 I think on some level Intel must know that their product naming scheme could be less confusing Where that level is well your guess is as good as mine because they have certainly never admitted it to us and yet Here we are with an Intel sponsored deeper dive into the core X series their high-end desktop Processors where we'll cover the key options available and what they might be most useful for Okay, so first a little context Intel's x299 platform is divided up into two major architectures Kaby Lake X and Sky Lake X Kaby Lake X is essentially their consumer 7000 series chips with more heavy-duty traces Slightly higher clock speeds and the higher power consumption that goes with it as a result it differs Significantly from other CPUs that fit into the LGA 2066 socket Intel intends them as entry-level chips for folks who want to get into an HEDT or high-end desktop motherboard and then upgrade later, but so far they've been most successful in competitive overclocking Especially in light of the six core options that are available on the Z370 consumer side of things now Sky like X on the other hand is where the meat's at here We've got two classes of processors core i7 and core i9 All of them have unlocked multipliers for overclocking Intel hyper threading technology Quad channel DDR4 memory support for AVX 2 and AVX 512 x86 extensions and they share Sky Lake X's new cache setup of 1M of level 2 cache per core matched with a shared level 3 cache that's much smaller than previous generations But in practice proves more efficient in most scenarios Where they differ is in the core count which increments by 2 for each step up the product stack the number of PCI Express lanes which is lower on core i7 models and the implementation of turbo boost max 3.0 So CPUs with eight cores or more get two max boost cores while the 7800 X gets zero Turbo boost max cores now we won't be doing a deep dive on every skew just the top tier core i9 7980 XE to show what the platform is capable of in multi-threaded and virtualized workloads the core i9 7900 X the jack of all trades and the core i7 78 20 X which we believe Should be the entry-level CPU for most buyers on this platform Let's start with that last one it has 28 PCI Express lanes So that's enough for a full speed graphics card a couple of NVMe SSDs and some high speed networking So it's about right for an entry-level workstation Which is great because that's where this chips performance shines It actually has the highest base frequency in the entire Skylake X lineup It shares the highest boost frequency with the 7900 X and it also shares the highest 2-core turbo boost max 3.0 frequency at 4.5 gigahertz making it a great fit for a workstation that isn't always used for work To be moving into core i9 territory we leave behind the 28 PCIe lanes and step up to 44 where we get perhaps the most interesting CPU in the x2 99 lineup the 10 core core i9 7900 X when this guy launched we reviewed it quite favorably thanks to its major performance improvements over its predecessor the core i7 6900 K and even the 6950 X Now to be clear not everyone is gonna see a performance improvement versus the 7820 X But if you want to have full unbottlenecked access to many connected PCI Express devices be they networking storage video capture or expensive accelerator cards This is where you want to be and you get another two cores for workloads that can take advantage of them as well The rest of the core i9 lineup is what I would describe as tweeners that is they are in between the 7900 X two cores per step and the highest end CPU Intel has ever released on a desktop platform the $2,000 18 core core i9 7980 XE this thing is an absolute beast and it shows in both its performance numbers and its power draw it blitzed through our testing suite pulling off similar per thread performance numbers to its fewer core brethren and even beating out our 22 core Xeon E5 2699 v4 and It managed to pull 500 to 600 watts on its own when overclocked It doesn't win any bang for the buck gaming awards But for those that need this kind of performance be they video editors 3d animators using fluid simulation or anyone Who's doing high-end computational work that can't be offloaded onto a GPU? Well it could be that for you raw performance is all that matters because time is money and a CPU that outputs faster Can pay for itself pretty quickly Skylake X represents a healthy improvement upon the previous generation and it's a solid choice when it comes to both per thread and multi-threaded performance now We just hope that Intel's plan for a more dynamic and risky future brings us even more performance next year and The year after that because we're insatiable like that So thanks for watching guys if you just like this video you can hit that button But if you liked it hit like get subscribed Maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description Also down there we've got our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should totally join