“Special Edition” processors are curious products. Intel, the main dabbler in such CPUs in recent years, pushes the performance envelope with these chips, but without introducing significant changes to the silicon. Instead, these processors tend to be carefully chosen samples of the company’s high-end CPUs, tested and QA-ed for above-spec speeds according to a selection process called “binning.” Most such CPUs, though, tend to be more interesting as collector’s items than as practical values.That’s how things have shaken out for Intel with its last few efforts in the Special Edition vein, with its 12th Gen and 13th Gen Core desktop CPU families. The company has had another go at it with its $689 Intel Core i9-14900KS processor, a 24-core/32-thread LGA 1700 chip like the Core i9-14900K (with eight Performance cores and 16 Efficient cores). The “S” in the name again stands for “Special,” as it did with the 13900KS and 12900KS before it. The result is disappointing, though, and less compelling than the last two KS efforts. We recommend saving a bit of money and opting instead for the Intel Core i9-13900K, our Editors’ Choice award holder for extreme-performance chips for PC builders and upgraders.
Hotzilla: Intel’s Biggest ‘KS’ ChallengeIntel’s Special Edition processors are a straightforward gambit: Take prime samples of an existing processor design (here, the Core i9-14900K) and crank it to 11. Power draw and heat production increase alongside clock speeds, which is what delivers the performance improvement—if any. The price for a Special Edition chip tends to be pushed up just as hard, for good measure. This can work well if a processor design has sufficient headroom to allow for a significant increase in clock speeds. But the whole proposition flops if clock speeds can’t be raised by all that much.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
The reason Intel’s Special Edition chips have been rather lackluster affairs in recent years is due (largely) to this exact issue. In a sense, the company is already pushing the envelope with its flagship chips like the 13900K and 14900K. Intel has been unable to increase clock speeds beyond those chips’ specs by much, and heat levels with them are high enough that the law of diminishing returns becomes apparent very quickly. With the 14900KS, its efforts have resulted in a Special Edition processor that, at times, can perform worse than its original counterpart.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
Let’s briefly recap the last few Special Edition processors, to show the recurring pattern. In 2022, Intel released the Intel Core i9-12900KS with a max turbo boost of 5.5GHz and priced at $739, which made it $140 more expensive than the original Intel Core i9-12900K. (The 12900K was clocked just 300MHz lower, at 5.2GHz.) In tests, the performance difference was negligible; the most notable measurable difference was that the Core i9-12900KS was rated to draw up to 150 watts (W), versus the Core i9-12900K’s 125W.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
In some ways, 2023’s Intel Core i9-13900KS seemed like an even less enticing option than the original Intel Core i9-13900K. This time around, the difference in clocks was just 200MHz and the difference in price just $100, but test results showed near-identical performance from both chips. It also didn’t help that the Core i9-13900KS proved slightly unstable and couldn’t run our Adobe Premiere Pro benchmark. Nor did it help that the KS processor consumed more power.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
The Core i9-14900KS is the least appetizing trade-off yet. The non-“S” Intel Core i9-14900K is quite similar to the Core i9-13900KS, with a price of $589 and the slight stability issue resolved—and it has a max turbo of 6.0GHz. The Core i9-14900KS reviewed here, meanwhile, costs $689 and is again just 200MHz faster, with a max turbo boost of 6.2GHz. Like last time, this has resulted in minimal real-world performance improvement. But stability issues while using a 240mm CPU cooler are, predictably, back again; so this time we upped the cooler for a second run of our tests, which we’ll get into below. Intel Core i9-14900KS: Our Test SetupFor my first run of benchmarking, I tested the Core i9-14900KS using our standard-issue 240mm Cooler Master MasterLiquid PL240 Flux water cooler on a Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Master motherboard with two 16GB sticks of DDR5 RAM in a dual-channel configuration. (More about the cooler choices in a bit.) The RAM was operated at the Core i9-14900KS’s max officially supported memory speed of 5,600MHz. An Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition graphics card was used during testing as a display adapter and for all gaming-focused tests.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
The system was built onto an open-air Praxis WetBench chassis for testing; a SilverStone DA850 850-watt PSU powered the components. All tests were performed under Windows 11 with the latest updates installed.I gathered the 240mm cooler numbers from my initial round of testing so I could get numbers comparable with our CPU testing baseline. However, it also occurred to me that with an extreme-enthusiast chip like the Core i9-14900KS, the typical buyer would not stint on the cooler and would likely opt for a cooler with a 360mm radiator. After all, why risk strangling the performance of that extra-special speedster chip you just bought? Those 360mm results will be shown in the charts where applicable and discussed below.
In the chart above, you can see more clearly the differences among the Core i9-14900KS and the standard Core i9-14900K, as well as the similar Core i9-13900K. Make no mistake, these charts are accurate! The differences are just that small. Other than these similar chips, the most competitive processor to the Core i9-14900KS is AMD’s Ryzen 9 7950X, which has fewer cores but more cache and a more advanced manufacturing process.Intel Core i9-14900KS: Processor TestsStarting with AIDA64, we get a look at how much bandwidth the processor has available to it, which plays an active role in determining performance in other tests. This information isn’t directly comparable between AMD and Intel processors due to architectural differences, but it did show the 14900KS to have slightly more bandwidth on average than the standard 14900K, though its bandwidth while reading data was often a bit lower.
It was in our first real performance test, with Maxon’s Cinebench R23, that some problems started to emerge. On the tests with the 240mm cooler, the Core i9-14900KS doesn’t lack a multi-threaded score in the chart below by mistake, but because the system repeatedly crashed while trying to run this test. As this demanding test (which pushes all available cores) wore on, the processor reached 100 degrees C, its thermal limit, at which point a processor should throttle itself back to avoid overheating.
