Intel X299, Kaby Lake-X & Skylake-X MegaThread! FAQ and Resources

[TechyInAZ]

What is the best motherboard for a 7800x? I have been trying to look around and I don't want to spend a hole bunch of money (not over 350) but all of them I look at have a lot of bad reviews, is there an atx board that will actually work well without a bunch of issues?

The X299-A is a solid choice: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813132993

 

[8350rocks]

7980XE pulls over 500w by itself when overclocked:

http://www.pcgamer.com/intel-core-i9-7980xe-review-an-incredibly-fast-cpu-but-gamers-dont-need-it/

Intel is rumored to be working on a nuclear fission adapter to power their new chips, rumored price tag to be in the $1,000,000.00 USD range. Overclocking will void the warranty on both parts however...caveat emptor.

(i) He is not measuring power at socket level, but power at platform level.
(ii) At stock settings the 7980XE pulls less power than TR 1950X, despite the ThreadRipper has two less cores and is much slower.
(iii) The 1950X hits a wall at around 3-9--4.0GHz. Using LN2 and pushing the chip at same clocks than OC XE, bring power consumption well above 500W. In fact already with a weak 3.9GHz overclock the 1950X platform pulls 550W. ThreadRipper is terribly inefficient and power hungry!

Sure it does...with a 250W GPU...it absolutely does.

The 7980XE pulls over 500W on the CPU though, this is validated in multiple locations.

To further add to this...

The only reason SKL-X has lower idle consumption (notice you did not provide full load consumption, interestingly), is because Intel has far more aggressive core parking on their CPUs.

I provided full load consumption figures in this post

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-3455797/intel-x299-kaby-lake-skylake-megathread-faq-resources/page-3.html#20223499

When paired with the same GPUs, the Threadripper platform often consumes more power than the X299 platform because AMD CPUs are more power hungry. The same happens when measuring power at the socket level.

Your pcgamer link measured 576W with the 18C overclocked at 4.1GHz. The review claims that threadripper 1950X overclocked to 3.8GHz used 422W in the same test. Let us do some computations. Pushing Threadripper up to 4.1GHz would pull ~25% more. So 530W. And adding two extra cores would increase to ~600W.

Show me Linpack for those Intel CPUs. That, is full load.

 

[goldstone77]

At the 12v EPS! Not the wall. Not with 3 video cards installed! Straight to the CPU during Cinebench!

During the multithreaded tests, the 7960X consumes about 249W stock and about 486-490W overclocked. The 7980XE consumes around 230W stock for this particular test, or around 444W overclocked (we ran this with a lower voltage, so it consumes less power). Threadripper, meanwhile, consumes 151W stock for the 1950X. Core-for-core, that places the 7960X at 64% more power than the 1950X when both are stock.

For all intents and purposes, the 7960X is functionally equivalent in multithreaded performance to the 1950X, with a less-than 1% performance lead. This sub-1% gain is at the cost of an additional 100W down the EPS12V rails.

Overclocked to 4.6GHz, the 7960X boosts its score over stock by 25% -- again, impressive and significant headroom – in exchange for its additional power consumption of around 240W. This 25% performance lead is equivalent to the gain over the 1950X.

For our standardized Blender test, we were measuring power consumption of 218W with the i9-7960X 16C/32T CPU at stock settings, or 492W when overclocked to 4.6GHz with a 1.22VID. That’s 40A down the EPS12V cables, at that point. We measured about 214W for the stock 7980XE – within usual variance of the 7960X – and also measured nearly 500W with the 4.5GHz overclock.

Link to the information here

 

[juanrga]

7980XE pulls over 500w by itself when overclocked:

http://www.pcgamer.com/intel-core-i9-7980xe-review-an-incredibly-fast-cpu-but-gamers-dont-need-it/

Intel is rumored to be working on a nuclear fission adapter to power their new chips, rumored price tag to be in the $1,000,000.00 USD range. Overclocking will void the warranty on both parts however...caveat emptor.

