i think on some level Intel must know that their product
naming scheme could be less confusing where that level is well your guess is
as good as mine because they have certainly never admitted it to us
and yet here we are with an Intel sponsored
deeper dive into the core x series their
high-end desktop processors where we'll cover the key options available and what
they might be most useful for
okay so first a little context Intel's
x299 platform is divided up into two
major architectures kb lake x and sky
lake x kb lake x is essentially their consumer
7000 series chips with more heavy duty traces slightly higher clock speeds and
the higher power consumption that goes with it as a result it differs significantly
from other cpus that fit into the lga 2066 socket
Intel intends them as entry-level chips for folks who want to get into an hedt
or high-end desktop motherboard and then upgrade later but so far they've been
most successful in competitive overclocking especially in light of the
six core options that are available on the z370 consumer side of things now
skylake x on the other hand is where the meat's at here we've got two classes of
processors core i7 and core i9
all of them have unlocked multipliers for overclocking
Intel hyper threading technology quad-channel ddr4 memory support for
avx-2 and avx-512 x86 extensions and
they share skylakex's new cache setup of one meg of level two cache per core
matched with a shared level 3 cache that's much smaller than previous
generations but in practice proves more efficient in most scenarios
where they differ is in the core count which increments by 2 for each step up
the product stack the number of pci express lanes which is lower on core i7
models and the implementation of turbo boost max 3.0 so cpus with 8 cores or
more get 2 max boost cores while the 7800x gets zero turbo boost max cores
now we won't be doing a deep dive on every sku
just the top-tier core i9 7980xe to show
what the platform is capable of in multi-threaded and virtualized workloads
the core i9 7900x the jack of all trades
and the core i7 7820x which we believe
should be the entry-level CPU for most buyers on this platform let's start with
that last one it has 28 pci express lanes so that's enough for a full speed
graphics card a couple of NVMe ssds and
some high-speed networking so it's about right for an entry-level workstation
which is great because that's where this chip's performance shines
it actually has the highest bass frequency in the entire skylake x lineup
it shares the highest boost frequency with the 7900x and it also shares the
highest 2 core turbo boost max 3.0 frequency at 4.5 gigahertz making it a
great fit for a workstation that isn't always used for work
moving into core i9 territory we leave behind the 28 PCIe lanes and step up to
44 where we get perhaps the most interesting CPU in the x299 lineup the
10 core core i9 7900x
when this guy launched we reviewed it quite favorably thanks to its major
performance improvements over its predecessor the core i7
6900k and even the 6950x
now to be clear not everyone is going to see a performance improvement versus the
7820x but if you want to have full
unbottlenecked access to many connected pci express devices be they networking
storage video capture or expensive accelerator cards this is where you want
to be and you get another two cores for workloads that can take advantage of
them as well the rest of the core i9 lineup is what i would describe as
tweeners that is they are in between the 7900x two cores per step and the highest
end CPU Intel has ever released on a desktop platform the 2 000
18 core core i9 7980
this thing is an absolute beast and it shows in both its performance numbers
and its power draw it blitzed through our testing suite pulling off similar
per thread performance numbers to its fewer core brethren and even beating out
our 22 core xeon e5 2699 v4
and it managed to pull 500 to 600 watts on
its own when overclocked it doesn't win
any bang for the buck gaming awards but for those that need this kind of
performance be they video editors 3d animators using fluid simulation or
anyone who's doing high-end computational work that can't be
offloaded onto a GPU well it could be that for you
raw performance is all that matters because time is money and a CPU that
outputs faster can pay for itself pretty quickly skylake x represents a healthy
improvement upon the previous generation and it's a solid choice when it comes to
both per thread and multi-threaded performance now we just hope that
Intel's plan for a more dynamic and risky future brings us even more
performance next year and the year after that
because we're insatiable like that so thanks for watching guys if you
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