Intel Core i9-7980XE & 7960X Review: 16-Core Is Old News!

[Sausagemeat]

A very well written review but I think the reviewer has missed the point. Nobody buys these sort of chips to get the most bang for their buck. They buy them because they want to challenge for the best results on benchmark sites etc. Often using enthusiast grade cooling solutions like LN2.

It’s like the reviewer has taken a track day car and reviewed it as if he were intending using it for driving to the supermarket and back. Anyone with more than 2 brain cells can see these chips aren’t intended for practical application.

 

[alexnode]

This is much worse than I expected. I knew the lower clocks would keep the performance numbers in check, but with 60/80% more cores than the 1900x, I seriously expected a lot more from them. With the exception of a few extreme situations, it's just not worth it.
And if we're talking about big companies with money to burn, ECC memory will be a much more important feature than the best workstation performance the money can buy. Proper Epyc/Xeon servers or TR workstations are a much better buy.

I am very curious why Intel still won't allow ECC memory support on their HEDT, yet TR does ECC, has more PCIE lanes and cost much less. I guess some people would still pay double the money for an i9 chip for 10% more performance which also means much hotter running and higher power draw as well, also giving up ECC support.

Intel has huge profits from the server sector, EPYC is a huge problem for them, This 7980XE could produce over 4000 cinebench score, two server chips 2x E5-2699 V4 produce 5692 cinebench with about $4500 price ... Intel is loosing a lot of money from AMD so they don't want to have an enthusiast chip being used instead of fat expensive servers. This whole AMD comeback is fantastic news for content creators ...

 

[alexnode]

A very well written review but I think the reviewer has missed the point. Nobody buys these sort of chips to get the most bang for their buck. They buy them because they want to challenge for the best results on benchmark sites etc. Often using enthusiast grade cooling solutions like LN2.

It’s like the reviewer has taken a track day car and reviewed it as if he were intending using it for driving to the supermarket and back. Anyone with more than 2 brain cells can see these chips aren’t intended for practical application.

It is quite strange situation but if you are in the video production , or 3d rendering business... or any number crunching application you used to pay £5000 for processors to have a cinebench score of ~ 4500 suddenly AMD comes with £1000 for 3345 ! And Intel replies with 4100 (oc) for £2000. In any case small studios could think of getting a few DIY single socket threadrippers instead of paying intel , or paying HP and supermicro for sometimes double the price of a DIY system.

 

[alexnode]

It actually has. They added a lot more cores, but as you've seen with the OC results... these chips don't have very high clocks for all of their cores. While software can indeed be optimised further, the biggest advantage Intel had over AMD was the much higher clocks.
With the core counts being very similar you can say that any optimisation that will benefit Intel will also benefit AMD (we've seen this with Ryzen patches sometimes where multithreading optimisations helped the 8 threads of the i7 too)

I see online people hitting 4.5 ghz on the 7980xe with high temps on water cooling ... I think that it could go comfortably on 4.2 ghz with 18 cores ... 75ghz of power ... which is amazing. Don't think about how fast a few threads can run to provide high frame rates, but buckets of data being crunched at once in slightly lower clocks.

 

[Footlong]

Overpriced is the definitive word for these Intel chips.