Intel's latest Core X-Series processor for PC-building enthusiasts in the high-end desktop (HEDT) field is the Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition. Core X-Series is Intel's class of desktop chips for serious power users, and this new entry is part of the chip giant's latest 10th Generation CPU wave. But unlike the great leap forward we've seen with some of Intel's 10th Generation Core mobile CPUs, the Core i9-10980XE is much the same chip as its previous-generation Core X predecessor, the Core i9-9980XE Extreme Edition, at least as far as specs are concerned. The single noteworthy improvement is a major price drop to $979, down from $2,000 for its last-gen equivalent. While the price-to-performance ratio is therefore much better than before, 2019's competing chips from AMD's Ryzen family (especially the mainstream AM4 Ryzen 9 3950X at $749 below it, and a host of Ryzen Threadripper chips above it) are an even better value still.

An 18-Core Powerhouse

With 18 cores, 36 threads, and a thermal design power (TDP) rating of 165 watts, the Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition is clearly intended to serve as the brains of an over-the-top desktop rig. This chip is overkill for anyone who doesn't regularly run resource-intensive software applications designed to take advantage of all the cores and threads available to them. Some potential use cases are 4K or 8K video editing, data science applications, or compiling immense code bases. For nearly any other consumer or prosumer computing task, including 3D gaming, the Core i9-10980XE cuts like a knife through butter.

The Core i9-10980XE is built on Intel's Cascade Lake microarchitecture (here dubbed "Cascade Lake-X"), a 14-nanometer production process on which most of the company's latest Xeon server and professional workstation chips are also built. Despite this new architecture, the Core i9-10980XE's features are mostly identical to those of the Core i9-9980XE Extreme Edition, based on the older "Skylake-X" architecture. In addition to identical core and thread counts, the two chips both lack integrated graphics processing (i.e., you'll need a video card to run alongside), share the same TDP, and use the same LGA 2066 socket and X299 chipset.

Other than the drastic price decrease, then, there are only three minor differences that enthusiasts might care about. The first is a slightly faster clock speed. The Core i9-10980XE starts at 3GHz and can attain a rated maximum of 4.6GHz using Intel's Turbo Boost technology, which increases the speed of a chip's best-performing cores first. The Core i9-9980XE has the same base clock speed but is rated for a Turbo Boost maximum of only 4.4GHz. More speed at the top end is indicative of a more efficient CPU, something we expect to see from one generation to the next. All Core X-Series chips are overclockable, so you may be able to get even higher maximum clock speeds if you've got the expertise and high-end power supplies, motherboards, and cooling equipment to make overclocking possible. (More on that in a bit.)

A second minor performance improvement: The Core i9-10980XE supports 48 PCI Express lanes (in addition to the 24 lanes reserved for the CPU itself), compared with the support for 44 lanes for the Core i9-9980XE and Skylake-X. Few users will need that many lanes, though, even if they install two graphics cards and a few PCI Express NVMe SSDs, but it's nice to know that the headroom exists. The board, however, will need to also support the additional lanes, which may mean you need to get a new motherboard if you have an existing X299 setup. Motherboard makers have rolled out some "X299 refresh" boards that add the 48-lane support, such as the Asus Prime X299 Edition 30 unveiled at Computex earlier this year.

Finally, the Core i9-10980XE adds support for up to 256GB of DDR4-2933 memory in a quad-channel configuration, up from the 128GB limit of the Core i9-9980XE. A doubling of the memory ceiling is significant, though very few applications will be able to make use of this new astronomical ceiling. As with the additional PCI Express lanes, you'll also need a new motherboard that can support up to 256GB of memory.

AMD Alternatives: Suddenly, a Killer Lineup

There's no direct competitor to the Core i9-10980XE based purely on price. The two closest alternatives are the Ryzen 9 3950X referenced earlier, a 16-core chip that retails for $749, or the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X, which costs $1,399 and has 24 cores.

Here's a breakout of all of the recent, relevant HEDT processors on the market, with the Ryzen 9 3950X (the only one here on a "mainstream" platform, AMD's AM4) thrown in for good measure. You can click the chart to see it bigger.

Both of these AMD chips I just mentioned (and indeed, all of them in the table above) are based on AMD's third-generation "Zen 2" architecture and a cutting-edge 7nm process technology. The Ryzen 9 3950X has a much lower 105-watt TDP and far fewer PCI Express lanes, at 24. It also lacks quad-channel memory support, which both the Threadripper and Core X chips have.

