The Intel Xeon W-3175X Review: 28 Unlocked Cores, $2999
by Ian Cutress on January 30, 2019 9:00 AM ESTGaming: Ashes Classic (DX12)
Seen as the holy child of DirectX12, Ashes of the Singularity (AoTS, or just Ashes) has been the first title to actively go explore as many of the DirectX12 features as it possibly can. Stardock, the developer behind the Nitrous engine which powers the game, has ensured that the real-time strategy title takes advantage of multiple cores and multiple graphics cards, in as many configurations as possible.
As a real-time strategy title, Ashes is all about responsiveness during both wide open shots but also concentrated battles. With DirectX12 at the helm, the ability to implement more draw calls per second allows the engine to work with substantial unit depth and effects that other RTS titles had to rely on combined draw calls to achieve, making some combined unit structures ultimately very rigid.
Stardock clearly understand the importance of an in-game benchmark, ensuring that such a tool was available and capable from day one, especially with all the additional DX12 features used and being able to characterize how they affected the title for the developer was important. The in-game benchmark performs a four minute fixed seed battle environment with a variety of shots, and outputs a vast amount of data to analyze.
For our benchmark, we run Ashes Classic: an older version of the game before the Escalation update. The reason for this is that this is easier to automate, without a splash screen, but still has a strong visual fidelity to test.
| AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
| Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
| Ashes: Classic | RTS | Mar 2016 |
DX12 | 720p Standard |
1080p Standard |
1440p Standard |
4K Standard |
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Ashes has dropdown options for MSAA, Light Quality, Object Quality, Shading Samples, Shadow Quality, Textures, and separate options for the terrain. There are several presents, from Very Low to Extreme: we run our benchmarks at the above settings, and take the frame-time output for our average and percentile numbers.
[game list table]
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
| Ashes: Classic | IGP | Low | Medium | High |
| Average FPS |  |
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| 95th Percentile |  |
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abufrejoval - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
So with the limited edition production numbers, quite clearly the price can be symbolically low, just so Intel can claim bragging rights: They are not interested in satisfying market demands, especially since far too many workstation and server customers might switch over from a Xeon Scalable offering, they just want to claim victory... everywhere... including 10nmJust pathetic!
And honestly, you shouldn't even report about it. Your mission is to inform consumers on products they can buy. If consumers cannot buy it, you should treat it very, very differently, if at all.
You're just being abused by Intel to push a brand that suffers for reasons.
SH3200 - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
This product cannibalizes half the current Xeon lineup as it provides ecc/rdimm at a fraction of the cost. I’d be amazed if FSI customers don’t prebuy every single one ever made before it even hits the public.br83taylor - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
I find it odd Ian is happy to run and report benchmarks with this processor going against Intel recommendation for bios settings, yet would not do it for the AMD processors with their PBO setting. Both of which seem to do very similar things. Letting the 2990WX run with PBO would give it a much fairer chance against this.GreenReaper - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
It's not unressonablr to test the system as given to you, especially when it is provided as a complete system, so may represent what end-users get. That said, it seems like he kinda called that out in the sideways manner by highlighting the fact that the system Intel had shipped to him was not actually using those specifications.outsideloop - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
This reminds me of the FX-9590. Massively overclocking silicon to keep up. Except now, the shoe is on the other foot.wow&wow - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Xeon W-3175X: $2999+$1500= $4499Ryzen TR 2900WX: $1799+$300= $2099
Is Intel trying to market it for “stupids” or those whose left brains being not right and right brains having nothing left :-D
ksec - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
I think we need some new innovation in Thermal Cooling, how we could cool more with less, ease and cheaper. We pushed to near 600W for CPU and GPU alone.mapesdhs - Saturday, February 2, 2019 - link
Ye cannae beat the laws of physics. :D Thermal density is a hard problem. Check out AdoredTV's video on the subject, it explains things nicely.The_Assimilator - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
This is Pentium 4 days all over again.bananaforscale - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
Kitty approves of heat output.