Early benchmarks leak of Intel Core i9-7980XE

Intel's flagship HEDT processor starts shipping next week and the first benchmarks are already hitting the web. The Intel Core i9-7980XE is quite a beast, it's an 18-core processor with 36 threads, a 2.6GHz base clock, 4.2GHz Turbo, 4.4GHz Turbo 3.0 and a 165W TDP.

It's the first consumer processor with a core count of 18 but it's more aimed at prosumers and content creators. Gamers have little use of the HEDT series and the 7980XE has a huge $1,999 price tag.

Anyway, VideoCardz spotted some early benchmark scores that were gathered on a system with an ASUS APEX motherboard. One interesting finding during the Cinebench benchmark session was that the CPU boosts all cores to 4.2GHz during the benchmark. It's unclear why this is occurring as it's a lot higher than expected. Check the link for all the scores, it also includes wPrime, CPU-Z, 3DMark Fire Strike and 7-ZIP.

Single-threaded Cinebench R15 performance came in at 196 cb, which is exactly the same score achieved by the 7900X and 7820X processors. The extra cores do help a lot in the other tests. The 7980XE came out on top in these series of benchmarks and seems to pack a mighty punch.



Interestingly, VideoCardz also notes there will not be a lot of reviews of the 7980XE because Intel is not going to do wide sampling of this CPU. The market for the 7980XE is pretty small so the chip giant feels no need to give a sample to every major tech site.