Overclocker extraordinaire Der8auer has been able to put Intel’s flagship, HCC HEDT 7980XE CPU, through its paces under extreme cooling, which resulted in a veritable show of force from the blue giant. Intel’s $1,979, 18-core, 36-thread CPU has cemented itself as the flagship consumer CPU of choice, surpassing AMD’s 1950X Threadripper in all fields. And yes, we do mean single-core and multi-core benchmarks, but also power consumption figures.
With 18 cores in need of adequate cooling, every piece of real-estate that may serve as an heatsink of sorts comes at a premium; that is why thermal paste for this Intel processor was applied not only to the CPU die itself, but also to the entire PCB around it. Der8auer says that doing this allows heat to be better dissipated form the CPU die, allowing for up to 400 MHz increased clock-speeds under load. Direct contact with the die was also tried, and achieved by cutting off the central pat of the IHS, while keeping the edges of it as a way of better load balancing the weight of the cooler (in this case, an LN2 cooler) over the CPU’s PCB, in order to avoid different amounts of pressure on the CPU pins. However, the extreme overclocker ended up not recommending that venue, for it didn’t offer consistent success in their extreme cooling efforts.
Compared to a Ryzen Threadripper 1950X @ 5.4 GHz on all cores, under LN2, which achieved a 4514 score in Cinebench R15. Intel 7980XE @ 5.6 GHz, achieved 5635 multi-threaded and 257 single-threaded points in the same benchmark. Der8auer estimates that 24/7 stable overclocks on the Intel 7980XE would achieve around 190 points in Cinebench’s single thread workloads, while a Ryzen Threadripper in the same conditions would be able to achieve between 160 and 170 points. Intel’s platform clearly has the upper hand when it comes to overclocked CPU scores, though users do have to consider the platform differences between Intel’s X299 and AMD’s X399 platforms.
Source: TPU
