are three generations later and Far Cry 6 still struggles with these efficiency cores from run to run, there’s a lot of variation when you actually play the game. Okay, admittedly, it’s not as bad as it was, but it’s not as good as I would expect it to be in terms of the uplift from the K to the ks and and everything in between. So then I got to thinking what’s the real MVP here.
What if we put that 7200 memory into the 13900k, that is actually where you should spend your money first, so these one percent builds sort of give us a clue, it’s like! Where, should you spend your money? What do you do if you, you know, are looking for the biggest bang for your buck, but still at that upper echelona system I mean just because you’re a one percenter, it doesn’t mean that you became a one percenter by spending all your money on the best Thing that’s absolutely available and then you can actually step down to the i7. The i7 can’t you buy like two of these for the price of the the I9 3900 KS yeah yeah you can and for gaming it doesn’t matter it doesn’t. Even if you’re doing this 1080p stuff now I’ll also give you the rant which is related to this, which is, if you’re buying a 40 90 and a 3900 KS and you’re still gaming at 1080p. That’S a little odd. There are a couple of people that made a case for that on the level one Forum, but it’s sort of unusual and when you step up to 1440p or 4K, there is functionally no difference even between an i7 and the 13900 KS. When you keep the memory the same and the performance of everything else in the system, the same mostly it’s, okay, three and a half percent variation worst case scenario, but real world I think, is actually less than that. I get why Intel didn’t really sample anybody for the 3900 KS, meaning that they sent them to reviewers ahead of time, because even at six gigahertz, even with the bump in e-cores functionally there’s not a lot of difference between the 3900k and the 3900ks. But also, it sure seems like the 12700k, which is also very close in performance to the 13700k.
Although the 13700k is better again, you know in that five percent range. It looks like the the 12th gen has become more expensive from intel if you’re buying those versus the 13th gen, so are they phasing? Those out has production ended? Is that perfectly normal in the supply chain? Probably, but it’s something to watch and then there are. There are also competitive parts from other vendors also available in the market, because maybe you want to build a team red system and maybe that’s an option and blah blah blah you’re not going to enjoy ddr5 7200 on a team red system. So, depending on what your gaming goals are, maybe that’s important to you, but for 1440p and 4K gaming, the memory speed between six thousand and seventy two hundred doesn’t make a huge difference.
It’S really interesting that we look at the ks and say: oh the thing that benefits the ks. The most is. Maybe you have a slightly higher chance of getting better silicon for the memory controller more than the six gigahertz clock speed more than everything else. It’S important to understand that that six gigahertz boost is really a thermal velocity boost, which means that it’s only going to do it opportunistically if you roasted team red for their.
You know fleeting boosts a generation ago, you’re going to experience basically the same thing on this team blue part for those six gigahertz thermal velocity boost, but you do get some. You know that aside, you do get some solid gains in terms of the the e-core Boost and then maybe a little bit higher gain clocks and a little bit higher everything else I mean the Silicon really has been, and it is a little better quality silicon for Those things, but I get why there wasn’t a lot of fanfare and whether this is level one there’s been a quick look at the 3900 KS, I’m signing out. You can find me in the level one forums .