Core i9-7900X Skylake-X Review Shows Up

[Deleted member 172152]

A lot of people seem to be ragging on this but 10 cores at 4.7 in a monolithic design is epic.

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.

Intel said they aren't soldered, basically could have made this chips last year or sooner, 4.8ghz is possible, but then you need to put so much voltage through it, even 280mm radiators might not be enough to prevent throttling and with better thermal paste or solder base clocks could've been high enough for there to be no reason to overclock and void your warranty (overclocking in general voids your warranty, so AMD pushing ryzen to near-max from the factory is great and only possible because of the chips being soldered).

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.

 

[AndreiD]

People complain if it's bad thermal paste as well, although generally speaking it's good enough nowadays for nobody to care. Also, gpu's don't have lids and the paste is applied directly to the die, cutting out the terrible intel TIM middle man.
Cpu's aren't made of water, no. However, higher temps mean higher energy bills, lower oc's and a much higher chance of your cpu breaking, or even your mobo because your cpu needs to pull too much power.
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.

The TIM they use in Skylake-X is actually of very good quality, der8auer delided a few of them already and from what he says he only gets a ~10C improvement by using liquid metal, which is in line with the ~9C he got by removing the Indium solder sheet from a 5960X then adding liquid metal. If the layer of polymer TIM is thin enough then it should perform similarly to a thicker sheet of indium, without some of the reliability issues.
Intel material science engineers actually published a few studies about a decade ago on indium solder TIM and its potential reliability issues, here's the summary of one of them.
And if the temps are within spec then they shouldn't be an issue for CPU longevity, Intel CPUs start throttling anyway before exceeding that spec. The biggest issue is usually voltage since that can actually damage the little transistors inside the chip over time, even if temperatures are kept low.

Also AMD's lower TDPs are an architectural and node trait, nothing to do with using indium solder. And I'm not sure about that laptop with the R7 1700 being paired with an RX580 since that GPU is by far one of the worst on the market right now when it comes to perf/W.

People really need to stop spreading fud, I can understand that you're a fan of a publicly traded multi billion $ corporation, but that doesn't mean that you should spread fud.

 

[Deleted member 172152]

The TIM they use in Skylake-X is actually of very good quality, der8auer delided a few of them already and from what he says he only gets a ~10C improvement by using liquid metal, which is in line with the 10C he got by removing the Indium solder sheet from a 5960X then adding liquid metal. If the layer of polymer TIM is thin enough then it should perform similarly to a thicker sheet of indium, without some of the reliability issues.
Intel material science engineers actually published a few studies about a decade ago on indium solder TIM and its potential reliability issues, here's the summary of one of them.
And if the temps are within spec then they shouldn't be an issue for CPU longevity, Intel CPUs start throttling anyway before exceeding that spec. The biggest issue is usually voltage since that can actually damage the little transistors inside the chip over time, even if temperatures are kept low.

Also AMD's lower TDPs are an architectural and node trait, nothing to do with using indium solder. And I'm not sure about that laptop with the R7 1700 being paired with an RX580 since that GPU is by far one of the worst on the market right now when it comes to perf/W.

People really need to stop spreading fud, I can understand that you're a fan of a publicly traded multi billion $ corporation, but that doesn't mean that you should spread fud.

Well, than intel just sucks.

And the rx580 runs at 1100-1200mhz I believe and only has 4gb ram to keep costs and temp down. I assume some things have been changed in polaris to keep power usage down other than lowering clockspeeds. O, and the gl702zc has a b350 chip and the disclaimer you can't oc has been removed, so mayeb you could get it running at 3.7ghz on all cores. Just a shame there is no thunderbolt port for egpu's, because than I would've pre-ordered one. Still better than a max-q/mobile 3gb 1060 on average probably in new, relevant games and it migjt even beat a max-q/mobile 6gb 1060.

 

[EarthDog]

Well, than intel just sucks.

And the rx580 runs at 1100-1200mhz I believe and only has 4gb ram to keep costs and temp down..

1. Lol @ intel just sucks...
2. Ram doesnt really get hot man..that isnt it.

 

[Deleted member 172152]

1. Lol @ intel just sucks...
2. Ram doesnt really get hot man..that isnt it.

Maybe just to squeeze out that much more from the gpu for 65w. I dunno. I'm hoping for 8-core mobile ryzen cpu's to drop tdp a bit or achieve higher clocks and maybe they finally coupled infinity fabric loose from ram in mobile cpu's and raven ridge.

There is one intel thing I'm excited about btw, and that is the 15w quad-cores! Something spicy, but not hot in contrast with the expensive enthousiast cpu's!

 

[EarthDog]

So much hope for zen2... its not happening with zen.

