 Oh Six am why I said this oh wait the review embargo just lifted on Intel's new CPU I gotta go check out the wall of videos from all my favorite channels about the exact same damn thing After this message from Madrinas Madrinas cold brew coffees are available in lots of different flavors and they come in these convenient 15 fluid ounce cans Check them out using offer code Linus at LMG.gg slash Madrinas coffee to get 40% off today. We'll have that link below I'm gonna have to be honest with you guys this is Is not a very interesting product on its own merit And it's a lot more straightforward than the other launches that we've had this year, but don't stop watching because there is a twist so Normally we'd talk about what's different between the 18 core core i9 99 80 XC and its brother the 18 core 79 80 XC But you might have noticed that I said brother not cousin predecessor. That's because these two are so similar that they're almost Twins there's been no new manufacturing process no more cores no more cash No more PCI Express lanes no memory frequency or capacity improvement Nor even a slight refresh of an existing chipset so that we can all run out and buy new motherboards So then how did they push the clock speeds higher have they raised the TDP so that it can just? Suck back more juice and run laps around the previous extreme edition No, no they did not So how does it go faster? Well we know from past experience that Intel has been treating the TDP ratings of their CPUs more like guidelines for cooler design than actual power consumption specifications So let's take a look at the one thing that they did change just like the ninth-gen consumer 9900 K our Ninth-gen HDT though it should be noted that architecturally they're more like eighth and sixth generation respectively 99 80 XC gets a soldered heat spreader So maybe the idea here is that as long as a cooler spec for Intel's TDP rating Can handle the CPU with nice low temps then we're cool, and it can it can turbo up more Solder should help with that Let's see by how much now Given that it comes in at the same price as the outgoing 79 80 XC the 99 80 XC only really has to perform Marginally better to come away with a strong recommendation here No, I'm sorry. I'm just kidding so we're gonna be comparing it to AMD's offerings and Intel's own mainstream platform, and I think it's gonna be a little rough Yeah, it's a little rough even with its higher base and boost clocks gaming really isn't this CPU's forte Now there's no reason why it can't game, but it's immediately obvious why it shouldn't Intel's consumer CPUs tooled the 99 80 XC's predecessors And the only changes here are that it picks up a couple points in DirectX 12 and in the very frequency dependent CSGO But productivity is the real bread and butter of an HDD chip anyway And here we do get some pretty big jumps in performance over last gen especially in 7-zip and Cinebench both in single threaded and multi-threaded modes a trend that continues down the line with decent results in Adobe Premiere and Blender where the base clock increase becomes more significant the longer the render takes to complete with that said Red Ripper thanks to its lower pricing and higher core counts Continues to either compete valiantly or make Intel look downright stupid across most of the productivity suite Now some of you may have noticed that the improvement in performance over last gen is really inconsistent if this thing is just 200 megahertz higher across the spec sheet then all other things being equal which they are We should be able to pretty much guess the uplift But we've got tests here that barely improved at all even after multiple runs Well after further digging we think we've reached the bottom of it if we look at our thermal results on first glance It looks like we're getting better thermals than our 7980 XE and with lower power draw But by going deeper we think we discovered the reason that Intel has Refused to say what their all core boost multipliers are So our AVX 512 stress test had this CPU running at just 2.8 Gigahertz across all cores that is lower than the base clock of the 9980 XE and Coincidentally the same as the base clock on the 7980 XE it replaces so users of AVX 512 workloads Yeah, you're not getting an upgrade today at all Switching to AVX 2 got us to 3.3 Gigahertz That's just a hundred megahertz over the 7980 XE with increases in both temperatures and power draw Then turning AVX off all together netted us a healthy 3.8 Gigahertz all core boost That's 400 megahertz higher than the 7980 XE's So that's where the performance increase in non AVX workloads like gaming is coming from But it also resulted in more power draw with our 9980 XE easily surpassing every other CPU We tested in this scenario So the bottom line is this this new skew seems to be basically a 7980 XE with a different voltage curve which allows its better binned die to draw less power at 2.8 Gigahertz With the side effects being that it requires more juice to achieve its higher true all core boost clock As for that soldered heat spreader it doesn't seem to be making much of a difference But there are a couple of extra degrees of headroom I guess so if you're a real masochist You can slap a fat cooler on this thing and remove the turbo limits Just make sure please that you have active VRM cooling for your motherboard just like for the 7980 XE Bottom line the numbers that you read on the box for the core i9 9980 XE should be taken with a dose of salt large enough to prune a whale Let's start with the 9 this is not a ninth-gen processor in so much as it doesn't use Intel's ninth generation Core micro architecture nor is it even the ninth family of HEDT processors It is sixth-gen with some extra seasoning namely salt As for these clock speeds well they're fine as long as Intel is assuming that their customers don't intend to use their $2,000 processor for the kinds of professional workloads that might justify a $2,000 processor which is obviously stupid and only going to get stupider as use of AVX instructions becomes more prevalent So in my opinion these marketing numbers are not worth the price And these marketing numbers are misleading at best and making matters worse Much worse is that Intel is refusing to be transparent about them We asked straight up to have a simple table provided to us so that we'd know what to expect during our testing and they Wouldn't tell us What is the purpose of this song and dance we can measure these numbers? Why not just save us the hassle and put it in the reviewers guide I? Get that giving us these numbers makes the product look worse But like the product is what it is we were going to figure that out now It's just worse, and you've pissed off the reviewers who are supposed to be either recommending or slamming your product when the embargo lifts and you guys wonder why you have PR problems over there Anyway 3980 XC then it's pretty cool, but I can't think of a use case that I would buy one for Speaking of buying things Massdrop's new force edc in-ear monitors are the sponsor for today's video They feature a single 6 millimeter dynamic driver on each side with both channels closely mapped for a cleaner more accurate sound You can wear them at home in the office at the gym. I mean they're in-ear monitors. You can wear them anywhere That's sort of the idea they feature a lightweight plastic housing which Massdrop says is built to stand up to regular use and they Come with two removable braided cables, so pick them up on Massdrop for just $59.99 at the link in the video description So thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button But if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in The video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join