(i) He is not measuring power at socket level, but power at platform level.
(ii) At stock settings the 7980XE pulls less power than TR 1950X, despite the ThreadRipper has two less cores and is much slower.
(iii) The 1950X hits a wall at around 3-9--4.0GHz. Using LN2 and pushing the chip at same clocks than OC XE, bring power consumption well above 500W. In fact already with a weak 3.9GHz overclock the 1950X platform pulls 550W. ThreadRipper is terribly inefficient and power hungry!

Sure it does...with a 250W GPU...it absolutely does.

The 7980XE pulls over 500W on the CPU though, this is validated in multiple locations.

To further add to this...

The only reason SKL-X has lower idle consumption (notice you did not provide full load consumption, interestingly), is because Intel has far more aggressive core parking on their CPUs.

I provided full load consumption figures in this post

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-3455797/intel-x299-kaby-lake-skylake-megathread-faq-resources/page-3.html#20223499

When paired with the same GPUs, the Threadripper platform often consumes more power than the X299 platform because AMD CPUs are more power hungry. The same happens when measuring power at the socket level.

Your pcgamer link measured 576W with the 18C overclocked at 4.1GHz. The review claims that threadripper 1950X overclocked to 3.8GHz used 422W in the same test. Let us do some computations. Pushing Threadripper up to 4.1GHz would pull ~25% more. So 530W. And adding two extra cores would increase to ~600W.

Show me Linpack for those Intel CPUs. That, is full load.

I have provided full load measurements for handbrake, Cinebench, Wprime, and other workloads.

I don't have power measurements for Linpack. I only have performance figures that I provided in my post about "AVX512 HPC benchmarks". Another 512bit benchmark is

As one can see performance is very superior. So it doesn't matter if power consumption is something superior when using 512bit units. Efficiency continues in the side of X299.

 

[8350rocks]

7980XE pulls over 500w by itself when overclocked:

http://www.pcgamer.com/intel-core-i9-7980xe-review-an-incredibly-fast-cpu-but-gamers-dont-need-it/

Intel is rumored to be working on a nuclear fission adapter to power their new chips, rumored price tag to be in the $1,000,000.00 USD range. Overclocking will void the warranty on both parts however...caveat emptor.

(i) He is not measuring power at socket level, but power at platform level.
(ii) At stock settings the 7980XE pulls less power than TR 1950X, despite the ThreadRipper has two less cores and is much slower.
(iii) The 1950X hits a wall at around 3-9--4.0GHz. Using LN2 and pushing the chip at same clocks than OC XE, bring power consumption well above 500W. In fact already with a weak 3.9GHz overclock the 1950X platform pulls 550W. ThreadRipper is terribly inefficient and power hungry!

Sure it does...with a 250W GPU...it absolutely does.

The 7980XE pulls over 500W on the CPU though, this is validated in multiple locations.

To further add to this...

The only reason SKL-X has lower idle consumption (notice you did not provide full load consumption, interestingly), is because Intel has far more aggressive core parking on their CPUs.

I provided full load consumption figures in this post

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-3455797/intel-x299-kaby-lake-skylake-megathread-faq-resources/page-3.html#20223499

When paired with the same GPUs, the Threadripper platform often consumes more power than the X299 platform because AMD CPUs are more power hungry. The same happens when measuring power at the socket level.

Your pcgamer link measured 576W with the 18C overclocked at 4.1GHz. The review claims that threadripper 1950X overclocked to 3.8GHz used 422W in the same test. Let us do some computations. Pushing Threadripper up to 4.1GHz would pull ~25% more. So 530W. And adding two extra cores would increase to ~600W.

Show me Linpack for those Intel CPUs. That, is full load.

I have provided full load measurements for handbrake, Cinebench, Wprime, and other workloads.

I don't have power measurements for Linpack. I only have performance figures that I provided in my post about "AVX512 HPC benchmarks". Another 512bit benchmark is

As one can see performance is very superior. So it doesn't matter if power consumption is something superior when using 512bit units. Efficiency continues in the side of X299.

Clearly your benchmarks are lacking a max power benchmark then...

 

[TechyInAZ]

Everything but the Core i5-7640X and Core i7-7740X are Skylake-X, doesn't make much sense to me? Why would they use Skylake in their i9 CPUs rather than Kabylake? Wouldn't Skylake have a lower IPC?

