Intel Core i9 9980XE

We recently updated our Linux testing suite a wee bit, making minor changes, but at the expense of dropping all single-threaded benchmarks – by accident. We hadn't thought much about every single set of results being hugely optimized for core counts,...

How Much Does it Cost?I have seen the prices of this CPU vary wildly from multiple retailers. However, the average seems to be around £2100, such as this one on Amazon at £2082.49. That's a freaking crapload of money, and I refuse to sugar coat that...

Regardless of what your budget is, there's a CPU that can meet your needs without emptying your bank account. Faster and more efficient CPUs are released every year, so there's no reason to pay for more than what you really need. But if you're an avid...

As we said in our introduction, in the past the concept of a new flagship Intel processor was always so much better than anything that had come before and anything that was available from AMD in their wilderness years that it topped all of our graphs,...

As well as topping several of our graphs despite being up against the best that AMD has to offer and offering small but tangible gains over the Core i9-7980XE, Intel still has that all-round great performance which many of AMD's CPUs still can't match,...

It used to be the case that Intel's chief consumer processor automatically gained the title of fastest in the world. That is no more.AMD has raised the game with Ryzen Threadripper, upping the processing density to 32 cores and 64 threads, and it's...

So there you have it; another incremental update for Intel but in some situations it could be more than that. Naturally pricing will come up again and again since –while Intel does seem to be reacting to AMD’s offerings- the i9-9980XE’s cost of $2,000 is stratospherically high and it also seems a bit tone-deaf to Threadripper’s positioning. But even with that taken into account, there’s still a ready and willing market for what the 9980XE has to offer.

Whether those improvements are enough to draw buyers back into the Skylake-X fold as excitement builds around AMD's next-generation server CPUs—and the potential Threadrippers derived from them—is a chapter yet to be written. For the moment, though, Intel is doing its best to put a happy ending on this chapter of its highest-end desktop chips, and a Core i9-9980XE ticking away at 4.5 GHz or better will make even the most demanding enthusiasts quite happy indeed.

When comparing against the AMD competition, it all depends on the workload. Intel has the better processor in most aspects of general workflow, such as lightly threaded workloads on the web, memory limited tests, compression, video transcoding, or AVX512 accelerated code, but AMD wins on dedicated processing, such as rendering with Blender, Corona, POV-Ray, and Cinema4D. Compiling is an interesting one, because in for both Intel and AMD, the more mid-range core count parts with higher turbo frequencies seem to do better.