Intel i9-9900K runs Incredibly Hot at 5GHz OC in Gigabyte’s internal tests

Gigabyte recently published a guide to overclocking Intel i9-9900K on a Z390 Aorus motherboard. The guide contains a lot of useful information in general, however, one detail that in particular caught our attention is the direct quote from board maker saying the temperature of the i9-9900K is “quite high.”

The guide features a screenshot showing the i9-9900K achieving a stable 5GHz overclock using a custom watercooled setup and a Vcore ranging from 1.3-1.4 V. Even with this moderate OC, the CPU reaches temperatures as high as 90°C while consuming 245W of power.

The Intel i9-9900K is supposed to boost up to 4.7GHz on all eight cores and 5.0GHz Turbo on a single core. Gigabyte’s internal testing shows all cores operating at 5GHz OC, but the CPU runs incredibly hot. Which indicates the soldered IHS may not be as effective in cooling the package as we may have hoped.

Also, the official rated TDP of 95W doesn’t seem to match with the actual consumption. The Core Temp shows the latest and greatest Intel i9 consuming 244.8W when overclocked.

You can find the related information on pages 13 and 14 of Gigabyte’s Z390 OC Guide (PDF). Here, the board maker literally writes:

As you can tell from the last screenshots, the CPU temperature of the i9-9900k is quite high. This is something that we’ve noticed on almost all the processors.

For this reason we suggest you to use a custom water-cooling and adjust the TjMAX Temperature to 110°C.

I’d recommend you to wait for the i9-9900K reviews to surface for better understanding of these temperature and power draw metrics. The review embargo is lifted on October 19 with the release on the same day.

Intel has already stirred a rather unnecessary controversy by commissioning Principled Technologies (PT) to do a benchmarking sesh on its 9000-series processors. The results showed the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X performing worse against the Intel i9-9900K.

However, the company revised its benchmark data following backlash. The performance gap between the two rival chip is much lower in the new PT data, with the i9-9900K just 12% faster than the 2700K at gaming.