Intel is expected to officially launch its newest flagship CPU—the core i9-14900KS "Special Edition"—on March 14th. Even though it's still a week from launch, it's already in overclockers' hands and has been delidded. A member of the Overclock.net forums has taken a scalpel to one of these CPUs to show what effect direct-die cooling can have, and it lowered the CPU's temps by 10C under full load.
A forum user by pakhtunov posted a gallery of photos and benchmark results for the delidded 14900KS, giving us the most detailed look yet of Intel's upcoming silicon. There are several caveats to the numbers, though, as the tests were run with hyper-threading disabled, so it's using 24 cores and threads instead of its maximum of 32 threads. Also, they opted for an all-core clock frequency of 5.9GHz instead of running the chip at its single-core boost clock of 6.2GHz. After the chip was delidded, the included thermal paste was removed and replaced with liquid metal for the tests. According to Tom's Hardware, the chip was cooled with a 360mm DeepCool LS720SE liquid cooler, a basic off-the-shelf AIO. This cooler was apparently the reason for not running it at 6.2GHz, as it is reportedly not up to the task.
In the tests, Cinbench went from hitting 85C under full load to a very tolerable 75C. Y-Cruncher also saw a notable temperature reduction from 89C to 82C at full load without the integrated heat spreader (IHS) getting in the way. Even the lidded numbers for the CPU are decent, making us wonder what kind of temps it hits at 6.2GHz. What is extreme about this CPU is its power consumption, as in stock trim, it was drawing 376W in Cinebench and 432W in y-cruncher. The delidded version drew slightly less power in both tests but still pulled 409W in the y-cruncher and 366W in Cinebench.
The Core i9-14900KS will surely break existing benchmark numbers once it gets hooked up to some liquid nitrous by extreme overclockers. These binned chips from Intel exist only for bragging rights and benchmark records and to allow power users to own the fastest chip in the universe. At 6.2GHz, its superiority will be unquestioned, but with an expected price of around $700, Intel will not sell many of these CPUs. Intel probably doesn't mind, though, as it just wants the clock speed title.
The 14900KS is also the swan song for these sky-high clock speeds, as it will be Intel's final monolithic FinFET CPU for "client" PCs. Intel will be moving to a tile-based design for its successor, Arrow Lake, which is expected later this year.
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