 It used to be that overclocking the processor in your computer was kind of like a dark art, black magic. It involved moving around dip switches and jumpers on your motherboard or replacing crystals so that the CPU might run at as much as double the frequency that the manufacturer intended, giving you effectively double the performance and all you have to pay is a little bit of your time. Now naturally, manufacturers for a long time fought against that. They don't want you to have something for free. They want you to pay for it, but enthusiasm for overclocking grew and manufacturers from ASUS to Gigabyte to AMD to Intel embraced it. Culminating in what we've got here in front of us today. This is a custom system and I'm assured it is one heck of an experience to unbox it from Digital Storm that contains what I consider to be an Intel first. A pre-overclocked processor. This is the Core i9 9900KS and oh, if the system inside, I can't even lift this, is anything to go by, it's gonna be one heck of a beast. Let's open it down here, shall we? This video is brought to you by GlassWire. With GlassWire, you can instantly see your current and past network activity, allowing you to detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device. Use offer code LINUS to get 25% off GlassWire at the link below. So let's begin this video with what the 9900KS is not. I was being a little bit facetious before, it is not actually just an overclocked 9900K. It is in fact new silicon that aside from allowing Intel to apparently reach higher clock speeds, so it runs at 4 GHz base and 5 GHz all core boost, the first time we have ever seen that in a mass market CPU. It also contains new hardware mitigations for some of the vulnerabilities that have affected Intel CPUs over the last couple of years. Now, Should I open this brown box before I go any further? You know what, let's open this. What even is this? Oh my God, that is the cutest little Pelican case. Is that not adorable? Oh, interesting. Wait a second. They just took the sleeve on the outside of the packaging, folded up and put it in here. Oh, and also the CPU. Ooh, so Digital Storm has done something pretty special with our 9900KS. They have actually provided it to us factory lapped. So lapping is a technique whereby sanding and very, very evenly flattening out the CPU by removing the top layer of it, you can get ever so slightly better contact between your cooler and your processor, improving its thermal conductivity. And therefore, it's overclocking performance. All right, I guess we get to install the CPU ourselves. Okay, I got a little bit sidetracked there. So back to what I was talking about before. Yes, this is technically new silicon, but it's not on a new manufacturing process and it's not fundamentally architecturally way different. So in order to hit these kinds of all core boost speeds, it's not like Intel didn't have a core boost speed. It's not like Intel didn't have to make some concessions compared to their normal mainstream consumer CPUs, which are rated at a TDP of around 95 watts. This one is a whopping 127 watts. And also because presumably every chip is not going to hit these kinds of ludicrous speeds, the price for it is quite dear at around $513 recommended retail price. Andy, do you mind giving me a hand with this thing? It is possibly the heaviest computer that I have ever encountered. One, two, three, don't blow out your stink dirt. Okay. You good? Yeah, my hands are good. Okay. All right, they have promised me this is something very special and I will now be sharing it with you because I have not yet seen it. So I really hope it's not something totally lame. And we went and built up to this throughout the entire video. Get out from under there. And a one, two, three. Oh, no way. Oh, that's cool. That looks freaking awesome. Now it's time to turn it around and have a look at the other side. Oh, all right. This side will need some work. I mean, by the time your computer weighs 200 pounds, it's another five pounds of packing foam, right? Ooh. Orange coolant. Very interesting. Oh, okay. Anyway, let's have a look at what's in the accessory box. Okay, and a big surprise to no one. This one is full of accessories, power supply cables and the like. I'm really hoping there's a CPU block in the other one. Hey, there it is. Look at that. They even pre-filled the tubes for me. Or are they afraid I would have dropped it or something otherwise? So for those not familiar, these are quick connect fittings and these are some particularly fancy ones. These are super cool because what they allow you to do is without losing more than about the moisture that would be on this piece of metal right here, you can take pre-filled, so this is not colored coolant. This is full of water. See that bubble moving around in it? They allow you to take pre-filled tubing and just connect it. And actually the pressure drop over a high quality quick connect fitting is surprisingly little. Now it is there, but considering the digital storm configured this thing with only the CPU water cooled anyway, we ain't that concerned fam as the kids say. The kids say that, right? Not for a couple of years. One not idiot proof thing seems to be that I don't know which way the coolant is gonna flow and our CPU block is directional, so that needs to be the inlet and that needs to be the outlet. So what I might do is just do a quick test and see which way it goes. All right, this is a 50-50 shot. Let's see if we got it right. Hey, got him. All right, now for the moment y'all have been waiting for. This is as fast as it gets. Just got some thermal goop there. It's fine. What I use the inside of this pocket on my LTT stealth hoodie, lttstore.com. Oh shoot, I just realized we've got a problem here. That's dual RTX 2080 TIs and this is just a 1440p monitor. Oh, I don't know what to do. There we go. Ha! 4K 144 Hertz G-Sync. Now we cooking with fire. Oh, that's cool. This is new since the last time I checked out one of their systems. Check this out. We've got a little display over here with our coolant temperatures and Digital Storm's just like tubing. That's for plebs. So they're using hard acrylic, I don't know what I would call it. It's not tubing, it's fluid routing. Here, here, and then all over the back of the system here is this gigantic coolant distribution block. What's really cool, ha ha ha, he did it, is that those two that are a loop on the other side, you could easily use those to tie GPUs into your cooling loop in the future if you so desired. You know what, I couldn't quite, oh, yeah! That's