For quite some time the i9-7960XE with a
whopping price tag of 1500 US$ was the king for
High-End gaming rigs. AMD has the Ryzen family
as counterpart. So what’s the new CPU about?

More cores, more speed, that’s what makes a good gaming rig and to feed actual games with enough speed nowadays. The graphics cards are also another driving factor to make faster CPUs necessary.

This week, the Intel i9-9900K for an MSRP of 499US$ / 629€ has landed and is the top-of-the-art cpu for Z390 mainboards.

8 cores and 16 threads with a base clock of 3.6GHz of which two can supercharge to 5.0GHz if needed, promise a lot of bang for the buck, especially as the CPU is quite cheap for what it offers.

Okay, for those who even want to go further (and have the spare money to shell out even more $$$ – 1579US$ – 1739€ to be exact) there’s the i9-9980XE that comes with a whopping 18 cores / 36 threads and a base clock of 3.0GHz of which two can jump to 4.5GHz if needed.

The difference? The 9900K is a Coffee-Lake-refresh that underlines the dominance of fast CPUs still using the 14nm fab process. The 9900K will fit into any Z370 or Z390 Chipset mainboard of which the latter one allows overclocking if needed.

The 9980XE however is a Skylake refresh also fabbed at 14nm but requires you to have any mainboard with LGA2066 socket and also the newest chipsets available by then.

As AMD has recently released it’s 2990WX Threadripper, Intel’s answer to that beast is the Intel Xeon 3175X Workstation processor that has no less than 28 cores / 56 threads at base clock of 3.0GHz of which four can boost up to 4.3GHz if needed. However an ass-spanking 7569US$ / 8199€ would even let one enthusiast’s purse cry – so opt that one out or at some point expect price drops as the Threadripper is way, WAAAAY cheaper and almost offering same power. And last but not least, there’s not many applications that can handle so many cores efficiently at the same time. So good money wasted if you don’t know how to feed such a beast properly.

So the war is on again and let’s see who offers more for less…

There is the complete lineup as of October 10th, 2018:

Coffee-Lake refresh, 14nm, LGA1151v2, 2ch DDR4@2666MHz:

Skylake refresh, 14nm, LGA2066, 4ch DDR4@2666HMz: