Friday, June 16th 2017
Core i9-7900X Skylake-X Review Shows Up
An Intel Core i9-7900X has appeared for a full review at the site Hexus.net. Spoiler alert, it clocks to 4.7 GHz on all ten cores with relative ease (only taking 1.25 V, apparently, though it racked up nearly 100°C in Cinebench at that voltage).
The review praised Intel's overclocking headroom and general muscle in a mostly positive review. Still, not all is rosy in Intel land. They found performance per watt to not have improved much if at all, criticized the high price tag, and Hexus.net had the following to say about the overall experience:
"X299 motherboards don't appear to be quite ready, there are question marks surrounding the Skylake-X processors due later this year, and at the lower end of the Core X spectrum, Kaby Lake-X is nothing short of puzzling."
It would seem AMD is not the only major chip-maker who can have motherboards ill prepared at launch time, even the mighty Intel may have teething issues yet.
You can read the full review (which is mostly positive, by the way) in the source link below.
Oh, and a special shoutout to our own @the54thvoid for discovering this article.
Source:
hexus.net
The review praised Intel's overclocking headroom and general muscle in a mostly positive review. Still, not all is rosy in Intel land. They found performance per watt to not have improved much if at all, criticized the high price tag, and Hexus.net had the following to say about the overall experience:
"X299 motherboards don't appear to be quite ready, there are question marks surrounding the Skylake-X processors due later this year, and at the lower end of the Core X spectrum, Kaby Lake-X is nothing short of puzzling."
It would seem AMD is not the only major chip-maker who can have motherboards ill prepared at launch time, even the mighty Intel may have teething issues yet.
You can read the full review (which is mostly positive, by the way) in the source link below.
Oh, and a special shoutout to our own @the54thvoid for discovering this article.

247 Comments on Core i9-7900X Skylake-X Review Shows Up
This is a legit question by the way. I've heard rumors about "microcracks" and such and am unsure what to think on that front.
Intel TIM is worse for power consumption as well btw. Less heat conductivity, means more heat, which means lower efficiency which means more power is required.
How does conductivity negatively impact efficiency?
And BTW, i9-7900X overclocks just fine.
If not, can't wait for next Core i11 with LakeLakeXxX codename, it will be much better for sure.
Core i-X, Geforce GTX-XXX, R-X are brand names. Whatever catchy name marketing team deemed the best.
Wondering what I will do with mine... they just got here today... :(Zzzzzzzzzz, you overclock, there are risks. But as I said, I'll gladly run it up there all day long as I have done before. It will last its warranty period... not worried. I don't keep these for more than a few years anyway. ;)
:lovetpu:
@cadaveca I Haven't played with you since BC2/BF3. can't wait to see what you get with those chips :toast:
These aren't things that can be explained in a simple post or article.
The problem is the people that think they are "experts" because they read about it in some online "article" and then spreading all the misinformation as fact.
I'm not pointing any fingers here just stating what I see.
Your point makes no sense as Intel did solder as recently as 6950x or SB for mainstream processors.
If you have to delid a CPU, in order to cool it, I'd say definitely not worth it since someone obviously short changed you. It's like saying you bought a Titan (GPU) & had to change the cheapo thermal paste because it ran obscenely hot when OCed, I'm sure many people don't like fiddling with their warranties either.
But seriously, at least specify who's wrong in what, helps keep the conversation relevant (and those interested, to google and inform themselves properly).
Ryzen is soldered, cool and efficient. Yet, it hits the wall very quickly.
In fact AMD has been having issues at high temp for years. There's a comparison of stock coolers at SPCR which showed (among other things) that A10 APU started throttling at 50*C, while i7 was fine up to 75-80*C.
Generally speaking, why are people so afraid of 100*C? Is it because water's boiling point? Don't worry - CPUs are not made of H2O...
And I'll add this: not one person that I have seen is asking for solder on GPUs, which tend to take up the same relative die space at the high-end, and push similar power consumption too compared to 7900X on full OC. Paste works just fine in GPUs, and CPUs are no different, never mind CPUs that are in most instances, going to be pulling less than 150W. This is the most hilarious topic ever, paste vs solder. Solder isn't needed, and is a waste of your hard-earned dollars, as evidenced by billions of GPUs sold over decades, never mind modern CPUs.
