Meet the CPU Intel Doesn’t Talk about.
Meet Intel’s Core i9 9900KF. It’s literally a CPU that Intel obviously makes, sells but doesn’t talk about. It does nothing to advertise these CPU’s and I’ll get to that in a minute.
If you do a Google search for Core I9 9900KF reviews, you won’t find very many. I think my search turned up one. Our request to Intel for this CPU was denied. No real reason was given other than “we don’t have one for review.”
I’ve been in the industry for a long time. The PR departments get a certain amount of allocation and they decide who gets them. Given the KF had just come out recently when I made the request, I can only conclude that Intel either sent out very few or, didn’t send out any of them. I’ve also seen some comments by other reviewers here and there pointing to a similar experience. Oddly, a company doesn’t always have review sample allocations for every product they make.
The KF Series is Defective?
All KF series CPU’s are just like their K variants, without the iGPU’s enabled. KF’s have the same clocks similar prices and all of the same features save for the iGPU itself. The reason the 9900KF could be considered “defective” comes down to the fact that the Core i9 9900K with an iGPU that’s been disabled. The feature has been disabled at the factory and cannot be re-enabled. That means you’ll need a discrete graphics card to use it. Many, if not most people who would buy a Core I9 9900K are probably going to use a discrete GPU like an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 or GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.