Sure enough, the processor attempted to do this, as I checked CPUID’s hardware monitor and saw its clock speeds dropping, which is a clear sign of throttling. The processor wasn’t able to do this effectively enough, though, and after a couple of minutes, it would consistently crash. The single-threaded Cinebench test completed just fine, but on that test the 14900KS performed essentially the same as the standard 14900K. The slightly higher peak clock didn’t amount to much.This test is an additional reason I added a round of testing with a 360mm water cooler. This resolved the crashing issue in Cinebench R23, and it enabled the Core i9-14900KS to perform slightly better than the Core i9-14900K and the Core i9-13900KS. This performance increase may be moot, however, as only the 240mm water cooler mentioned above was used for the Core i9-14900K and the Core i9-13900KS. If those had been tested with a 360mm water cooler, they might well have shown better performance, too.I encountered a similar problem while running the PugetBench benchmark in Adobe Premiere Pro. The whole system mercifully didn’t crash during this test, but Premiere did repeatedly, though this may have been down to an issue with the Puget benchmark-test software. The Photoshop test worked without issue, but the 14900KS chip again was only trivially different in performance from what we saw with the Core i9-14900K.The other CPU tests didn’t crash, but the performance numbers don’t help justify the Core i9-14900KS’s price premium. The 14900KS was slower than the Core i9-14900K in HandBrake using the 240mm cooler and just a second faster than it with the 360mm one. The two then tied in Blender and in the multi-threaded POV-Ray test. (The 240mm vs. 360mm radiator here made almost no difference.) Only in the single-threaded POV-Ray did the Core i9-14900KS show even a marginal gain over the 14900K, but a performance advantage of just 3.6% is so small that we give it little heed. We typically see results of 3% or less as inside the margin of error.With the 360mm water cooler, its main benefit benefit was in resolving the Cinebench crash issue. In the rest of the CPU tests, performance changed little with one cooler versus another.Intel Core i9-14900KS: Gaming TestsTesting the Core i9-14900KS with an Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 doesn’t tell us much about the CPU’s performance, as the graphics card is the clear bottleneck in most tests. We do see some small differences between AMD and Intel processors, particularly in 3DMark and F1 22, but not a lot else.
Statistically, the results show little if any performance difference between the Core i9-14900K and the Core i9-14900KS. While I didn’t witness any stability or performance issues in these tests, the fact that the Core i9-14900KS’s higher price doesn’t lead to any speed gains in these scenarios is notable.Intel Core i9-14900KS: Integrated Graphics TestsThe Core i9-14900KS is equipped with an Intel UHD Graphics 770 integrated graphics processor (IGP). Intel uses this same IGP on most of its recent desktop processors including all of the ones shown in our charts. The only difference among these IGPs is their clock speeds; at 1.65GHz, the Core i9-14900KS is one of the highest clocked.
Despite the 14900KS’s higher clocks, it performed within one frame per second (generally, less) of the Core i9-14900K on average. The performance difference was small but consistent across these tests. This could be due to the CPU cores pulling more power or running slightly hotter, causing the IGP to run slightly slower. Either way, you’ll never notice the difference, and most folks will use a CPU like this with a graphics card, anyway, rendering the point moot.Intel Core i9-14900KS: Power and Thermals TestsTo measure power draw, we use a Kill-A-Watt wall meter to gauge the power consumption of the full system during select tests. Due to the instability issues encountered on our Premiere benchmark, however, I wasn’t able to gather all of the readings we normally do. Thus, the Premiere bar is missing below for the 14900KS.
Idle power for the Core i9-14900KS was up slightly compared with the Core i9-14900K, but the measured power draw was slightly lower in Cinebench. Thermally, the Core i9-14900KS was problematic when used with our 240mm water cooler, hitting 100 degrees C quickly and soon crashing, likely due to excessive heat. Used with a 360mm water cooler, the processor still hit 100 degrees C, which is why I didn’t add a separate listing for it in the chart. The key difference is that the extra cooling performance helped the processor to overheat less frequently, which would enable it to run at turbo clocks more often and more stably. This is why it managed to run the Cinebench test without crashing and showed a slight performance increase with a 360mm cooler.Verdict: Unless You Must Have the Very Latest, Just Buy a 13900KThis much should be clear by now: We have little positive to say about the Intel Core i9-14900KS as a value proposition. Is it fast? Sure. Its high core count and high clock speeds are welcome, but you get most of that with other processors like the Core i9-14900K for $100 less. The Core i9-14900KS also exhibited stability issues with our 240mm cooler that the Core i9-14900K didn’t. Also, you need to account for the slightly slower IGP speeds, and that we saw no noticeable real-world benefits in any performance area, apart (maybe…) from the power of your bragging rights. Now, the use of a 360mm water cooler improves these results a smidge, but that also adds cost. Plus, because of the similarities in resources and architecture between the 14900KS and 14900K, those improvements would likely also be observed from the Core i9-14900K if it were used with a 360mm water cooler.
(Credit: Michael Justin Allen Sexton)
Long story short? We can’t find many reasons to splurge on an Intel Core i9-14900KS. However, it’s not all bad news: This is just another arrow pointing toward the excellent Intel Core i9-13900K if you’re looking for extreme performance on Intel’s current mainstream desktop PC platform. It’s our Editors’ Choice award holder in the category and, at the time of publishing, you can buy it for $150 less than the Core i9-14900KS.
Pros
High clock speed
Large core count
The Bottom Line
Intel’s power-hungry, pricey Core i9-14900KS delivers too little extra performance versus its Core i9-14900K kin to merit the extra cash. Intel’s previous-gen Core i9-13900K comes much more highly recommended.
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