 

[efikkan]

You AMD fans needs to stop this BS and return to the real world.
Even the source of most of the AMD hype, Wccftech, recognized the i7-7900X offered "Features Great OC Headroom, Insane Multi-Tasking Performance and Excellent IPC".

Skylake-X is better than AMD at overclocking, offers IPC improvements, more cores, and higher clocks. Still all the fanboys claims it's a disaster. The amount of Intel hate in this forum is really sad.

 

[Deleted member 172152]

So much hope for zen2... its not happening with zen.

Zen is great, zen2 will be greater! Still, 4ghz is plenty for 1440p in most cases and 4ghz-ish seems to be the most common boost/oc speed for -x ryzen. Unless you really want to just buy a new gpu at a later date, even though ddr5 is coming, and multi-core support barely increases, ryzen will serve you just fine for a fraction of the cost of the faster intel equivelant.

Also, barely any ipc improvements from broadwell-e to skylake-x, insane tenps to go with the insane overclock from the insanely low baseclock. O, and raid keys and a mere 28 lanes if you care about that stuff.

 

[EarthDog]

You crack me up...

Insane temps...insanely low base clocks (300mhz below ryzen).. hahahalolol jesus man... just ask amd to marry you already and get it over with... holy shit. Lol!

 

[Deleted member 172152]

You crack me up...

Insane temps...insanely low base clocks (300mhz below ryzen).. hahahalolol jesus man... just ask amd to marry you already and get it over with... holy shit. Lol!

Nah. I haven't been scorched by AMD's love!

 

[EarthDog]

"If you're not first, you're last" - Ricky Bobby

 

[HTC]

How will the smaller cache affect this CPU when compared with threadripper (with similar amount of cores) since it should have 32 MB (double that of R5/7, right)?

Since in certain workloads the cache's size has negative effects on performance, even @ overclocked speeds (compared to the 6950X), the disparity in cache size should give threadripper the advantage, despite it's lower clocks, no?

 

[Vlada011]

Nah. I haven't been scorched by AMD's love!

It's not important base clock, important is Turbo Boost 3.0. Intel guarantee you that every sample will work on 4.5GHz.
That's most important, all Intel processors when you install work on Turbo Boost, It's enabled by default. OK i9-7900X will work maybe on 4.3GHz Turbo Boost 2.0 but he is stable and on 4.5GHz.

If you look on that way who would buy i7-5960X when single threaded performance as weaker than i7-3770K.
But of course no one keep him on 3.0GHz, that's funny, People keep him on 4.0-4.5GHz, over 30% better perfomance in single and multi than default.
Only AMD look Intel's result on 3.0GHz and base frequency when compare with their processors. Because AMD OC 200MHz and Intel 1000-1500MHz.
Difference between i7-6900K and 1800X after you overclock both is much different than default setting because Intel have low frequency.
No one use such processors to work on 3.0-3.5GHz that's killing fps in games. Better fps have CPU with 4 cores on 4.5GHz than. But after you overclock Xtreme on 4.0GHz + you get something completely different.
Because of that I thin Intel Turbo Boost 3.0 is great.
To be honest I would not overclock i9-7900X first days.
i7-5820K need to be manually overclocked to be comparable with i7-6700K in single apps. but i9-7900X is out of box ready for gaming, only enable Turbo Boost 3.0.
I would keep Adaptive clock, on High Performance Plan 4.5GHz and on Balanced idle frequency.

Only is problem because I can't see reason to upgrade from six core to six core. Again I will be slower than 1800X than. That's not worth paying premium motherboard for that.
I search for some i9-7900X without warranty or maybe i7-7820X or ES. Than immediately I buy CPU and sell my platform to buy Rampage VI Extreme.

 

[trparky]

I don't review CPUs, and I don't care if a CPU "overheats" because I know that they have built-in protections that keep them away from anything dangerous, so really, they actually never overheat.

It may not be a problem in the short term but in the long term it's going to result in less overall life of the processor. The fact that these chips are showing signs of being at 100c under full load is very disconcerting, 100c is water boiling temperatures. I see this as a major step backwards back to the days of the Intel Pentium 4 Prescott chips that doubled as a space heater. No need to have a space heater in those cold January months (North America), just get yourself an Intel Pentium 4 Prescott chip and you'll be toasty warm.

TIM is great because

Until it turns to shit under the IHS and it can't conduct heat properly which is exactly what we've seen on recent Intel chips as they age. I'm sure that we wouldn't be talking about the TIM if Intel had chosen to use a quality TIM such as Arctic Silver or Thermal Grizzly. But no, they had to use the cheapest shit on the market and practically force us to void the damn CPU warranty to get anywhere close to decent running load processor temps.