Because it's a more reliable architecture to build on and it's also based on the same "floorplans" as it's xeon counterparts. Intel has always done this ever since they invented the HEDT platform.

Even though mainstream and HEDT are on the same generation in terms of numbering, HEDT is always 1 step behind when it comes to the latest architectures (or miroarchitectures).

For example, when Ivy Bridge went mainstream, HEDT was on Sandy Bridge, when Haswell was on mainstream, HEDT was on Ivy Bridge and so on and so forth.

 

[juanrga]

Kabylake and Skylake have same IPC.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

Show me Linpack for those Intel CPUs. That, is full load.

That's a bit mean, man. Do you want to melt the heatsink? 🙂

 

[juanrga]

7980XE pulls over 500w by itself when overclocked:

http://www.pcgamer.com/intel-core-i9-7980xe-review-an-incredibly-fast-cpu-but-gamers-dont-need-it/

Intel is rumored to be working on a nuclear fission adapter to power their new chips, rumored price tag to be in the $1,000,000.00 USD range. Overclocking will void the warranty on both parts however...caveat emptor.

(i) He is not measuring power at socket level, but power at platform level.
(ii) At stock settings the 7980XE pulls less power than TR 1950X, despite the ThreadRipper has two less cores and is much slower.
(iii) The 1950X hits a wall at around 3-9--4.0GHz. Using LN2 and pushing the chip at same clocks than OC XE, bring power consumption well above 500W. In fact already with a weak 3.9GHz overclock the 1950X platform pulls 550W. ThreadRipper is terribly inefficient and power hungry!

Sure it does...with a 250W GPU...it absolutely does.

The 7980XE pulls over 500W on the CPU though, this is validated in multiple locations.

To further add to this...

The only reason SKL-X has lower idle consumption (notice you did not provide full load consumption, interestingly), is because Intel has far more aggressive core parking on their CPUs.

I provided full load consumption figures in this post

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/id-3455797/intel-x299-kaby-lake-skylake-megathread-faq-resources/page-3.html#20223499

When paired with the same GPUs, the Threadripper platform often consumes more power than the X299 platform because AMD CPUs are more power hungry. The same happens when measuring power at the socket level.

Your pcgamer link measured 576W with the 18C overclocked at 4.1GHz. The review claims that threadripper 1950X overclocked to 3.8GHz used 422W in the same test. Let us do some computations. Pushing Threadripper up to 4.1GHz would pull ~25% more. So 530W. And adding two extra cores would increase to ~600W.

Show me Linpack for those Intel CPUs. That, is full load.

I have provided full load measurements for handbrake, Cinebench, Wprime, and other workloads.

I don't have power measurements for Linpack. I only have performance figures that I provided in my post about "AVX512 HPC benchmarks". Another 512bit benchmark is

As one can see performance is very superior. So it doesn't matter if power consumption is something superior when using 512bit units. Efficiency continues in the side of X299.

Clearly your benchmarks are lacking a max power benchmark then...

I couldn't find a power measurement for Linpack, but since widening the SIMD is a well-known technique to increase the efficiency, the power consumed by the 512bit units will be broadly compensated by the extra performance they provide. That is the reason why server and HPC customers are purchasing Skylake Xeons and using them for 512bit code...

 

[juanrga]

Genuine comparison of Zen and Skylake-X clock for clock. Unlike biased sites as Guru3d, Arstechnica, and others that only test engineering samples of i9 or use weird tricks (such as overclocking the interconnect on Zen chips but leaving i9 interconnect on stock settings) to favor AMD, this review makes realistic and fair comparison.

https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8379/amd-threadripper-vs-intel-core-i9-cpus-clock/index7.html

Intel IPC is 31% ahead of Zen. The efficiency gap is reduced when overclocking the Intel chip, but still Skylake-X is still 13% more efficient than Zen.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

@juanrga: your sig says "I like/dislike tech, not companies!" but what seems to be your attitude, your focus, and your word choices aren't backing up that claim. (If you aren't a native English speaker, my apologies, this third point might not be on purpose.)

