The Intel Core i9-9980XE CPU Review: Refresh Until it Hertz
by Ian Cutress on November 13, 2018 9:00 AM ESTTest Bed and Setup
As per our processor testing policy, we take a premium category motherboard suitable for the socket, and equip the system with a suitable amount of memory running at the manufacturer's maximum supported frequency. This is also typically run at JEDEC subtimings where possible. It is noted that some users are not keen on this policy, stating that sometimes the maximum supported frequency is quite low, or faster memory is available at a similar price, or that the JEDEC speeds can be prohibitive for performance. While these comments make sense, ultimately very few users apply memory profiles (either XMP or other) as they require interaction with the BIOS, and most users will fall back on JEDEC supported speeds - this includes home users as well as industry who might want to shave off a cent or two from the cost or stay within the margins set by the manufacturer. Where possible, we will extend out testing to include faster memory modules either at the same time as the review or a later date.
| Test Setup | |||||
| Intel HEDT | i9-9980XE i9-7980XE i9-7960X i9-7940X i9-7920X |
ASRock X299 OC Formula |
P1.40 | TRUE Copper |
Crucial Ballistix 4x4GB DDR4-2666 |
| AMD TR4 | TR2 2970WX TR2 2920X |
ASUS ROG X399 Zenith |
1501 | Enermax Liqtech TR4 |
Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro 4x8GB DDR4-2933 |
| TR2 2990WX TR2 2950X |
ASUS ROG X399 Zenith |
0508 | Enermax Liqtech TR4 |
G.Skill FlareX 4x8GB DDR4-2933 |
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| GPU | Sapphire RX 460 2GB (CPU Tests) MSI GTX 1080 Gaming 8G (Gaming Tests) |
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| PSU | Corsair AX860i Corsair AX1200i |
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| SSD | Crucial MX200 1TB | ||||
| OS | Windows 10 x64 RS3 1709 Spectre and Meltdown Patched |
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| VRM Supplimented with SST-FHP141-VF 173 CFM fans | |||||
Unfortunately due to travel back and forth to the US for AMD’s Horizon Event and Supercomputing 2018, I was unable to look into overclocking performance for this review. We will hopefully cover it in another article.
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our multiple test beds. Some of this hardware is not in this test bed specifically, but is used in other testing.
| Hardware Providers | |||
| Sapphire RX 460 Nitro | MSI GTX 1080 Gaming X OC | Crucial MX200 + MX500 SSDs |
Corsair AX860i + AX1200i PSUs |
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| G.Skill RipjawsV, SniperX, FlareX |
Crucial Ballistix DDR4 |
Silverstone Coolers |
Silverstone Fans |
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Stasinek - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
It's indeed suprise to me that those new 24,32C AMD processors 2920,2970 are just worst in any therms than their 16C equivalents. In terms of perf/money perf/power just laughable.Linux changes a lot but who uses Linux and for what purpose?
I bet developers but what makes me really angry is that nobody even tries to use KVM, Xen, VirtualBox, VMware, VirtualBox as benchmarking tool for purpose of testing usage as small company server. In mine company lot of Remote Desktop sessions are connected to same server.
Someone would think - who needs good CPU? But it's only because dont used to solve real life problems and those problems are like importing big databases from obsolete programs, filtering, fixing and exporting to new ERP systems. This consumes lot of time to have fast CPU is crucial. Most of companies i know uses RDP server for that purpose and typical cheep portable laptops given to workers. To have AMD or Intel HDET tested in such purposes would be nice to see. Cause anyone can potencially have 32C anyone could benefit.. but rather than this kind test i used to see gaming.. gaming od HDET?! WTF
pandemonium - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
All of these "my work doesn't have any desktop users" comments crack me up. Congratulations. Your work is not the entire world of computing in a professional space, much less prosumer space. Get over yourselves.halcyon - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
@Ian CutressYour tests and review text are always a pleasure to read, thank you for the professionalism.
Questions related to the test suite (I know, everybody always wants something):
1. You are missing an Excel Spreadsheet calculation (Finance still uses a lot of these and they can peg all cores near 100% and be incredibly CPU dependent). Would be nice to see some for example an Excel Monte Carlo simulation kn the suite (local data)
2. Alternatively an R (language) based test for heavy statistical computation. Finding a one that is representative of real world workloads and strikes a balance between single core IPC and many core parallelisation might take some work. But this is one area where laptops just can't muster it and CUDA/OpenCL acceleration isn't often available at all.
3. For Web / JS framework it is nice to see SpeedoMeter and WebXPRT3, but for some reason V8 Web Tooling Bench is not there (https://v8.github.io/web-tooling-benchmark/ ). The old Kraken/JetStream/Octane are nice for reference, but not very representative of real world anymore for some time now (hence why they are abandoned).
Again thank you for this monumental work, the amount of tests is already superb!
For graphing results it would be so helpful to get a comparative price/perf graphed results browser (pick your baseline CPU, pick workloads, cpus on graph as a func of price/perf). This would enable auick viewinf of the efficient frontier in terms of price/perf for each workload and see the base CPU as an anchor.
Yeah, yeah, I know.... Just throwing this in here 😀
KAlmquist - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
These benchmarks also show the 16 core TR 2950X beating the 18 core i9-9980XE in some cases.KAlmquist - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
My previous comment was a reply to nexuspie's observation that, "These benchmarks show that the 9980's 18 cores often BEAT the 2990wx's 32 cores."Stasinek - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
Witch should lead to conlcusion AMD Threadripper 2 is just bad offer except 2950.It's the one and only AMD CPU worh mentioning - witch means TR4 16C is dead end.
AMD offers overpriced CPUs on that platform that is for sure.
Overpriced because half of cores are choking being absolute useless.
If 32C and 4 channels is too much cores/channel imagine RYEN 3 16C on dual channel..
It will be big dissapointment for some people i bet.
Regardless of pricing Intel 9980 is just great.
Stasinek - Wednesday, November 21, 2018 - link
Is that what you wanted to say?crotach - Wednesday, November 14, 2018 - link
I have to say I'm a big fan of HEDT platforms, I built my last workstation in 2011 and it still serves me well 7 years later. But looking at this and the X299 offering I really don't see why anyone would bother.Lolimaster - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
Till intel changes the way it builds high core count cpu's they can't compete with AMD and it will be even worse next year when AMD made an already cheaper way to produce high core count cpu's even cheaper, to sick levels.Gasaraki88 - Thursday, November 15, 2018 - link
I'm actually more interested in the i7-9800X vs. the i9-9900K. I want to see how the overclocking is compared to the i9-9900K before I just in to X299.