Zen is great, Zen v2.0 will be greater!

If Ryzen v2.0 is manufactured on the new GlobalFoundries 7nm process that many of us think it will be, Ryzen v2.0 will not only be better than Ryzen v1.0 but it will thoroughly kick Intel's ass all the way to the moon and back. Ryzen's architecture can scale, it's showing how it can scale with the introduction of Threadripper and EPYC. The thing that's holding Ryzen back now is the lack of quality silicon (the really good stuff is being reserved for Threadripper and EPYC) and the fact that it's still 14nm. If they can get it down to 7nm they will really be able to clock these things high, quite possibly as high a 5 GHz out of the box, hence my statement about them kicking Intel's ass to the moon and back.

In a lot of ways I don't just want AMD to hurt Intel, I want AMD to make them bleed. I want them to gut punch Intel so hard they'll be pissing blood for the next week. For too damn long Intel has been screwing us over, I want them to not only hurt but I want them doubled over in agony as AMD stands over them yelling "Does that hurt?! Yeah! I bet it does!" I want them to go Rocky all over Intel.

 

[Deleted member 172152]

It may not be a problem in the short term but in the long term it's going to result in less overall life of the processor. The fact that these chips are showing signs of being at 100c under full load is very disconcerting, 100c is water boiling temperatures. I see this as a major step backwards back to the days of the Intel Pentium 4 Prescott chips that doubled as a space heater. No need to have a space heater in those cold January months (North America), just get yourself an Intel Pentium 4 Prescott chip and you'll be toasty warm.


Until it turns to shit under the IHS and it can't conduct heat properly which is exactly what we've seen on recent Intel chips as they age. I'm sure that we wouldn't be talking about the TIM if Intel had chosen to use a quality TIM such as Arctic Silver or Thermal Grizzly. But no, they had to use the cheapest shit on the market and practically force us to void the damn CPU warranty to get anywhere close to decent running load processor temps.


If Ryzen v2.0 is manufactured on the new GlobalFoundries 7nm process that many of us think it will be, Ryzen v2.0 will not only be better than Ryzen v1.0 but it will thoroughly kick Intel's ass all the way to the moon and back. Ryzen's architecture can scale, it's showing how it can scale with the introduction of Threadripper and EPYC. The thing that's holding Ryzen back now is the lack of quality silicon (the really good stuff is being reserved for Threadripper and EPYC) and the fact that it's still 14nm. If they can get it down to 7nm they will really be able to clock these things high, quite possibly as high a 5 GHz out of the box, hence my statement about them kicking Intel's ass to the moon and back.

In a lot of ways I don't just want AMD to hurt Intel, I want AMD to make them bleed. I want them to gut punch Intel so hard they'll be pissing blood for the next week. For too damn long Intel has been screwing us over, I want them to not only hurt but I want them doubled over in agony as AMD stands over them yelling "Does that hurt?! Yeah! I bet it does!" I want them to go Rocky all over Intel.

I got thinking and isn't the max recommended temp for nost thermal pastes something like 80-90c with a PEAK of 100-110 in noctua's case? How long untill your i9 starts throttling or the system starts crashing if you can't fit a 280mm AIO and maybe don't even oc and only can fit a mid-range/snall cooler in your system? Might as well call it the supernova lineup because intel's sucking you into a symbolic blackhole which will explode magnificently!

 

[trparky]

Isn't the max recommended temp for most thermal pastes something like 80-90c with a PEAK of 100-110 in Noctua's case?

Exactly and that's premium thermal compound that you're talking about there. Intel isn't using that kind of stuff, they're using the cheapest shit that they can get in bulk. It's like these damn things are manufactured to fail with cheap-ass shit TIM.

There was a video that I watched on YouTube where someone took a year old Intel chip that was running a bit too hot for his liking so he took the chip and de-lidded it and sure enough, the cheap-ass shit TIM that Intel was using for his chip damn near crumbled as he scraped it away. That tells you something!

 

[Deleted member 172152]

Exactly and that's premium thermal compound that you're talking about there. Intel isn't using that kind of stuff, they're using the cheapest shit that they can get in bulk. It's like these damn things are manufactured to fail with cheap-ass shit TIM.

There was a video that I watched on YouTube where someone took a year old Intel chip that was running a bit too hot for his liking so he took the chip and de-lidded it and sure enough, the cheap-ass shit TIM that Intel was using for his chip damn near crumbled as he scraped it away. That tells you something!

So temps are bad and will only get worse! Considering a high-end air cooler gets 93c in prime95 at stock speeds and 73c in handbrake, it's not looking good for oc-ers with air coolers and a 240mm radiator doesn't fair to welk at 4.6ghz and a 280mm struggles with 4.7ghz! Guess your oc will only last a year and then you'll have to void your warranty in such a way you're definitely not getting a replacement if something goes wrong!

