The Intel Core i9-9990XE Review: All 14 Cores at 5.0 GHz
by Dr. Ian Cutress on October 28, 2019 10:00 AM ESTCPU Performance: Office Tests
The Office test suite is designed to focus around more industry standard tests that focus on office workflows, system meetings, some synthetics, but we also bundle compiler performance in with this section. For users that have to evaluate hardware in general, these are usually the benchmarks that most consider.
All of our benchmark results can also be found in our benchmark engine, Bench.
3DMark Physics: In-Game Physics Compute
Alongside PCMark is 3DMark, Futuremark’s (UL’s) gaming test suite. Each gaming tests consists of one or two GPU heavy scenes, along with a physics test that is indicative of when the test was written and the platform it is aimed at. The main overriding tests, in order of complexity, are Ice Storm, Cloud Gate, Sky Diver, Fire Strike, and Time Spy.
Some of the subtests offer variants, such as Ice Storm Unlimited, which is aimed at mobile platforms with an off-screen rendering, or Fire Strike Ultra which is aimed at high-end 4K systems with lots of the added features turned on. Time Spy also currently has an AVX-512 mode (which we may be using in the future).
In simpler titles like Ice Storm, having that high frequency causes the 9990XE to be the best physics calculator for this test that we have.
GeekBench4: Synthetics
A common tool for cross-platform testing between mobile, PC, and Mac, GeekBench 4 is an ultimate exercise in synthetic testing across a range of algorithms looking for peak throughput. Tests include encryption, compression, fast Fourier transform, memory operations, n-body physics, matrix operations, histogram manipulation, and HTML parsing.
I’m including this test due to popular demand, although the results do come across as overly synthetic, and a lot of users often put a lot of weight behind the test due to the fact that it is compiled across different platforms (although with different compilers).
We record the main subtest scores (Crypto, Integer, Floating Point, Memory) in our benchmark database, but for the review we post the overall single and multi-threaded results.
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DazFG - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
Would like to see a average performance/Watt chart.abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
The older 3Dmark physics tests don't scale to all available processor cores, so those numbers are misleading. My observation has been that the newer/more demanding the base benchmark, the wider the physics. So e.g. I doubt that Ice Storm actually scores beyond 4 physical cores, while I have seen the physics benchmark correllating to the DX12 graphics (keep forgetting the name) actually pushed all 18 cores in my workstation. I run HWinfo on a secondary screen to monitor what's happening on the system and it cleary reflects that most cores aren't used on these CPU-only physics tests.abufrejoval - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
1.290V at 5 GHz all core may be "amazing" but it should really be "expected": Any chip that requires more voltage and thus power to push electrons through layer interconnects will fail the binning because of heat. And with every little part of 14 cores and their caches needing to qualify, it's easy to see how rare these are.DixonSoftwareSolutions - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
I'm still holding out for the i9-9999XE.Hifihedgehog - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
Agreeing to disagree with you, Ian, after seeing the benchmark results, I would hardly call this the slam dunk and beast it is made out to be. It is good in several benchmarks but it is highly specialized to the point I would argue the 9900KS would be the better choice of the two in nearly all cases for high frequency applications and the 3900X (and by extension 3950X) in multi-core applications. All in all, I am not really impressed and even less so with Threadripper 3000 and Cascade Lake on the verge of release.lejeczek - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
Who cares about tests done on Windows? Who would bother with Chrome compilation on Windows?? Author(s) sees that increasingly more tests are being done with Open Source and clumsily tries to mimic that. But for those interested in real testing - go to phoronix.com and openbenchmarking.orgLots love, xxx.
Urufu - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
Not interested because that's not the real world that people experience every day when using these microprocessors. My apologies for seeming abrupt.lejeczek - Thursday, October 31, 2019 - link
This certainly will sound abrupt - it's for that tiny little world and tiny people in it - the office?? Step outside for a moment and look at big data, clusters, HPC, all sort of servers & services, also academia! Linux & open source everywhere. Why?Might think... some media streaming, transcoding, codecs, etc. you might need that i9-9990XE beast in the office and for windows - sure if you click once here once there to run something - heavy duty transcoding that's Linux all around the clock.
But if one does only pure 'office' and thinks s/he must have this i9-9990XE - well these are the same sort of people who even today when it makes no financial sense whatsoever(do not mention this is not 'office' cpu), who have been happy to pay hefty taxes to Intel for years, those people will do it anyway, will waste money on it, as they do with anything else I'm sure.
But anyway, 'the office' stuff also we do with Linux, easy.
TEAMSWITCHER - Wednesday, October 30, 2019 - link
There is still a metric-sh*t-ton of software development that happens on Windows.MattZN - Tuesday, October 29, 2019 - link
Did you say 600W under full load? For a single CPU socket and only 14 cores? That isn't a wattage that will beget a limited market. That's a wattage that makes the chip D.O.A. No market. At all. Anywhere. Not for 'high frequency trading' or anything else.-Matt