The Intel Xeon W-3175X Review: 28 Unlocked Cores, $2999
by Ian Cutress on January 30, 2019 9:00 AM ESTGaming: Civilization 6 (DX12)
Originally penned by Sid Meier and his team, the Civ series of turn-based strategy games are a cult classic, and many an excuse for an all-nighter trying to get Gandhi to declare war on you due to an integer overflow. Truth be told I never actually played the first version, but every edition from the second to the sixth, including the fourth as voiced by the late Leonard Nimoy, it a game that is easy to pick up, but hard to master.
Benchmarking Civilization has always been somewhat of an oxymoron – for a turn based strategy game, the frame rate is not necessarily the important thing here and even in the right mood, something as low as 5 frames per second can be enough. With Civilization 6 however, Firaxis went hardcore on visual fidelity, trying to pull you into the game. As a result, Civilization can taxing on graphics and CPUs as we crank up the details, especially in DirectX 12.
Perhaps a more poignant benchmark would be during the late game, when in the older versions of Civilization it could take 20 minutes to cycle around the AI players before the human regained control. The new version of Civilization has an integrated ‘AI Benchmark’, although it is not currently part of our benchmark portfolio yet, due to technical reasons which we are trying to solve. Instead, we run the graphics test, which provides an example of a mid-game setup at our settings.
AnandTech CPU Gaming 2019 Game List | ||||||||
Game | Genre | Release Date | API | IGP | Low | Med | High | |
Civilization VI | RTS | Oct 2016 |
DX12 | 1080p Ultra |
4K Ultra |
8K Ultra |
16K Low |
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
Civilization VI | IGP |
Average FPS | |
95th Percentile |
We had issues running Civilization beyond IGP, we're looking into exactly why.
136 Comments
View All Comments
eva02langley - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
Forget to mention Omnium Gatherum - The Burning ColdPeachNCream - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
"On the power side of the equation, again the W-3175X comes in like a wrecking ball, and this baby is on fire."It's more like a Miley Cyrus licking a sledgehammer thing to me.
sgeocla - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
Computex 2018: Intel 28 core 5 Ghz out by end of year.February 2019: Intel 28 core 4.5 Ghz, costs 70% more than competing product.
Intel is early on promises and late on delivery as always.
BigMamaInHouse - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
The CPU is 3000$ + 1500$ MB+ ECC + eXtreme case/PSU/AIO.Thanks Ian Cutress for the honest review!
(unlike "JustBuyIt that gave this fail product(Total System) 4.5/5 rating vs 2990WX 3.5/5 because its expensive!")
Morawka - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
oh wow, i didn't realize the Dominus Extreme was so expensive.tamalero - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
We're getting a ton of "sponsored" BS articles lately that are cynical.eva02langley - Thursday, January 31, 2019 - link
WCCFtech gave the MSI 2080 TI lightning 1600$ GPU a 10/10 for value...FMinus - Friday, February 1, 2019 - link
RX 570 is 10/10 along with maybe the GTX 1060, everything else is going down the value ladder pretty fast from that point on. For any consumer/gaming oriented GPU that passes the $500 mark I'd give it -1/10 value score.DanNeely - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
The on stage demo was using a chilled water setup, that they managed to push that system higher than Ian could with room temperature water is only to be expected.jardows2 - Wednesday, January 30, 2019 - link
This seems like a really good processor for a productivity station. I think, especially at the expected price, it would sell really well. That has me puzzled then as to why Intel would have such a limited run. The supposed figures is barely enough to send to review sites around the world, let alone have a profitable product line. If they produced 10X the amount of these, they'd probably sell them all. Why is Intel leaving easy money on the table? Something doesn't seem right about this picture.