It was hardly a secret that Intel was working on a new, suped-up version of its fastest Core i9 processor — it was leaking all over the place earlier this month. But it seems particularly fitting that the company released the i9-14900KS yesterday on March 14th, known to math nerds as Pi Day. (Get it?) The new chip was used to break records for the Super Pi benchmark program.
If you didn’t know, Super Pi is a Windows program that calculates the value of pi to 32 million digits. The faster your processor, the faster it can use the single-threaded program to calculate the value. It’s about as simple as it can get as a means of measuring a computer’s literal number-crunching performance.
So naturally, when Intel officially unveiled the Core i9-14900KS, which can reach speeds of 6.2GHz even without overclocking, it did so on Pi Day, 3-14 in American notation. And of course maxing out the Super Pi benchmark was one of the first things users did with it.
The i9-14900KS now holds the top two spots on the public leaderboard, at 3.662 seconds and 3.768 seconds to run the calculation. Noted overclocker specialist Allen “Splave” Golibersuch got the new CPU running up to 8.44Ghz, probably using his incredible custom-built, liquid nitrogen-powered cooling setup. That’s an increase of 700 megahertz over his previous Core i9-14900K.
For a little comparison, I just ran the Super Pi program on my home-built PC, which I recently upgraded with a new AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D. That’s a darn good CPU, especially for gaming…but it doesn’t hold a candle to Intel’s 24-core, $700 beast and Splave’s overclocking skills. My 32-million-digit calculation took six minutes, four seconds.
I’m going to blame it on running WordPress in Chrome at the same time.
Author: Michael Crider, Staff Writer, PCWorld
Michael is a 10-year veteran of technology journalism, covering everything from Apple to ZTE. On PCWorld he's the resident keyboard nut, always using a new one for a review and building a new mechanical board or expanding his desktop "battlestation" in his off hours. Michael's previous bylines include Android Police, Digital Trends, Wired, Lifehacker, and How-To Geek, and he's covered events like CES and Mobile World Congress live. Michael lives in Pennsylvania where he's always looking forward to his next kayaking trip.