After an initial round of early 3DMark benchmarks in July, the Intel Core i9-9900K leaks just keep on coming. In the latest, a $582.50 price listing and an image of some fancy packaging for the much-anticipated processor reportedly appeared on Amazon, spotted by Tom’s Hardware.
These leaks suggest Intel has clearly now stepped up its game, seemingly taking a shot at the AMD Threadripper which already comes in impressive packaging. The listing has since been pulled, but screenshots captured by Twitter user Momo_Us show that the box resembles a translucent dodecahedron, with a space in the middle part for the processor.
Things look pretty similar to the shape of a twelve-sided die, marking a big departure from Intel’s typical square-shaped processor boxes. Unfortunately, the image suggests there is still no cooler included, despite how big the box may look.
It is hard to verify if this listing holds up to be true, but the photos look fairly convincing. Amazon briefly mentions that the processor comes packed with eight cores and sixteen threads, a boost of up to 5.0 GHz, with Intel Hyper-Threading Technology for sixteen-way multitasking. That’s not necessarily new information, but it is plenty of power and confirms the benchmarks from July which mentioned that the Core i9-9900K was “noticeably quicker than its last-generation predecessors and AMD’s Ryzen 2700X.”
As for the reported price, $582.50 is still quite a bit expensive compared to the $380 Coffee Lake Intel Core i7-8700K. That’s also higher than some of the originally rumored price suggestions, but then again, this is Intel’s first eight-core, sixteen-thread desktop processor — and it’s meant to compete directly with AMD’s Ryzen processors.
Unfortunately, you can’t buy the processor yet, as Amazon notes that it is still temporarily out of stock. We would have liked to see a sixteen-sided Hexadecagon shaped box instead (with one side for each processor thread,) but the translucent dodecahedron will have to do as a bonus.
All the leaks now considered, a reveal might be coming soon. Best keep your wallet near, and your PC motherboards ready for the upgrade by the end of this year.
