Intel Core i9-7900X review: The fastest chip in the world
The real problems with Skylake-X are chipset cost, power consumption, shitty partner boards, and TIM.  All of these are forgivable given the performance - except the TIM.<p>Chipset cost will come down in 6-12 months after launch like it always does.  This is part for the course, at launch X370 boards for Ryzen were going for well over $250 as well.<p>Power consumption is a consequence of AVX512 and the mesh interconnect along with raw core count.  Everyone wants higher clocks, more cores, and more functional units.  There are no easy efficiency gains anymore, and this is the price - power consumption.  This is the &quot;everything and the kitchen sink&quot; processor and it runs hot as a result - but it absolutely crushes everything else on the market.  This is no Bulldozer.<p>Board partners with insulators on top of their VRMs was going to come to a head sooner or later.  This is the natural outgrowth of form over function, RGB LEDs on everything and stylized heatsink designs that insulate the board instead of actual cooling.  The terrible reviews on those boards will sort this problem right out, they will be unusable in their current form.<p>Intel has been cruising for issues with their TIM for years (since Ivy Bridge), this time they finally have a chip that puts out enough heat they can&#x27;t ignore it.  Intel can get away with making you delid a $200 i5 or a $300 i7, it&#x27;s not acceptable on a $1000 processor.<p>There is still a market for a 6-12C HEDT chip that can hit 5 GHz overclocked.  This thing absolutely smokes Ryzen in gaming at stock clocks let alone OC&#x27;d - single-thread performance is still a dominant factor in good gaming performance and this chip delivers in spades.  Combining its leads in IPC and clocks, it&#x27;s fully 33% faster than Ryzen in single-thread performance.  This is just a brutal amount of performance for gaming.  Unfortunately without delidding you&#x27;re not going to hit good OC clocks given the current TIM.  And delidding is a dealbreaker on a $1000 CPU.<p>TIM is the actual core problem with Skylake-X - everything else will sort itself out.  Skylake-X with solder would be a winner and Intel would be wise to turn the ship as fast as possible.  The 6C and 8C version are priced much more reasonably and will sell great as long as they fix the TIM problem.<p>Intel claims they have problems with dies cracking, but AMD manages to solder much smaller dies, so IMO Intel just doesn&#x27;t have a leg to stand on here.  This is not something that should be pushed onto the customer with a $1000 processor - you&#x27;re Chipzilla, <i>figure something out</i>.