Man I thought the exact same thing when Coffee Lake refresh emerged. If they had so much of this 14nm silicon lying around, why did they not just make the 9900KS a not-so-special-edition chip and bump everything that didn't make the bin down to 9700K? I mean, it's not much of a self-inflicted gunshot wound all by itself but now that we see what Comet Lake is made of, hindsight is really showing how bad of a strategic decision that was.
They should have carried it on up until 9 series was EOL, by the time I got my 9900k, the 9900ks was out of supply in most places, the one store that had it gouged it up to mount everest levels. I did get my 9900k super cheap though so I cant complain that much. But I think the way it as priced people probably were snapping them up vs basic 9900k's. So I expect also 9900k sales nosedived whilst it was available.
The new Intels are always sold out immediately (which I don't understand since this is Skylake 5.0, but I guess Intel's milking works), takes a while that you can really buy them.
I'm kicking with 2600K as I sold my R5 2600 + B450, this runs RE games and that's fair enough.
Easy to understand, the supply numbers are really low, its happened in so many generations now I believe it to be deliberate to keep prices high.
If you short supply, it can make consumers think demand is high rather than supply is low, and with how the human mind works it also makes them more sought after.
Hmm. I've got time to wait since none of them are in stock, but I still feel like the i7 is the best option.
What do people think about overclocking now? BACK IN MY DAY... there wasn't all this turbo boosting and stuff. Per the review, it seems like this vague 2nd tier of turbo boost does the work, and you see very minimal gains from OC? When I overclocked my current chips it was just a massive increase in the floor for FPS on games.
These new chips have "preferred cores" enabled, this to me means if you running a new OS, the values of overclocking are now very low.
What this new feature does is if the chip only can run top clocks on 1-2 cores, which is the case on intel turbo clock, then the OS will make sure low threaded apps "always" use those cores. So the benefit on pushing all cores to top clocks (which would previously ensure that) is now more limited.
On top of this high end intel chips are pushed close to their limit now in terms of power and heat out of the box. It can be seen on the OC and asus tuned bios results the temperatures were stupid high and not practical. All for a mere 100-200mhz boost.
On my 9900k which is previous gen, I decided to stop pushing vcore up to silly levels for small gains, instead I actually reduced the voltage and still managed to get an all core 4.8ghz. My 8600k needed 1.37v for an all core 4.7, my 9900k runs an all core 4.8 at 1.25v. That feels much better than I would if I perhaps set it to run 5ghz at 1.4v. The temps and power draw are now very respectable.
So my suggestion for 10 series chips is to either not tinker, or just reduce voltage, I would also disable any board manufacturer tuned modes as they likely just giving minor improvements for huge heat gains.
The K chips will still have some value as they are better binned chips and do still come with higher out of the box specifications than non K chips.