Direct quotes from the page of the page in the TweakTown article that you linked to:
"However, the kicker is, you would also be paying 78% more for the 7960X, meaning you would be getting 30% more performance for 80% more cost."

"Once you remove buyers who value "price vs. performance", then you get into another subset of buyers. However, if you need 16 cores, and you don't want to sell a kidney for it, then at stock the 1950X is an extremely powerful option, especially for its price. If money is not an issue (for most it is), then Intel does offer a bit more."

"There are other factors to take into account, and this article isn't about telling you which CPU to buy, rather it's looking at how AMD's microarchitecture is doing against Intel's in the high-end desktop segment, so far, quite good."

________________________
Are you perhaps excluding price from your thinking? If one excludes price, then yes, Intel's chips would defintely be the better buy for some use cases. If one includes price in the equation though, Intel doesn't have a leg to stand on in the slightest.

 

[juanrga]

@juanrga: your sig says "I like/dislike tech, not companies!" but what seems to be your attitude, your focus, and your word choices aren't backing up that claim. (If you aren't a native English speaker, my apologies, this third point might not be on purpose.)

Direct quotes from the page of the page in the TweakTown article that you linked to:
"However, the kicker is, you would also be paying 78% more for the 7960X, meaning you would be getting 30% more performance for 80% more cost."

"Once you remove buyers who value "price vs. performance", then you get into another subset of buyers. However, if you need 16 cores, and you don't want to sell a kidney for it, then at stock the 1950X is an extremely powerful option, especially for its price. If money is not an issue (for most it is), then Intel does offer a bit more."

"There are other factors to take into account, and this article isn't about telling you which CPU to buy, rather it's looking at how AMD's microarchitecture is doing against Intel's in the high-end desktop segment, so far, quite good."

________________________
Are you perhaps excluding price from your thinking? If one excludes price, then yes, Intel's chips would defintely be the better buy for some use cases. If one includes price in the equation though, Intel doesn't have a leg to stand on in the slightest.

I was showing that the IPC gap between Intel and AMD is about 30%, despite certain biased sites using tricks to reduce the gap. I was also showing that this review confirms that Intel is more efficient even overclocked.

I wasn't discussing prices. My main interest is technology, not prices. Also as explained a hundred of times, performance is not a linear function of price. So getting 30% more IPC costs about 70% more from an engineering point of view. The company that targets lower performance almost always has a price advantage. So I give zero merit to AMD for winning in the price/performance metric.

Of course, this nonlinear relation between price and performance also applies to other engineerings. Not everyone looks for the best price/performance ratios. No one is purchasing a 400Km/h supercar because it has the best price/performance ratio...

 

[goldstone77]

@juanrga: your sig says "I like/dislike tech, not companies!" but what seems to be your attitude, your focus, and your word choices aren't backing up that claim. (If you aren't a native English speaker, my apologies, this third point might not be on purpose.)

Direct quotes from the page of the page in the TweakTown article that you linked to:
"However, the kicker is, you would also be paying 78% more for the 7960X, meaning you would be getting 30% more performance for 80% more cost."

"Once you remove buyers who value "price vs. performance", then you get into another subset of buyers. However, if you need 16 cores, and you don't want to sell a kidney for it, then at stock the 1950X is an extremely powerful option, especially for its price. If money is not an issue (for most it is), then Intel does offer a bit more."

"There are other factors to take into account, and this article isn't about telling you which CPU to buy, rather it's looking at how AMD's microarchitecture is doing against Intel's in the high-end desktop segment, so far, quite good."

________________________
Are you perhaps excluding price from your thinking? If one excludes price, then yes, Intel's chips would defintely be the better buy for some use cases. If one includes price in the equation though, Intel doesn't have a leg to stand on in the slightest.

I was showing that the IPC gap between Intel and AMD is about 30%, despite certain biased sites using tricks to reduce the gap. I was also showing that this review confirms that Intel is more efficient even overclocked.

I wasn't discussing prices. My main interest is technology, not prices. Also as explained a hundred of times, performance is not a linear function of price. So getting 30% more IPC costs about 70% more from an engineering point of view. The company that targets lower performance almost always has a price advantage. So I give zero merit to AMD for winning in the price/performance metric.

