Designed to reach 5 GHz in its eight cores, each i9-9900KS is known to reach up to 5.2 GHz in OC.
Intel Core i9-9900KS reaches 6.9 GHz in all cores
Intel provided a sample of a hand-selected Core i9-9900KS to Tom’s hardware to perform overclocking tests that reached a speed of 6.95 GHz in all cores and 7.3 GHz in a single thread. Intel has already tested this piece for overclocking. Although Intel does not guarantee the OC frequencies, they expect the test results of this part to be higher than those of an average sample.
The first step to reach these frequencies is to file the IHS by sanding it on a really flat surface with sandpaper. The “flattening” of the IHS reduces the temperatures in the hottest core by up to 4-5°C and leads to a more uniform temperature distribution between the tools.
The tests used Geekbench3 and Cinebench R15, with liquid nitrogen (LN2) cooling system that set world records. A well-known Windows 10 trick was also used to disable Spectre and Meltdown software mitigation for optimal performance.
In the end, the frequencies already commented on in Benchmate’s Cinebench R15 (https://benchmate.org/) at 6.952MHz were awarded a score of 3.122 points. In a single-core, the 7,300 MHz was exceeded in Superpi32m and pifast.
The i9-9900KS is exactly what you imagined, a 9900K with a wide OC rim. Although the results we see here are impossible with air or liquid cooling, we can reach up to 5.4 GHz at the most.