Intel Core i9-9980XE CPU Review: Still Too Expensive

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Shadow Of War and Project CARS 2

Middle-earth: Shadow Of War

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Shadow of War leans heavier on graphics resources than host processing, so we don't see large deltas between the fastest and slowest CPUs. Keep this in mind when shopping for your next gaming processor: modern games respond more readily to cards on the high-end of the GPU hierarchy than powerful CPUs. This is doubly true as you scale up to 2560x1440 and 3840x2160.

Project CARS 2

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Although Project CARS 2 is purportedly optimized for threading, clock rates obviously affect frame rates. The Core i9-9900K consequently makes up for its "meager" eight-core configuration with a blistering 5 GHz dual-core Turbo Boost bin for first place.

Overclocking Core i9-7980XE to 4.2 GHz yields an impressive speed-up, and we expect that the -9980XE will match or exceed those results once we have a chance to tune it.

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Paul Alcorn
Paul Alcorn

Paul Alcorn is the Deputy Managing Editor for Tom's Hardware US. He writes news and reviews on CPUs, storage and enterprise hardware.
20 Comments Comment from the forums
  • lperreault21
    so double the price per core with less than half the cores as the AMD equivalent, all within spitting distance in terms of performance, for a significantly more money, and no upgrade path on the socket (most likely) and a 4/5 ... wtf toms
    Reply
  • rantoc
    How about just no for that price...
    Reply
  • BulkZerker
    I'll pay about $950...
    Reply
  • mikebabigian
    Does it fix all the Spectre problems? If not, then no way.
    Reply
  • rs.anantmishra
    AMD's Ryzen Threadripper chips land quite a ways down our charts. With that said, we did test in AMD's recommended Game Mode.

    Does this turn off many of the TR's cores? If yes, then these benchmarks are no good right?
    Reply
  • rs.anantmishra
    Also, why the hell this dude has included gaming benchmarks? This guy himself says that these are not gaming CPU's and then goes ahead and makes 3 of the 5 benchmark pages about gaming!!!!

    That's just super weird man! Are you sure what you're talking about???
    Reply
  • rs.anantmishra
    This is just a terrible review. lol
    Reply
  • velocityg4
    I'm curious as to why Adobe Premiere was not included in the Adobe tests? Premiere is one of the few Adobe programs which benefits from heavy multi-core performance. Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects are still mostly focused on one to a few cores.
    Reply
  • pct8750
    Hi, Paul!
    Did Intel officially announce Skylake-X Refresh be manufactured on 14++ node?
    9980XE Stepping is the same as 7980XE.
    Stepping is 4, there is no change.
    Reply
  • Kaz_2_
    Biased whole tome article dedicate to intel. This should be rated 2/5 like linus tech has said
    Reply