Of course, this nonlinear relation between price and performance also applies to other engineerings. Not everyone looks for the best price/performance ratios. No one is purchasing a 400Km/h supercar because it has the best price/performance ratio...

Let's not over hype the comparison. This review is an outlier favoring Intel compared to many other reviews. Gamers Nexus who test 7960X CPU against the 1950X show huge power consumption differences at the EPS( upwards 50% more overclock) and used delidded 7960X.
Let's look at the test set up first:

Cooler: Enermax TR Liquitec 360 and Corsair H115i AIO Water Cooler

The 7960X used the 360mm cooling solution!

The Intel 7960X is clocked up to 4.0GHz using multiplier only overclocking. Memory speed is increased to 3200MHz per XMP, using the same exact kit that was used for the Threadripper testing. The Threadripper system also had its infinity fabric increased in speed by 50%, so I went ahead and overclocked the mesh speed from 2.4GHz to 3.2GHz, which is a 33% increase. An input voltage of 2.1v was used, and LLC was turned on. A fan was blowing right over the VRMs, and the radiator fans were always blowing full speed.

He states Infinity fabric was overclocked, this is by product of the uArch(which was deemed by most as a weakness and it now viewed as an unfair advantage) by virtue of simply putting in a stick of RAM and having it work at it's rated speed. Bios settings had to be manipulated to overclock the mesh! Intel's VRMs had to have a fan blowing right over the VRMs, and the radiator fans blowing at full speed just too get this thing to run at stock speeds without thermal throttling. This has been demonstrated on multiple reviews!

https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8379/amd-threadripper-vs-intel-core-i9-cpus-clock/index2.html

Now let's look at the benchmarks, and what all went into those overall numbers even after seeing the test setup heavily favors Intel with solutions that most users will not see out of the box!

@4GHz Single thread performance difference is 12 points or 7% in favor of Intel, and multithread of 75 points or 2% in favor of Intel. Let's not forget the quote that comes later:

The price gap remains, so the Intel costs roughly 80% more.

Looking at cooling involved a 360mm radiator and a fan blowing on the VRMS, and relative small performance gains not worth a cost of 80%. But that's just the first test! Let's look at the second test!

@4GHz there is a 1.5 point or 3% gain over the 1950X

Here we are with one of the test that are factored into overall performance that was used to come up with the 24% productivity and 31% overall! Really?

@4Ghz the 1950X is 8% faster at copy and 13% faster at write while being 15% slower at read. Still not seeing that 24% better in productivity!

We see that clock for clock AMD's Threadripper equals Intel's Skylake-X in 64-bit integer IOPS, but in SP FLOPs it is half as fast, but we saw the same type of activity at stock. Memory bandwidth is an interesting thing, AMD's reads and writes are faster, but Intel's copy is faster. Intel's memory latency is superior, but that is because Intel doesn't have an Infinity Fabric

@4GHz AMD is 3% faster than Intel.

And here we go at 720p transcoding we see Intel gain 18% over AMD. They throw in a benchmark that greatly favors Intel to help Intel get that 24% better productivity. I wonder how many people buying $1,000 plus CPU's will be doing 720p transcoding? They don't even mention 720p in the commentary.

AMD had the lead in Handbrake 4K encoding at stock and maintains it in our clock for clock tests, but the margin is smaller. Intel had the lead in Handbrake transcoding, and the margin is still maintained when they are equalized.

@4GHz we see Intel take the lead in overall performance by 17%, still not seeing that 24% productivity performance increase here.

@4GHz Intel takes away a good win here performing 25% better. And that concludes all the "productivity performance" benchmarks. So, the majority of that 24% increase over AMD comes from synthetic benchmarks affected by memory latency.

In ScienceMark Intel's offering is faster. In SuperPU we see Intel's offering is significantly faster, and that isn't just because SuperPI is a single core benchmark, it also greatly relies on memory latency (where Intel shines).