another dual 140 millimeter radiator. I love this. It's literally idling below the minimum temperature that it can display. It's great. There's no doubt in our minds that the 9900KS is fast, but we wanted to quantify it, of course. So we grabbed a regular 9900K, install all of our test games and benchmarks and all that good stuff, and ran both the regular K and the KS through our suite to determine, well, at a higher price, is it worth it? And the difference in performance in many cases was not huge, but something that's really interesting is that compared to getting one of those pre-overclocked 9900Ks from somewhere like siliconlottery.com is the cost for a 9900KS that runs five gigahertz all core boost compared to a regular K that Silicon Lottery validated at five gigahertz all core boost is actually lower. And that's pretty impressive, considering that in the past, Silicon Lottery told us that only about 30% of 9900Ks are capable of reaching that mark. But back to what I was talking about at the beginning of this video about how overclocking is kind of dead because Intel is effectively shipping a pre-overclocked CPU. Does that mean that there's more headroom? Let's go ahead and see if we can push it any further. Let's try doing this the simple way. I'm gonna key in 51 into my CPU ratio, which should give us a boost frequency of 5.1 gigahertz on all cores. And if the conventional overclocking wisdom holds, we should be able to push a processor by, what does that work out to? Like 3% without making any adjustments to system voltage or anything like that. Wow, we made it. And that might not seem impressive. Ooh, Cinebench with a 2% overclock. But the thing is, when we ran our blender tests before, we were looking at mid to high 80 degree temps on our CPU. And that's in spite of this wicked cooling system because it's not about the radiator's capability to move heat out of the water and into the surrounding environment. It's more about just how dense and tiny that heat generation is on the CPU die itself. So let's try another 2% overclock, shall we? Now we're trying to boot at 5.2 gigahertz. And what's interesting is that even at 5.1, the value proposition of this chip starts to become much more interesting because while I certainly wouldn't necessarily recommend paying this much for it, Silicon Lottery puts the value of a 5.1 gigahertz validated 9900K at about 900 US dollars, considering how few of them can get there. Whereas if you buy a chip that was 5 gigahertz in the first place, a 2% overclock doesn't seem like as much to ask. And in fact, we're booted into Windows now at a whomping 5.2 gigahertz, which to my knowledge, Silicon Lottery doesn't even offer. With that said, we have no idea if this is stable. And I suspect it probably isn't. Wow, I'm actually pretty surprised we completed that run. I honestly wasn't expecting to get this far. Maybe we should do a blender run. 96 degrees on core number two. Dang! And with how much radio, oh! It froze. Attempt number two, this time we bumped the voltage a little bit to 1.35 volts. And I am not necessarily expecting this to work. But then I haven't really been expecting any of this to work, so. And we're done. 5.1 is as high as we can go without applying an AVX offset then, which is kind of cheating in this case, because as soon as you're applying AVX offsets, well now it's an apples to oranges comparison, because that's basically a way of telling the CPU, okay, well in certain very demanding workloads, you can turn the frequency down. You might get a little bit more gaming performance, but I suspect there's not a lot of headroom there, which is, I guess, entirely the point of this video. Intel went and released something very unusual for them, a CPU that is basically already absolutely screaming at the limits of what the architecture can handle. We got a 2% overclock out of this thing, and we were already thermally constrained in spite of the fact that we've got an enthusiast class system, including very high-end cooling built around the thing. Now with that said, that doesn't mean that the product is necessarily pointless, because instead of paying $900 for something that, I would suspect you'd have pretty good odds here, runs at 5.1 gigahertz on my high-end cooling system, I mean, those guys were gonna spend a bunch of money on the cooling system anyway. I'm spending, well, a little over $500 on something that runs 5.1 gigahertz, as long as I've got the cooling system for it, because that's the big gotcha with this chip. If you guys are looking to get a 9900KS, don't assume that like Intel's other stock speed, you know, normal operation chips, you can just throw whatever cooler you want on it. You're going to need a beefy cooler in order to get the best performance out of it. So this chip won't be winning any bang for the buck awards, but at the high end, that wasn't the expectation. And as an enthusiast product, it actually looks not bad. So thanks Intel for sending it over for us to check out, and especially thanks Digital Storm for providing us with what has to be the absolute sickest CPU test bench we have ever had the pleasure of using. Like this thing is absolutely unreal between the RGB lighting, the insane cooling system, the ease with which we were able to get everything up and running and liquid cooled. These guys absolutely know what the heck they're doing. So they didn't sponsor the video or anything, but like massive shout out to them for sending over such a cool showpiece for us to put our 9900KS in. We'll link those guys below. Speaking of sponsored though, this video is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the easy to use all in one website building platform that has a ton of great templates. So no matter what kind of project you're trying to tackle, Squarespace has got you covered. And it's easy to use. If you need additional help, Squarespace offers webinars, a full series of help guides, and you can even contact their 24 seven customer support via live chat and email. If you've got a third party domain, it's easy to transfer over to Squarespace and Squarespace has e-commerce built in. So you can manage your orders and your inventory directly through your Squarespace store. So check it out at squarespace.com forward slash LTT. We're gonna have that linked below and get 10% off your first purchase using Squarespace. So thanks for watching guys. If you liked this video, maybe check out our recent video taking like a $5,000 dream machine from 11 years ago for a test drive. We're gonna have that linked below as well.