Final Thoughts
Pricing
The Intel Core i7-7820X LGA 2066 Skylake-X 8-Core 16-Thread Processor is available now for around £520. That’s a lot of money, but it’s also a lot of CPU. It’s a far cry from the £950 flagship Threadripper or the £1000-2000 i9’s, but it’s still the best performance you can get for half the price.
Overview
There’s a big market for extreme performance processors, but I wonder just how deep most peoples pockets are. As a content creator myself, the flagship i9 was a worthy investment, as is Threadripper. As expensive as these CPUs are, they can make me more money and save me more time in the office compared to what they actually cost me to buy. It’s an investment. However, not everyone wants to drop a few thousand on an upgrade. That’s where the i7-7820X comes into play, it’s walking that fine line of very expensive, but it delivers huge performance at a much lower cost than its big brothers.
Gaming, Rendering, and Beyond
This CPU is a big of a jack of all trades. When it comes to big number crunching tasks, video rendering in Adobe Premiere, or transcoding in Handbrake, this is the kind of CPU you’ll be happy to have in your rig. The 8-Core and 16-Thread design makes light work of anything you throw at it.
It’s not the fastest gaming CPU in the world, but it’s certainly up there with the best. X299 isn’t so much a gaming platform as it is a general workstation/extreme performance platform. However, with increased PCIe lanes, throwing in a few graphics cards, Optane, some M.2 storage, and more, it will obviously bring the grunt needed to power VR and 4K gaming. Content creation and game streaming can obviously benefit from the increased core count too.
Performance
It’s a great CPU and another welcome addition to the X299 platform. One thing I really like is just how easy the CPU is to overclock. Even on air, we were able to reach 4.7 GHz on all cores and if you’re running something like a custom loop setup, you may even reach 5.0 GHz on a good enough motherboard.
Pros
- Excellent all-round performance
- Great for content creators
- Extremely easy to overclock
- Competitively priced (relative to performance and core count)
- Great for gaming
Cons
- Requires a powerful cooler for overclocking
“At less than half the price of the current extreme CPUs such as TR and i9, the latest X299 i7 is not less than half the performance. If you’re looking for extreme performance, but still want more bang for your buck, the 7820X is the way to go!”