And I still don't see where they get that 24% productivity performance increase! They must really give a lot of weight to Aida64 FPU Test for single-precision FLOP's where it out performed AMD by 50%!
Read more: https://www.tweaktown.com/articles/8379/amd-threadripper-vs-intel-core-i9-cpus-clock/index4.html

Now let's take a look at the same type of difference at the 4GHz clock for clock. The price gap remains, so the Intel costs roughly 80% more. We see Intel offer roughly 31% overall, 36% gaming, and 24% productivity performance increases over AMD. Compared to stock, Intel's margins increase 2% overall in overall performance and 8% in gaming performance. However, Intel's margin in productivity decreases from 28% to 24%, meaning Intel's margin over AMD at 16 cores has decreased 4% in productivity applications. However, while Intel's power consumption was 12% higher at stock, it's now 16% higher overclocked (includes idle and load). Putting the Intel 7960X and AMD 1950X head to head, clock for clock, reveals three major trends. Intel's performance gains over AMD's decrease in productivity applications, but increase by a larger margin in gaming applications, resulting in a slight increase in overall performance. At the same time, Intel's power consumption increases 4% while overall performance margins only increase 2%-3%. There are other factors to take into account, and this article isn't about telling you which CPU to buy, rather it's looking at how AMD's microarchitecture is doing against Intel's in the high-end desktop segment, so far, quite good.

This is another heavily Intel bias review using better cooling, bios manipulation, and using cherry picked benchmarks to favor Intel. The review remains an outlier.

 

[juanrga]

Cooling doesn't have anything to do with measuring performance at fixed clocks. Rest of points were replied in the AMD thread.

 

[-Fran-]

Cooling doesn't have anything to do with measuring performance at fixed clocks. Rest of points were replied in the AMD thread.

It does when temperature affects thermal conductivity and transistor behaviour.

I wonder what temps they produce any meaningful and observable differences though, haha.

Cheers!

 

[goldstone77]

Cooling doesn't have anything to do with measuring performance at fixed clocks. Rest of points were replied in the AMD thread.

I disagree because cooling has everything to do with keeping this power hungry chip from thermal throttling at 3.6GHz:

The 7960X in its stock configuration with TIM and additional silicone adhesive lands at 93 degrees Celsius, with liquid temperature nearing Asetek’s maximum spec of 60C. This is the most concerning and, from the standpoint of getting Intel to act on its poor thermal solution, is the most powerful: OEMs and SIs like Dell, Alienware, iBUYPOWER, and CyberPower rely on Asetek for affordable CLC solutions for workstations and HEDT platforms. The fact that we’re nearing the 60C maximum operating liquid temperature on an open air bench means that, under heavier working conditions and with mere 240-280mm CLCs, we’d be nearly at or breaching the 60C threshold when in a case.

They needed that 360mm Cooler with fans on max speed and a fan blowing over the VRMs to get the 7960X not to thermal throttle at 4GHz making most of these benchmarks impossible. Gamer Nexus mentions if the setup was put in a case, or using lesser cooling solutions it would see higher temps.

Edit: Note that Gamers Nexus used 1.15V, and Tweaktown used 2.1V(almost double), which would undoubtly increase thermals!

 

[juanrga]

Where is it stated that the systems throttled? Both were running at fixed 4GHz.

GamerNexus incorrect statements about TIM have been debunked before. He is also using AX512 workload without properly setting the AVX offset.

The Tweaktown reviewer used fans to cool the VRM of both mobos. This is the part about ThreadRipper where he mentions the use of active cooling over the VRM:

The Threadripper 1950X is clocked to 4.0GHz with a 100MHz base clock. Memory XMP is set on the G.Skill kit to 3200MHz C14, and that also increases the NB frequency (Infinity Fabric) to the same speed as the RAM, so from 1066 to 1600, which is a 50% increase. The CPU is fed 1.325v with LLC ON, there is a fan running full speed over the VRMs, and all radiator fans are going full speed at all times.

About using a large cooler for the Skylake-X. I don't get what is the problem here. Where is it stated that one has to test different CPUs with the same cooler size? Skylake cores are much faster, so consume more power, so cooling has to be better. Pretending that faster CPU has to use the cooler of the slower CPU is like pretending we would use i3 cooler on an i9 or we would use a R5 cooler on a ThreadRipper CPU.