That's what I want, CPUs that can take the same abuse GPUs do, bare bloody die. I want 300W 4096 core CPUs, but not everyone can be so forward-thinking.
And yes, I de-lidded GPUs, too. So what. :roll:
:pimp:
AMD fixed their temps, so that's a rubbish point. Only old APU's and cpu's still have high temps, but they're now the extremely low budget options not many will buy except maybe for people just wanting a pc to work. Besides, raven ridge is coming to save the dat on the APU front and mobilr in general will be fixed with ryzen mobile.
AMD also manages to squeeze the most out of their cpu's at their rated tdp's, without extremely high temps. That's only possible because they use solder, not a sh*tty TIM. An 1800x for example doesn't need to be overclocked to get 95%+ out of your cpu because of that and a 1700 will just about work in a laptop paired with a 65w rx580.
I'm just stating the obvious. You can be an intel fanboy on mars if you like, but honestly being a fanboy of intel and not AMD right now just makes you look like you are the sort of person willing to buy an intel cpu made of cheese if it performs better than AMD's, even though it will melt. I don't care that you want to buy intel, but LOVING their new enthousiasts products?! That's just weird.
Sure it isn't, heck why do we need a lid, just to delid some of these mini furnaces later on? Because it makes better sense for the CPU maker to not sell them bare die, for all sorts of screw ups the retail buyer could do at his end.
So what does Intel do ~ you want more than 28 lanes shell out a grand, you want solder cough up 4k (xeon) or need ECC get a Xeon.
Their upsell is ridiculous, even by Apple standards. Not sure that's a good thing any which way you look at it.
the problem now isnt the cooler.. its getting adequate heat transfer from chip to cooler.. as chips get smaller the problem gets greater.. heater spreaders are also load spreaders they enable huge coolers to be attached to tiny chips.. a gpu chip is bigger so the problem isnt there..
but in the end it all only comes down to at most a couple of hundred extra mhz from any given chip before that highly speculative heat ceiling is hit.. a huge fuss about f-ck all..
trog
With that sort of IPC and clock speed I don't think Intel have anything to worry about just yet.
I predict their 16 and 18 core models to be able to match thread ripper clocks and therefore be the more powerful chips to buy.
But are they worth double AMD chips?
Not for me so I'll be going AMD for Christmas probably.
But for professionals Intel is probably still the way forward.
Honestly some are you are straight up ignoring the basic facts.
This thing is a 7700 k with 6 more cores, any of you that thought the 7700k was the best cpu ( especially for gaming) then you should be having wet knickers over this CPU.
Sure it's expensive as hell but our pay a premium for performance, all of you are jumping to the conclusion that this doesn't used a solder chip either, based on what? The temperatures at 4.7ghz with 10 cores in a monolithic package? Guys, I hate to brake it to you but that is going to get toasty no matter what, even if they used diamond heat spreaders and crap like that. This is a bigger chip that the i7 chips that don't use solder so in all likelihood this is a soldered part, but it's 10 cores at silly speeds so gets hot.
Run the thing at Ryzen speeds and it will run incredibly cool I recon.
Let's say you delid your CPU,(voiding warranty) use some sort of liquid metal between the IHS and die and benefit 20 degrees lower temps. Now let's say that if soldered the same chip would now run 20 degrees or so cooler.
Why would you rather buy a CPU with just paste instead of being soldered adding to your own personal cost and voiding warranty for what at the end would be the same result?
3.5-3.6ghz base is the minimum really nowadays 1440p+, which most HEDT buyers will game at and intel only manages 3.3 base. Yes, boost speeds are great,but in heavily multithreaded games it may struggle and you need a pretty good cooler just to prevent throttling from max boost, so mini-itx, an enthousiast favorite, is going to be a problem, unlike with ryzen 7 or probably the lower end threadrippers.
Intel really f-ed over its customers with that terrible thermal paste basically. Could've been 10% faster stock, but no, 1/10th of a cent for decent thermal paste was too much.
Slight disclaimer: it's nigh impossible for intel to tell of you oc-ed, unless they store it's highest clockspeed on-chip or you fry the cpu.