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Intel Core i9-10980XE Reviewed by Lab501: Strong Performance, but Can It Beat AMD's R
Romanian publication Lab501 has published the first review of the Intel Core i9-10980XE, and it is apparently unsanctioned by Intel. The 18-core, 36-thread processor is the flagship of the chipmaker's Cascade Lake-X family, which Intel announced earlier this month.
It's uncertain how the publication obtained the unreleased processor, or whether it's an engineering sample (ES) or retail chip. It's also unlikely that this sample is using production-class firmware. Lab501 paired the Core i9-10980XE with a Gigabyte X299 Aorus Master motherboard, 32GB (4x8GB) of G.Skill Sniper X DDR4-3200 memory with CL14-14-14-36 timings, and an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics card.
Core i9-10980XE Application Performance
Office, Productivity, and Compression
Lab501 inexplicably did not include Threadripper processors in its test pool. Bear in mind, those are the -10980XE's natural competitors.
Lab501's results show the Core i9-10980XE falling behind the Ryzen 9 3900X in PCMark 10. When it comes to compression workloads, WinRAR 5.8 apparently favors the Ryzen 9 3900X, while 7-Zip puts the Core i9-10980XE ahead.
Rendering and Encoding
The Core i9-10980XE has six more cores than the Ryzen 9 3900X, and this difference is enough to give the Intel chip the advantage with software that embraces cores, such as 3ds Max 2020, Blender 2.8, and DaVinci Resolve 15. In HandBrake 1.2.2., however, the Core i9-10980XE is only one second faster than the Ryzen 9 3900X.
On the flipside, the Ryzen 9 3900X has a better single-core performance than the Core i9-10980XE. The Ryzen 9 3900X performs up to 14% and 4% faster than the Core i9-10980XE in Cinebench R20 and POV-Ray 3.7 single-core tests, respectively.
The tides turn in the Core i9-10980XE's favor in the multi-core tests. The six extra cores gives the Core i9-10980XE a 21% and 18.7% lead in Cinebench R20 and POV-Ray 3.7, respectively.
Core i9-10980XE Gaming Performance
Gaming (1920 x 1080)
Lab501 has a pretty extensive gaming test suit. For the sake of simplicity, we'll look at the 1920 x 1080 results. It's evident that gaming favors processors with high operating clocks, so the Core i9-9900K continues to be the fastest gaming processor on the planet. Nonetheless, if we compare the Core i9-10980XE and the Ryzen 9 3900X, the results reveal that AMD's chip is better at gaming.
Due to the significant difference in cores, it's a no-brainer that the Core i9-10980XE would come out on top in software that scales with cores and memory bandwidth. The Ryzen 9 3900X undoubtedly put up a respectable fight. At the same time, we're more interested in seeing what the Ryzen 9 3950X can do, although given the segment in which the Core i9-10980XE is in, it would only be fair to compare it against AMD's Threadripper 3000-series offering.