 

[goldstone77]

Where is it stated that the systems throttled? Both were running at fixed 4GHz.

GamerNexus incorrect statements about TIM have been debunked before. He is also using AX512 workload without properly setting the AVX offset.

The Tweaktown reviewer used fans to cool the VRM of both mobos. This is the part about ThreadRipper where he mentions the use of active cooling over the VRM:

The Threadripper 1950X is clocked to 4.0GHz with a 100MHz base clock. Memory XMP is set on the G.Skill kit to 3200MHz C14, and that also increases the NB frequency (Infinity Fabric) to the same speed as the RAM, so from 1066 to 1600, which is a 50% increase. The CPU is fed 1.325v with LLC ON, there is a fan running full speed over the VRMs, and all radiator fans are going full speed at all times.

About using a large cooler for the Skylake-X. I don't get what is the problem here. Where is it stated that one has to test different CPUs with the same cooler size? Skylake cores are much faster, so consume more power, so cooling has to be better. Pretending that faster CPU has to use the cooler of the slower CPU is like pretending we would use i3 cooler on an i9 or we would use a R5 cooler on a ThreadRipper CPU.

Where is it stated that the systems throttled? Both were running at fixed 4GHz.

7960X would have to have a fan to cool it's VRMs, and 360mm radiator running all fans on max speed to stop it from thermal throttling! That is why it was including in the test setup to begin with. Other reviews have proven these power and thermal cooling solution requirements for the Skylake-X platform that have plagued it from it's inception.
The 1950X didn't need a fan to cool it's VRMs or a 360mm radiator running all fans on max speed to stop it from thermal throttling, but the 7960X does need it! The setup from the review is purposefully deceptive to anyone reading the review creating an illusion that the 1950X required the same set up too cool the VRMs, which couldn't be further from the truth. Also, you could use an air cooler to cool the 1950X, and that is not possible for the 7960X at stock settings. The whole point is exactly what I said previously. This setup does not demonstrate and out of the box experience. I stand by my previous statement, and this is the last I will comment on this review.

This is another heavily Intel bias review using better cooling, bios manipulation, and using cherry picked benchmarks to favor Intel. The review remains an outlier.

 

[juanrga]

Many Initial reviews of Skylake-X used beta BIOS with increased power consumption (incorrect p-state and turbo policies). This was solved with latter BIOS updates.

Also some initial X299 boards had an incorrectly desinged fancy plastic cover that overheated the VRM. The solution was so simple as throwing cooling to the region. The original incorrect design was solved in latter iterations of the mobos

https://linustechtips.com/main/topic/809001-asus-responds-to-der8auers-x299-vrm-problem/

ThreadRipper boards based in former X299 boards prevented the overheating problem by adding a fan to cool the VRM. So claiming that ThreadRipper builts don't need fans on the VRM is incorrect... Some ThreadRipper mobos already come with active cooling in the VRM region

https://overclock3d.net/news/cpu_mainboard/asus_reveals_three_x399_series_threadripper_motherboards/1
http://www.legitreviews.com/asus-rog-zenith-extreme-x399-motherboard-pictures_196357

I already answered why a CPU with faster cores requires better cooling.

 

[8350rocks]

Show me Linpack for those Intel CPUs. That, is full load.

That's a bit mean, man. Do you want to melt the heatsink? 🙂

Benchmarks often quoted here for Ryzen power consumption come from Linpack on a few sites that some of the posters here use.

So, apples to apples.

Though, I have seen a few melted heatsinks in my day...lol.

 

[8350rocks]

Cooling doesn't have anything to do with measuring performance at fixed clocks. Rest of points were replied in the AMD thread.

It does when temperature affects thermal conductivity and transistor behaviour.

I wonder what temps they produce any meaningful and observable differences though, haha.

Cheers!

Tests show thermals cause efficiency degradation of 4% for 10C in temp. So, essentially...if they are running these CPUs at 75C when they could easily get them 20C cooler, you are talking about 8% performance difference.