Meanwhile, the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X features a 240-watt TDP and offers 72 PCI Express lanes. Both of the new Ryzen platforms, under the X570 (mainstream Ryzen) and TRX40 (third-gen Threadripper) chipsets, bring support for higher-bandwidth PCI Express 4.0, mainly of interest at the moment to users of cutting-edge PCI Express SSDs. (See our guide to all 12 of the initial TRX40 launch motherboards.)

So the current state of the high-end desktop PC chip market is therefore defined by well-carved-out niches. Intel's Core i9-10980XE is a refined version of a years-old chip-fabrication process, with a price to reflect that. The Ryzen 9 3950X and Ryzen Threadripper 3960X chips demonstrate what a more advanced architecture can offer, with specs, respectively, below and above those of the Core i9-10980XE.

Even though it offers no major structural or technical improvements over its predecessor, given the huge Core X-Series price adjustments, the Core i9-10980XE would therefore appear to be a goldilocks CPU, one that bridges the prices and specs of the Ryzen 9 3950X and Ryzen Threadripper 3960X. How does it test out, though?

CPU Performance Testing

Whether or not the Core i9-10980XE plays its goldilocks role well comes down to its actual performance capabilities, of course. To test them, we dropped the chip into our Intel X299 testbed, updated to the moment with Windows patches and BIOS updates, which uses an Asus Prime X299-Deluxe motherboard and 32GB of Corsair memory running in a quad-channel setup. An Nvidia GeForce GTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition video card handles display output, and a Serial ATA-based Kingston HyperX Savage SSD serves as the boot drive.

All of these components go into a Deepcool GamerStorm Genome ROG Certified case, which includes a self-contained liquid cooler with a large three-fan radiator. You'll need similarly powerful components if you're planning on building a Core i9-10980XE-based system yourself. As with AMD's Threadripper chips, Intel's Core X-Series processors don't include coolers in the box. The good news is that unlike the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X, which requres an expensive motherboard based on the brand-new sTRX4 socket and TRX40 chipset, the Core i9-10980XE is compatible with existing X299-chipset boards, of which more are available at various price points. The cheapest sTRX4 motherboard announced so far lists for $399, while we see several X299-based boards (albeit, 44-lane models) starting at around $200.

In addition to the Ryzen 9 3950X, the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X, and the Core i9-9980XE, I've also included a few other Ryzen Threadripper chips from the second and third generations, as well as the Intel Core i9-9900K in the benchmark comparison charts below. The $499 Core i9-9900K isn't in the same class as the Core X-Series and Threadripper CPUs, but it serves as a good indicator of the performance you'd be giving up if a $900-plus chip isn't in your price range.

We test CPUs using a variety of synthetic benchmarks that offer proprietary scores, as well as real-world tests using consumer apps like Apple's iTunes and 3D games like Far Cry 5. One of the most telling indicators of performance on demanding multimedia workflows is the Cinebench R15 benchmark. It's a CPU-centric test that gauges both the single-core performance and the multicore performance of a processor. The resulting scores are proprietary numbers that represent the CPU's capabilities while rendering a complex 3D image, and they immediately present a problem for the Core i9-10980XE.

The Core i9-10980XE performed behind the Ryzen Threadripper 3960X on both single-core and multi-core tests, as expected, but it also underperformed the less-expensive, lower-TDP Ryzen 9 3950X. The situation repeats itself on our Handbrake test, another demanding multimedia benchmark that involves encoding a 4K video file...

And it repeats itself a second time on the POV-Ray ray-tracing benchmark, another synthetic, highly threaded CPU-intensive rendering test. In this case, the difference between the Core i9-10980XE and the Ryzen 9 3950X on the all-cores test is small, but the Ryzen 9 nevertheless still comes out on top.

For a final look at the Core i9-9980XE's performance deficiency on the resource-intensive multimedia tasks for which you're likely to buy it, consider the new Cinebench R20 test, an updated version of the Maxon 4D-based benchmark that better represents how a chip can incorporate newer rendering techniques.

The Core i9-10980XE's sole performance advantage in this group occurs while running older, single-threaded software applications like Apple's deprecated version of iTunes shown here. Intel's 14nm architecture may be showing its age, but it's typically more efficient on a per-core basis than AMD's Zen chips are, and that's still the case on our iTunes test. This advantage doesn't mean much, however, since such a powerful chip is mighty overkill for this type of task.

On less-demanding multimedia tasks, like rendering a simple graphic of a squirrel in Blender, nearly all of the CPUs perform roughly the same.

Our final synthetic benchmark is another simple test that simulates file compression. It scales well with more cores and threads, which is why the third generation Ryzen chips perform so well, but note that even the Core i9-10980XE's score on this test represents excellent performance.

