Intel Core i9-9980XE Extreme Edition Review – It Hertz!

Performance and Overclocking Overview

Depending on which benchmarks you focus, these charts could deliver shocking results – however if you have been paying attention you can very likely guess what is coming next. Core i9-7980XE previously topped the charts in general tasks such as 3DMark and Core i9-9980XE raises the performance levels ever so slightly. We have no doubt the 9980XE is better than 7980XE but these results do not look like two different CPUs. Instead it feels like 9980XE is a 7980XE that came out of a better bin and delivers slightly higher performance.

In 3DMark Time Spy there is essentially no difference between 7980XE and 9980XE but when you look at 3DMark Fire Strike you can clearly see the Core-i9 9980XE pulls ahead on Auto settings thanks to those extra Megahertz. When we overclocked the two Intel CPUs we found the best speed was 4.6GHz on all cores for both CPUs and as a result performance of the two CPUs was pretty much identical.

What you are seeing here is the advantage that Core i9-9980XE brings in non-AVX workloads when you run the Intel CPUs on Auto settings. Non-AVX speeds are 3.8GHz for the i9-9980XE and 3.4GHz for i9-7980XE so for gaming the new CPU has an advantage.

Comparing the Intel CPUs to AMD we see that Threadripper 2950X does a decent job but loses out in straight performance. Clearly there is an argument to be made about value for money but in these tests Intel wins and AMD loses. The 32-core Threadripper 2990WX loses badly in 3DMark, however we expected nothing less.

Switching to CPU tests such as Cinebench and Blender shows the i9-9980XE once again has the lead over i9-7980XE on Auto settings. When the CPUs are overclocked to the same speeds they perform in an identical manner. This time, however the Threadripper 2990WX crushes Intel by a significant margin. Those 32 cores run at slower clock speeds than the 18 cores packed by Intel, however there are so many cores that they make mincemeat of the benchmarks. It simply doesn’t matter that AMD has no support for AVX-512 instructions as Threadripper steamrollers its way through the tests at a monstrous pace.

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