The Core i7 980X Review: Intel's First 6-Core Desktop CPU
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 11, 2010 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
Final Words
I have to say that Intel's Core i7 980X is the first Extreme Edition CPU that I've ever gotten excited about. In the past you used to have to choose between more cores or high clock speeds. Thanks to power gating and Gulftown's PMU, those days are over. The 980X gives you its best regardless of what you throw at it. Lightly threaded apps benefit from the larger L3 cache and heavily threaded apps take advantage of the extra cores. The performance advantage you get at the low end ranges from 0 - 7%, and on the high end with well threaded code you're looking at an extra 20 - 50% over the Core i7 975. Even more if you compare to a pedestrian processor. There are a few cases where the 980X does lose out to the Core i7 975 thanks to its higher latency L3 cache, but for the most part it's smooth sailling for the 6-core beast.
The performance advantage comes at no extra power cost either. Enabling 6 cores on a 32nm process means that the die actually got smaller and power consumption remained mostly unchanged. It really is the best of both worlds, at least for a 130W chip. It's almost Conroe-like in its ability to dominate the charts without any technical limitations. If money were no object, the Core i7 980X is clearly the best you can get.
The only problem is price, as is always the case with these Extreme Edition processors. While I don't expect 6-core CPUs to trickle down to the mainstream, if we had a version priced at ~$500 it would be an amazingly easy sell. I wonder where Intel will price the Core i7 970, allegedly also a 6-core Gulftown derivative. We'll have to wait another quarter to find out.
Even taking into account price, if you do any significant amount of compute intensive 3D work, video encoding or Excel modeling, the Core i7 980X is worth it. If you're the type of user who always buys the Extreme Edition knowing that you can get better bang for your buck further down the lineup, this time you're actually getting your money's worth. On the desktop, the next 12 months are fairly stagnant in terms of CPU performance improvements. We'll see a clock bump to the 980X at the beginning of 2011, but it'll be even longer before we get a replacement.
There is of course the higher powered alternative. You could pick up a dual-socket Xeon board and a pair of quad-core Nehalem Xeons for a bit more than a X58 + 980X. You'd end up with more cores, albeit with a higher power budget and higher price tag. The Core i7 980X is such a difficult processor to recommend. It's something I'd personally never spend the money on. But if I needed more compute in a single chip, it's really the only thing that could scratch that itch.
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DarkUltra - Saturday, March 20, 2010 - link
I would love to see a task manager screenshot during the different multi-threaded benchmarks, also games, so we can see how it utilizes the six cores and two threads per core?drewintheav - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
The INTEL i7 980X has dual QPI's and will run in a dual socket mainboard!!!Such as the EVGA W555 / Classified SR-2
magnes79 - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link
Where did you get that information from? On intel website it says 1 QPI. from what I know and what always was the case all i7 series are single QPI's.THats why you have Xeon series with double QPI.
Please do not post incorrect information, because people get stuck with expensive equipment not able to use it properly.
Aenslead - Saturday, March 13, 2010 - link
This has got to be THE most worthless, useless, expensive pice of silicon I've ever seen. An average of 13% performance increase in SOME apps AND a decrease in gaming?Give me that 1k, and I'll get myself a GTX480, an SSD, and some DDR3 modules that will give me 2x, 3x or Xx times more performance in EVERYDAY use.
Thank goodness for CUDA, Stream, OpenCL and all that cr4p.
Cableaddict - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
Aenslead,I think you're missing the whole point of this cpu. It wasn't built to go fast. It was built to due serious multi-tasking. The pro A/V crowd will buy these in droves.
I can't wait to get one for my digital audio system. It will be worth every penny.
Aenslead - Tuesday, March 16, 2010 - link
I understand your point.I do video editing myself as well as some animation, but thanks to Furry Ball (Maya) and Elemental plugins for AE and Premiere, I've come to love GPU power more than ever.
I've seen what's comming for CS5 and I do not see CPU playing an important role there.
I see very few people, like yourself, actually finding bennefit from these product launches - same goes to PII X6, although I believe this one will be FAR better priced and far more atractive.
Best,
dastruch - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
Now that's what I'm saving some money for.- Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
Wondering how the i7 980X would do against a 6 core Opteron,Tech Report did some benchmark numbers when the 6 core Opterons (server) first came out,going head to head againt Xeons..interesting results when you compare the new i7. This is a rough estimate, but if AMD's 6 core is based on the 6 core Opteron this could be interesting..
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17005/11">http://techreport.com/articles.x/17005/11
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17005/7">http://techreport.com/articles.x/17005/7
complete report
http://techreport.com/articles.x/17005/1">http://techreport.com/articles.x/17005/1
- Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
asHsilverblue - Friday, March 12, 2010 - link
I'm somewhat confused as to why, on your review, the PII X4 965 seems rather greedy, but on Toms' review of the i7-980X, AMD's offering does much better.Toms' test setups for the X58:
Gigabyte X58A-UD5 (LGA 1366) X58 Express, BIOS F4
Corsair 6GB (3 x 2GB) DDR3-1600 7-7-7-20 @ DDR3-1333
Yours:
Intel DX58SO (Intel X58)
I'm going to presume Corsair DDR3-1333 4 x 1GB (7-7-7-20)
Toms' test setup for AM3:
Asus M4A79T Deluxe (Socket AM3) 790FX/SB750, BIOS 2304
Corsair 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR3-1600 7-7-7-20 @ DDR3-1333
Yours:
Gigabyte GA-MA790FX-UD5P (AMD 790FX)
I'm going to presume Corsair DDR3-1333 2 x 2GB (7-7-7-20)
Toms' has the PII X4 965 idling 21W lower than the 980X and 32W lower at load (using Prime95), however you have the 965 idling 10W HIGHER and using 4W more at load. Is Prime95 just favouring AMD or is there some sort of problem with your 790 rig? I will concede that the AMD rig will be using less RAM on the Toms' setup which may account for some of the difference.
One thing to note: up the resolution on a CPU-limited title such as Left4Dead and the performance gap narrows markedly. Enable AA and there's no difference at all. For graphically intensive games and/or highest settings, it won't make sense to fork out $1000 no matter how good the CPU.
It'd be nice to see how good this CPU is with multiple graphics cards... :)