Intel Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition Processor Review

Synthetic Benchmarks

3DMark Firestrike

There’s no mucking about here, this big and expensive processor does exactly what you would expect! The 7980XE set our highest ever score in 3DMark. However, it’s when we overclocked the CPU that things got really crazy, scoring an insane 25158 with the CPU clocked at 4.6 GHz on air… simply incredible.

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Overclocked

Unigine Superposition 1080p Extreme

Unigine is far more about the GPU than the CPU, and what we’re looking for here is consistent PCIe throughput. Sure, some may refer to this as “throttling” and there’s clearly no problem with that here. Of course, our overclock did help improve that score regardless.

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Overclocked

PCMark 10 Express

Faster clocks not more cores usually seem to do well in PCMark 10, but the XE still scored extremely well. Not that we expected a 16 core CPU to suck at day-to-day office tasks.

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Overclocked

WPrime 32M and 1024M

We’ve seen some insanely fast scores throughout 2017, but the XE is in another league of fast. Stock performance was so close to being 50 seconds dead, which is amazing for 1024M. However, with a simple overclock to 4.6 GHz on all cores, it blazed a trail to 40 seconds; cutting 10 seconds from 50 is a very big deal.

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Overclocked

Cinebench R15

We’re not done with setting new high scores yet, as the XE crushed everything in Cinebench, beating the Threadripper by around 500 points, and even scoring some of our best ever single core performance too.

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Overclocked

It’ll come as no shock that it pulled even further into the lead while overclocked, gaining almost a full 1000 points on the Threadripper, and leaving the 7900X looking like a dual-core in comparison.

Handbrake MP4 to MKV Conversion 4K

Knocking the XE down a few pegs, the Handbrake score didn’t blow me away. I honestly think it should be higher, and perhaps we’re going to see some improvements here with a software update, and perhaps even a BIOS update. This isn’t a bad score, not at all for 4K rendering, but it should be higher.

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Overclocked