Videocardz discovered an early Micro Center listing confirming the price of Intel's upcoming Core i9-14900KS flagship CPU. The new chip will reportedly be priced at $749, $50 more than rumors expected. The CPU's launch date was also revealed as March 14th, four days from this writing.
Micro Center's listing is the first US-based listing we've seen for Intel's new Core i9-14900KS. The US-based retailer's pricing matches very closely with pricing from several Canadian and French retailers we covered a few days ago, which had pricing above $715 and below $750. Micro Center's pricing is slightly higher than what we anticipated. Previous rumors indicated that the i9-14900KS would share the same MSRP as its predecessor, which featured a $699 MSRP. But it appears the 14900KS may be priced $50 higher.
That said, we still need to take this listing with a grain of salt, as there's a chance Micro Center's pricing is specific to its stores. When other US-based retailers (like Newegg) unveil pricing before the 14900KS debut, we'll know whether or not Micro Center's price is indeed the MSRP.
The Micro Center listing also confirms the i9-14900KS' full specifications, featuring a 3.2GHz base clock, 6.2GHz turbo frequency, 8 P-cores, 16 E-cores 32MB of L2 cache, 36MB of L3 cache, and support for DDR4-3200 and DDR5-5600 memory.
At $750, the i9-14900KS is over $200 more expensive than the Core i9-14900K — which isn't currently on our list of the Best CPUs, since the Core i7-14700K gives you effectively the same gaming performance for less. All that extra money gives you with the 14900KS is a 200MHz higher boost clock on the P-cores — 6.0GHz to 6.2GHz. From a value perspective, the i9-14900KS is a horrible buy, but that has been the case with all of Intel's special 'KS' edition SKUs since the very beginning. These chips are halo products designed to wring out the highest amount of performance possible from Intel's CPU architectures, no matter the cost (literally).
The i9-14900KS will be the first Intel CPU in history to break the 6GHz barrier, both the i9-13900KS and i9-14900K have turbo clocks of 6GHz, but the 14900KS is the first to feature a boost frequency beyond 6GHz. But to hit these absurdly high frequencies, it appears Intel left nothing off the table. To achieve 6.2GHz, previous reports have indicated that the 14900KS is utilizing CPU voltages of nearly 1.5v to do so. As a result, CPU power consumption reportedly excels beyond 400W when the CPU's power limits are boosted beyond Intel's default specification — this is a performance-enhancing 'trick' that most modern Intel motherboards do out of the box.
Again, we'll know in a few days if MicroCenter's pricing is indicative of the 14900KS real MSRP. Either way — $699 or $749, the i9-14900KS will repeat history and be the most expensive and highest-clocking CPU in Intel's current 14th-gen lineup.