 

[trparky]

Exactly. These chips are practically designed to fail because of Intel's stupidity.

New PC sales have been down for the last couple of years, what better way to force people to buy new PCs thus have to buy new CPUs than to purposely design their new CPUs to prematurely fail?

 

[EarthDog]

The things people make such a big deal about are truly perplexing sometimes...

Designed to fail...lol

Insane temps... lol

Thinking one video in youtube about paste borking is The Gospel and it happens on all/most/many...lol

Thinking this is going to prevent an average consumer or most enthusiasts from buying it... lol

Come on guys... use your head for a second would ya?

 

[trparky]

Insane temps

I don't know about you but I buy things to last, I expect my hardware to last for more than two years. With the way that recent Intel chips have been made there's no way that's even remotely possible without de-liding them thus voiding your warranty (which I have no desire to do so).

Sure, I understand that the chip is designed to run at high temperatures but that doesn't mean it's healthy for them to be constantly running at such high temperatures. 100 degrees Celsius is hot, damned hot; too damn hot for a chip to be running at. I don't care if it can "handle" it, it's way too damn hot.

 

[EarthDog]

I don't know about you but I buy things to last, I expect my hardware to last for more than two years. With the way that recent Intel chips have been made there's no way that's even remotely possible without de-liding them thus voiding your warranty (which I have no desire to do so).

Sure, I understand that the chip is designed to run at high temperatures but that doesn't mean it's healthy for them to be constantly running at such high temperatures. 100 degrees Celsius is hot, damned hot; too damn hot for a chip to be running at. I don't care if it can "handle" it, it's way too damn hot.

how does one respond to this post? You admit its ok... then the next damn sentence you dont care if intel says its ok.i told you earlier they will last their warranty... i know this as much as you know it will last two years. Difference is, if done it for years with multiple generations and you/others are holding on to misinformed opinions..

Point is, run it where its 90c peak like the advice those in the know always say. You are still getting a faster cpu with more overclocking headroom than the cannot-actually-compare-to amd temps.

Im mean facts are in front of you about the temp being ok... i cant help anyone belive it. Leads horse to water...

Its just funny to see personal preference cloud judgement and form opinion..then the opinion spread fud.

 

[efikkan]

How will the smaller cache affect this CPU when compared with threadripper (with similar amount of cores) since it should have 32 MB (double that of R5/7, right)?

Since in certain workloads the cache's size has negative effects on performance, even @ overclocked speeds (compared to the 6950X), the disparity in cache size should give threadripper the advantage, despite it's lower clocks, no?

Skylake-X quadruples the L2 cache while reducing the L3 cache. The L2 cache is much faster, and with the previous inclusive L3 cache, all the L2 cache is duplicated in the L3 just in case another core needs it. In real live >90% of this is waste, so the reduction in L3 is not nearly as dramatic as it sounds. The overall cache hierarchy is clearly more efficient for Skylake-X.

Intel has been using 256kB L2 cache for many years, while AMD is using 512kB. Most people are under the misconception that the cache hierarchy is storing the "important stuff", but in reality it's just a streaming buffer. The entire contents of the L2 cache is swapped out thousands of times per second. A larger L2 cache makes the CPU able to more eagerly prefetch data, which in turn improves the hit rate which reduces stalls of the CPU. This should help nearly use case, but probably especially data intensive use cases like video encoding.

These changes are definitely a step in the right direction. But that's not to say that we can expect similar gains from simply increasing the L2 cache, since the gains for each increase will be less.

 

[trparky]

But how long can the chip withstand those temperatures? We've already seen that the cheap shitty TIM that Intel uses in their chips turns to clay after some time due to extreme temperature fluctuations. Eventually the TIM won't be able to conduct the heat properly and you're going to eventually lose the ability to overclock the chip due to the inability to get rid of the heat fast enough. It may be OK for the chip to run at 90c in the short term but in the long term it's going to be very bad news.

 

[EarthDog]

Ive went over it before in the thread and my previous post (anyone reading them or has this degraded into trolling? Feels like i make points that are missed completely, lol!)...as ive said, ive run chips 100% at close to 90c for YEARS. That doesnt mean some wont fail, but its not even remotely close to the doosmday prophecy about it a few of you have running high temps the silicon is designed for.

For someone that doesnt f@h where cpu is running like that 24/7, in the vast majority of cases, it will easily last well past its warranted life.

 

[trparky]

Some of us aren't very comfortable having our CPUs running that damn hot. I get scared when my CPU starts running hotter than 70c.