Also, a note: We tested the newest Threadrippers with 64GB of RAM, versus the 32GB on the Core X-Series/X299 testbed. Pulling out 32GB reduced the Threadripper scores by about 20 percent on this test. In some tests, the RAM differential might matter a little (it didnt at all on Handbrake or the Cinebenches), but we maintain that no one should be on the TRX40 platform who isn't a hardcore content creator who actually needs that much RAM, to start with.

Enough Headroom to Overclock

Boosting the base clock speed, the memory speed, and the TDP is one of a PC enthusiast's favorite pastimes, and the ability to overclock is why you'd spend so much money on a CPU and its supporting components in the first place. Overclocking results vary widely with both the quality of these components and the skill of the overclocker, but based on our brief testing, it's clear that the Core i9-10980XE could offer plenty of headroom, depending on your sample.

We were able to achieve system stability at 4.9GHz using the one-click overclocking feature of Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU) app, which resulted in a Cinebench R20 score of 10,426 (up from 8,807) and a Handbrake time of 3:13 (down from 3:56).

This improvement of approximately 15 percent is admirable, and it suggests there's room for even better results if you have better cooling components and spend time adjusting more settings in the BIOS. The gains from overclocking the much more expensive Ryzen Threadripper 3970X were not nearly as impressive, ranging from 2 to 10 percent.

Overkill for Gaming

A high-end graphics card matters far more than a powerful CPU when it comes to gaming, especially at resolutions above 1080p, and the Core i9-9900K is a far more appropriate gaming CPU than the Core i9-10980XE if that's what your main aim is. Most games can't leverage anything close to 18 cores, and the Core i9-9900K's higher base clock and boost clocks benefit most games more. Still, gaming is one area in which the Core X-Series and the newest Threadripper chips perform roughly equally, as is clear from our game benchmarks below.

Recall that at 4K resolution, the graphics card is generally your limiter. While there's some variation, especially at 1080p resolution, all of the CPUs offer frame rates well in excess of the 60 frames per second (fps) we generally consider to be silky smooth here. If you're a professional esports gamer looking for 240fps or above, any of these CPUs will oblige on popular titles like Counter Strike: Global Offensive at 1080p when paired with a top-end video card.

Similar to overclocking results, game performance varies greatly based on the individual title you're playing. On Rainbow Six: Siege, for instance, the Core i9-10980XE actually turned in the best performance of the group at 4K (181fps). On others, like Bioshock Infinite, all of the chips performed roughly equally at 4K.

For HEDT, It's Ryzen or Bust Into 2020

The Core i9-10980XE is the only current inhabitant of the 18-core, circa-$1,000 consumer CPU niche. It doesn't fill that niche all that well, however, even with a relative price cut by half. We expected to see lesser performance than with the 24-core, $1,399 Ryzen Threadripper 3960X, and we did, but the fact that the Core i9-10980XE also underperforms the $749 Ryzen 9 3950X on many important multimedia tasks is a bigger deal.

Ultimately, the Core i9-10980XE's saving grace is the strength of its ecosystem, but it only matters if you need certain aspects of it. If you've already got an X299-compatible motherboard, it should work with this chip after a BIOS update. (Check with your motherboard maker.) That's not true of the third-generation Ryzen Threadripper chips, which use entirely new chipsets and sockets, and therefore new, not-cheap motherboards.

Most enthusiasts building a high-end desktop PC from scratch, and who aren't trying to max out the memory and pack the PCI Express lanes to bursting, will be better off choosing the Ryzen 9 3950X. If you've got deeper pockets and deeper needs, though, a third-generation Ryzen Threadripper might be a better choice, while if you're primarily interested in gaming, a less-expensive CPU like the Core i9-9900K will do you just fine.

Also, don't overlook discounts on the second-generation Threadripper line, and their mainboards. Our former Editors' Choice, the Ryzen Threadripper 2950X, has dropped below $700 and delivers 16 cores and 32 threads at an outrageous price.

Intel Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition 3.0 See It $1,139.99 at Tiger Direct MSRP $979.00 Pros Works with mature X299 chipset ecosystem.

Much cheaper than previous generation.

Support for up to 48 PCI Express lanes.

Decent overclocking potential.

Memory support to 256GB with supporting motherboards. View More Cons Underperforms less-expensive AMD Ryzen competitor on many performance benchmarks.

To gain support for more than 44 lanes, needs new motherboard. The Bottom Line With few improvements over its predecessor and performance, in many cases, behind a less-expensive AMD Ryzen alternative, Intel's Core i9-10980XE is an enthusiast-class CPU that can't quite live up to the "Extreme" in its name.

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