 

[juanrga]

Cooling doesn't have anything to do with measuring performance at fixed clocks. Rest of points were replied in the AMD thread.

It does when temperature affects thermal conductivity and transistor behaviour.

I wonder what temps they produce any meaningful and observable differences though, haha.

Cheers!

Tests show thermals cause efficiency degradation of 4% for 10C in temp. So, essentially...if they are running these CPUs at 75C when they could easily get them 20C cooler, you are talking about 8% performance difference.

Electric efficiency, defined as power output over power input, degrades with temperature. Compute efficiency, defined as performance per watt, is a different concept.

The only significant way temperatures can affect performance is via throttling. When there is no enough cooling, clocks have to reduce, because the generated heat cannot be dissipated and circuits could be damaged by working overheated. Nothing of that is happening here. The TeawkTown review benchmarked both chips at fixed 4GHz. So temperatures didn't affect measurement of the IPC gap between both chips. The skylake-X chips with a 33% interconnect overclock is about 30% faster clock-for-clock than ThreadRipper chip with 50% interconnect overclock.

 

[AndrewJacksonZA]

If temperatures don't matter, let's run them both at 4GHz using a simple Noctua D14?
If temperatures do matter how about we spray both CPUs and motherboards with waterproofing spray, dump them in 100 litre vats of liquid helium?

Cooling matters. Use the same cooling solution on both: 1x 240mm radiator at max fans, no fans on the VRMs on the motherboards.

 

[8350rocks]

Cooling doesn't have anything to do with measuring performance at fixed clocks. Rest of points were replied in the AMD thread.

It does when temperature affects thermal conductivity and transistor behaviour.

I wonder what temps they produce any meaningful and observable differences though, haha.

Cheers!

Tests show thermals cause efficiency degradation of 4% for 10C in temp. So, essentially...if they are running these CPUs at 75C when they could easily get them 20C cooler, you are talking about 8% performance difference.

Electric efficiency, defined as power output over power input, degrades with temperature. Compute efficiency, defined as performance per watt, is a different concept.

The only significant way temperatures can affect performance is via throttling. When there is no enough cooling, clocks have to reduce, because the generated heat cannot be dissipated and circuits could be damaged by working overheated. Nothing of that is happening here. The TeawkTown review benchmarked both chips at fixed 4GHz. So temperatures didn't affect measurement of the IPC gap between both chips. The skylake-X chips with a 33% interconnect overclock is about 30% faster clock-for-clock than ThreadRipper chip with 50% interconnect overclock.

AndrewJacksonZA has this right.

Thermals matter a lot more than you let on.

Higher silicon temps = increased leakage = efficiency loss. Intel is exposed to this problem as well.

http://www.springer.com/cda/content/document/cda_downloaddocument/9781461407478-c1.pdf?SGWID=0-0-45-1268751-p174130080

Paste that link into your browser to get more information about thermal impacts on silicon.

As an aside: why do you think they run extreme overclocks with LN2 or LOX? Because it makes the silicon so cold that the leakage is near zero and the gates can switch quickly enough without thermal degradation becoming so monstrous the leakage is off the charts.

 

[juanrga]

I just explained that temperature affects electric efficiency of circuits, not compute efficiency of CPUs. Both CPUs were clocked at 4GHz fixed, so working temperatures didn't affect performance. I also explained which is the effect of coolers on throttling and why it is incorrect to pretend to use the same cooler on all CPUs independently of its performance/size/TDP.

Extreme overclockers use LN2 to reduce temperature, which increases electric efficiency of the circuits, which reduces the f/V relationship, which allows overclockers to push clocks to 6GHz or more without needing a nuclear plant to push the electrons at those higher speeds and without melting the material due to resistance of moving electrons.

Once one gets 4GHz stable and fixed on a given CPU, it doesn't matter if one is using air, water, or LN2 to cool the CPU. If the chip is running at 4GHz stable then the performance is the same, independently of the cooling used and independently of if the temperature of the CPU is 7 ºC or 60 ºC. Performance is the product of IPC and clocks and clocks were fixed. So the review measured the IPC gap between both.

That is all.