Yes, it might seem strange to see the company's most powerful processor with a base clock speed under 3GHz. But what's more important are the boost figures, which will kick in when you actually need more computing power. As for the other members of the X-series family, the 16-core model will feature speeds between 2.8GHz and 4.4GHz, while the 14-core version starts at 3.1GHz. As usual, Intel can reach higher speeds on chips with fewer cores since there's less of a heat issue to worry about.

It'll be a while until we get full benchmarks from these chips, but Intel gave us a small preview from its own testing. The 16-core i9 CPU reached a Cinebench R15 score of 3,200, while running an NVIDIA GTX 1080Ti GPU. That's below a 24-core Xeon E5 2697, according to 3D Fluff's database. The quad-core i7-7700K, meanwhile, scored just 966 on that same benchmark.

You can nab the 14- to 18-core i9 CPUs on September 25th while the 12-core version is coming sooner, on August 28th. The other chips are already available.