Intel Core i9 7980XE - 2.6GHz Eighteen Core Socket 2066 Processor

Beast

Absolute powerhouse of a CPU if you have the right workload for it.Now this CPU is the current king on the market and as a result you pay a steep premium on it, even if its performance is not massively greater then say the 7960X and in some workloads the considerably cheaper Threadripper platform, but like always you pay a price to have the top dog on the market.For multithreaded workload, its where this CPU shines, with my normal day to day overclock (4.8 GHz on 6 cores, 4.6 GHz on 12 cores), I see performance number's north of 4500 In cinebench, in essence this CPU dominates in tasks that are highly multi threaded. Being based on Skylake architecture, it also has very strong single core performance, with single core speed in excess of 200 with my day to day clocks. Now one thing to note, even if you hit say 4.8 GHz on a few core's the single core performance is not the same as say a 7700k at 4.8 GHz as Skylake-X and this CPU use a mesh architecture to communicate between the core's vs Ring Bus. It means there is a slight variation in communication which can mean a minor penalty in some applications.Back on topic however and with X299 and this CPU I have been more easily able to attain higher clock speeds on things like RAM being able to hit 3800 MHz with all 8 slots populated which was not possible on X99. If your planning to overclock this CPU heavily, delidding is really ideal. This thing under load on its own in power heavy situations overclocked can pull 500w + on its own so having the best cooling setup is ideal. Personally I use a custom loop.For overclocking, I have a good chip so can do 4.8 GHz+ on all 18 cores for benching purposes. Day to Day however I find going into the BIOS and overclocking on a per core basis is the way to go. Overclock a handful of core's (in some boards like the ASUS Rampage I have paired with this, the best core's have a * next to them) so that way in lightly threaded tasks such as gaming which rarely use more then 4-6 core's will run on the core's with a higher clock speed. Under a full load the other core's will spool up, but to a lesser degree. I find this is a nice way of keeping temps / power and noise all reasonable for daily use.Anyways, back to square one, this is a beast of a CPU, it can crush everything you throw at it. If your purely gaming go for a 8700k. While this CPU is no slouch when tuned properly, the 8700k will hit higher clock speeds, a architecture suited for gaming and not to mention massively cheaper. For workloads you can use more cores, for myself with modelling work, then this CPU comes into its own, at a price of course. Now why the 4 star's, well simply put, Intel using toothpaste TIM, is grating to say the least when prior HEDT platforms use soilder and even Ryzen chips use soilder.

Sold both kidneys for this but do not regret, now i can play minesweeper at 30FPS