 Hello. My name is Linus Sebastian and I have not been held captive at Intel's headquarters since releasing a video stating I did not agree with Intel's direction for the X299 but if that were the case I'm sure Intel would have treated me very well. I would also like to go like to go on record as stating that in reference to my statements in that video that I that I was that I stand by everything I said. Synergy allows you to share your mouse and keyboard between multiple computers at once. Check it out now at the link in the video description. Ok so silly intro aside obviously I have spoken to Intel since we made this video I've expressed my concerns and you know what they're big boys and girls who can handle a bit of constructive criticism so obviously we're still working together X299 then let's do a short recap for those of you who didn't see our previous video Intel's brand new core i9 chips plug into motherboards with a brand new LGA 2066 socket that's connected to a brand new chipset X299 that features more updated I.O. more PCI Express lanes and a four lane DMI 3.0 link and finer overclocking controls so pretty straightforward more and more better what's less straightforward and how you take this is up to you is that the socket now handles two separate generations of CPUs the first skylake X is about what you would expect it's this year's enthusiast grade high core count processor based on last year's quad core max consumer grade processor so we get some fancy architectural improvements we get turbo boost max that bumps up to course instead of only one and finally support for AVX 512 outside of Xeon and the second is Kaby Lake X in an attempt to appease hardcore overclockers Intel basically took their consumer grade Kaby Lake chips disabled their integrated graphics processors and glued them onto bigger packages with better power delivery characteristics and bigger heat spreaders Intel hopes that these chips will be a boon to folks who don't have a thousand dollars for a core i9 today but want to have a solid upgrade path in the future for my part i feel like only being able to populate half of the RAM slots on a quad channel board and having PCI Express bandwidth potentially cut to less than half is a really confusing experience though i would love to hear from you guys in the comments if you feel differently but wait what less PCIe bandwidth I thought you said more ok so for the top-end core i9 we actually get more than ever 44 versus 40 on the previous flagship 6950x where that potentially less than half bit comes from is that anything other than a core i9 gets far less as few as only 16 which could affect the performance of demanding enthusiast features like SLI 10 gigabit networking m.2 raid or thunderbolt 3 and on the subject of m.2 raid it looks like vrock doesn't have pricing yet and Intel actually isn't quite sure how they're going to roll that out but the good news is you can boot from NVMe raid if it goes through the chipset without doing any of that stuff it's only if it goes through the CPU that the vrock module is going to come into play so let's get into benchmarks then we unfortunately didn't get a Kaby Lake X CPU in time for this video but we did get the 10 core core i9 7900x the least expensive option with the full 44 PCI Express lanes this along with our nifty AF Asus Prime x2 99 deluxe some overclocking elbow grease all x200 compatible chips are unlocked and some validated memory from G skill gives us our main test bench today for comparison we'll be looking at the Z2 70 based core i7 7700 K our x99 bench featuring last gen's much more expensive 10 core and while we don't have thread ripper yet we've thrown AMD's Ryzen 1800 X into the fray for comparison so in gaming there's clearly no major difference between any of our CPUs at 4k 1080p tells a bit of a different tale but frankly none of this is a surprise clock speed is still king when it comes to games and until properly implemented Vulcan and DirectX 12 games are commonplace that isn't going to change anytime soon as for productivity this is cool one interesting aspect of Sky Lake X's design is that it moves from relying heavily on a ton of level 3 cache to relying more on its higher speed level 2 cache so where broad well II had 256 kilobytes of level 2 per core Sky Lake X has all whopping 1 Meg each and the level 3 becomes what's known as a victim cache so where one core might look for data in the level 3 find it isn't there but in another core's level 2 where it can then get pushed to the level 3 cache that leaves the most relevant cached data in the fastest cache more often which results in some of the performance gains that we're seeing here which is great given how core i9 is intended to be used in everything from high-end gaming rigs to high-end workstations so core i9 7900 X then great performance and compared to broad well II great price great release then right in a vacuum yes but the elephant that hasn't yet entered the room is AMD's the red ripper Intel is faced with the disadvantage of having shot first with X 299 and AMD has some time to tweak their upcoming thread ripper CPU lineup which it said will be available with up to 16 cores and 64 PCI elanes so they could put the gears to Intel on pricing at which time Intel whose 12 14 16 and 18 core models will be arriving between August and q4 of this year we'll have to figure out how to respond if at all so you know what I am still frustrated that it took Intel this long to wake up and I do still think that this CPU lineup is unnecessarily confusing but whatever their motivation AMD's innovation or their unconditional love for enthusiasts it is true this is a great release because we're back to Intel and AMD playing leapfrog and that is just great synergy solves once and for all the problem of having two keyboards and two mice at your desk it lets you share a single mouse and keyboard between two or more computers so you'll no longer confuse which one is for which you just move the mouse across they offer a basic and pro option with one-time payment for lifetime access and they have tons of great features like clipboard sharing between the computers dragging and dropping files between them the ability to set up hotkeys and even the ability to use computers with different operating systems we're talking Windows we're talking Mac we're even talking Linux so use our link in the video description and get 50% off of synergy today or tomorrow but don't wait too long so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button and maybe check out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description also down there is a link to our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join