Intel Core i9-7960X Review: Skylake-X At 16 Cores

Project CARS, Far Cry Primal & Rise of the Tomb Raider

Project CARS

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The Core i9-7960X offers leading performance against the rest of our field at stock settings, and tuning yields a solid 11.5% gain on average.

Given its price, the quad-core Core i7-7700K continues to complement our GeForce GTX 1080 well, while AMD's Ryzen Threadripper processors suffer in Game mode. Then again, we know this title slows down even more if you leave Threadripper in Creator mode, so Intel's advantage is likely a simple matter of getting more done per cycle.

Far Cry Primal

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Far Cry Primal refuses to load on CPUs with more than 24 threads. Although we could have disabled eight of the -7960X’s threads, we instead chose to turn off half of them to match Ryzen Threadripper 1950X’s thread count in Game mode as an experiment. This gives us a look at “like” performance with the same number of threads.

The Threadripper models don’t take a lead, but they aren’t far behind after tuning. Meanwhile, Intel's Core i7-7700K shows why we don't typically recommend high-end desktop CPUs for gaming PCs.

Rise of the Tomb Raider

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The Core i9-7960X unsurprisingly delivers impressive performance during our Rise of the Tomb Raider benchmark, besting Core i9-7900X in stock and overclocked trim.

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