Highly anticipated: While most people are waiting impatiently for the arrival of Intel's 9th generation Coffee Lake-S Refresh processors---rumored to launch in October---some users have already got their hands on engineering samples and are showing what the chips are capable of.
Back in July, we saw Core i9-9900K benchmarks that put the CPU ahead of the Ryzen 7 2700X and i7-8700K. Now, an i7-9700K purportedly overclocked to a massive 5.5GHz across all eight of its cores has been spotted.
The i7-9700K is said to feature 8 cores and 8 threads---hyperthreading will be an exclusive feature for the top-end Core i9 series. Built on the 14nm++ process, it has a clock speed of 3.6GHz and can boost to 4.6GHz on all cores, or 4.9GHz using a single core. It also boasts 12MB of L3 cache and a TDP of 95W.
Chinese-language site ZOL has posted screenshots of the chip being used. It shows the i7-9700K running on an ASRock Z370 Professional Gaming mobo with 16GB of G.Skill DDR4-2133 RAM.
Another image shows the CPU's Cinebench R15 benchmarks. The i7-9700K has been overclocked to 5.5537GHz across all eight cores, and that's apparently using water cooling rather than liquid nitrogen. It attained a single-core score of 250 and a multi-core result of 1,827, though the overclock had the voltage set at 1.536V, which is high.
The scores put it above the Core i7-8700K (stock), which managed 193 and 1408. It's also slightly better the Ryzen 2700X---AMD's chip attained scores of 250 and 1827, though that was also at stock speeds.
As with all leaks of this kind, it's best taken with a pinch of salt, particularly as the date in the BIOS image is months out from the one in the Windows taskbar. Expect to discover the 9000-series' exact performance capabilities when the chips are released in a few weeks' time.