Introduction
Intel Core i9-7900X
With Ryzen hitting the market a few months ago, it was only a matter of time before Intel played their hand. Admittedly, we all feel like Intel may have rushed their new Skylake-X hardware to market a little earlier than expected. However, with a 10-core 20-thread design, as well as improvements to the cache and VRM design, new instruction sets, and more, we’re still expecting great things from the Core i9.
Want to see more of the i9-7900X? Check out our reviews of the Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 9 Motherboard and ASUS ROG STRIX X299-E Gaming Motherboard.
At around £1000, this CPU is freaking expensive, there’s no excusing that fact. However, Intel thinks this will be the fastest consumer CPU on the market, and if true, then they’ll have no problems commanding whatever price they like. There’s a big market out there, and when it comes to the best performance, enough people are willing to pay up for it. Of course, for rendering and other processor-heavy tasks, time is money, so £1000+ on a CPU that could save many hours of work can always pay off elsewhere.
So let’s take a look at the specifications and see where your big investment goes!
Essentials
- Product Collection – Intel® Core™ X-series Processors
- Code Name – Products formerly Skylake
- Vertical Segment – Desktop
- Processor Number – i9-7900X
- Lithography – 14 nm
Performance
- Number of Cores – 10
- Number of Threads – 20
- Processor Base Frequency – 3.30 GHz
- Max Turbo Frequency – 4.30 GHz
- Cache – 13.75 MB L3
- Bus Speed – 8 GT/s DMI3
- Intel® Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0 Frequency ‡ – 4.50 GHz
- TDP – 140 W
Memory Specifications
- Max Memory Size (dependent on memory type)128 GB
- Memory TypesDDR4-2666
- Max # of Memory Channels4
- ECC Memory Supported ‡No
Expansion Options
- Scalability1S Only
- PCI Express Revision3.0
- Max # of PCI Express Lanes44
amd ryzen 1800x has new performance improvement is it being shown here?
At the moment you can’t the mosfets and VRM get over 100°C even the Motherboard CPU cables get up to 65°C and it was test on a bench open air now imagine inside a case.
How much better performance does it offer as compared to the previous model ?
This is what happens when you have no real competition for almost a decade and then suddenly your competition comes out with a product that is much cheaper and also faster in some workloads. Intel went from 10 cores to 18 cores as a reaction to thread-ripper. Yet, they messed up by using thermal-paste (a cheap one at that, not your arctic silver 5 or conductonaut) on a CPU that costs 1000 dollars instead of soldering it directly. Intel also messed up with the platform. The VRMs can barely handle the 10 core CPU, much less the 18 core. The Core i7 7740K and Core i5 7640K have no business being on HEDT. It should have gone to the mainstream platform instead, because they only support dual channel and have relatively limited PCI-E lanes. The only justification would have been the addition of quad-channel memory and adding PCI-E lanes, which they did not do to save money on a redesign. I hope Intel market share in CPUs falls to under 50% so that they wake up and realize that their anti-consumer and anti-competitive practices are not going to work anymore.
What competition Ryzen is losing from Core i7 in almost all games and Threadripper is expected slower from Core i9….Intel is still the king of performance
Marginally losing and it’s half the price. Totally no competition.
“Threadripper is expected slower from Core i9”
This is especially true in HEDT segment when “muh megahurtz” mean jack.