Intel Cascade Lake-X HEDT vs. AMD Ryzen: Fight!
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Intel Cascade Lake-X HEDT vs. AMD Ryzen: Fight!
When Price Cuts Aren't Enough
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As anticipated earlier this week when we tested AMD's HEDT Threadripper, Intel is also coming out with their own new high-end desktop series codenamed Cascade Lake-X. You already saw some preliminary data on the Core i9-10980XE, and now we're bringing you a full series review by testing the 10980XE, 10940X, 10920X and 10900X CPUs.
The 18, 14, 12 and 10-core CPUs are all refreshes from chips that were released back in late 2017 as the 7000 series, codenamed Skylake-X. A year later these were relaunched as the 9000 series, still codenamed Skylake-X. As part of the refresh, the CPUs came with a small factory overclock and featured soldered rather than thermal paste for connecting the CPU die to the heatspreader. This essentially made them worse overclockers, but slightly better for everyone else.
Cascade Lake-X is a little more than a straight refresh. We're getting a little extra frequency, but we're also getting a few more PCIe lanes, better memory support, and some hardware security fixes. Oh, and prices have been slashed considerably.
Both the memory frequency and capacity support has been upgraded, going from 128GB of DDR4-2666 to 256GB of DDR4-2933. Boost frequencies have been increased by 200 to 300 MHz depending on the part, though performance gains might be offset by the hardware security fixes for Spectre and Meltdown variants 2, 3, 3a, 4, and L1TF.
The biggest difference for potential buyers is the pricing change. The 18-core 9980XE has dropped from $2,000 to $1,000 now as the 10980XE. The 14-core model is down to $800 from $1,400, the 12-core model is down to $700 from $1,200 and the 1