Ahead of the release of Intel’s Core i9-10980XE next month, we’ve had a sneak peek of what to expect in terms of performance courtesy of an early test. Site Lab501 was able to secure an engineering sample ahead of other outlets and put it through its paces.
Intel Core i9-10980X
As the tests can’t be 100% confirmed and concern a pre-release version of the Core i9-10980XE, a degree of skepticism is recommended. As such, the consumer-end results may differ when the final retail version arrives.
Lab501 ran the Core i9-10980XE through a build with a Gigabyte Aorus Master X299 motherboard by using an updated BIOS allied to 32 GB of GSkill SniperX DDR-4-3200, an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti.
The tech site compared performance to a selection of other CPUs from both AMD and Intel, including the Core i7-9700K, Core i7-8700K, Core i9-9900K, Ryzen 9 3900X, Ryzen 7 3700X, and Ryzen 7 2700X.
Gaming Benchmarks
In gaming-oriented tests, the Core i9-10980XE lags only slightly behind the Ryzen 3900X running Shadow of the Tomb Raider in 4K but were more or less equivalent at either 1080p or 1440p.
As for Metro Exodus, the Ryzen 9 3900X was slightly ahead once again at 4K by about one frame and offered the same meager advantage at 1080p and 1440p. In other games like Grand Theft Auto V and Far Cry New Dawn, the results followed the same pattern pretty consistently.
Using Cinebench R20, the Core i9-10980XE scored 458 points compared to the Ryzen 3900X 522 in a single-thread ray-tracing test. In multi-thread mode, the Core i9-10980XE jumped to 8563 dwarfing the Ryzen 9 3900X and its 7076 points.
Lab501 then ran the Core i9-10980XE through DaVinci Resolve 1.5 to render a 4K video in around 96 seconds, while the Ryzen 9 3900X took a little longer at 109 seconds. The next closest competitor was the Ryzen 7 3700X with 157 seconds.
Running PCMark 10, the Core i9-10980XE landed 7214 points, beaten quite convincingly by the Ryzen 9 3900X, which had 7571 points.
Final Word
While the results give us a fascinating insight into the capabilities of Intel’s latest chip, we’d recommend waiting until next month for a final verdict. But, we’ll be sure to have all the latest, so make sure to keep checking back for more info!