A Look At Intel’s Core i9-7900X X-Series 10-core Processor

(All of our tests are explained in detail on page 2.)

As seen on the previous page, rendering can take amazing advantage of even the biggest processors, but video encoding is not that far behind – if at all. Even the free conversion tool HandBrake can take advantage of our sixteen-thread processors to significantly decrease encode times. For our video encoding purposes, we use Adobe’s Premiere Pro, as well as HandBrake.

To a lesser degree, music conversion and image manipulation can also see benefits on beefier chips, so Adobe’s Lightroom and dBpoweramp will be used to help us gauge that performance.

Adobe Premiere Pro

The i9-7900X continues to dominate here, delivering a far better value at $999 now than the i7-6950X did for $1,699 last year.

HandBrake

Where encoding is concerned, Intel really does dominate, thanks in huge part to the fact that its hardware has dominated. Despite the 1800X having 80% the cores of the two Intel 10-cores, Intel has a huge advantage – more so with the higher-clocked i9-7900X – just keep in mind the price difference, though.

Adobe Lightroom & dBpoweramp

dBpoweramp’s a great tool for testing the scalability of cores and frequencies, although because it doesn’t support more than 16 threads, it does put the 10-cores at a disadvantage from delivering a dominating result. Above, I talked about Intel’s prowess in multi-media, and that shines through with the Lightroom test, with last-gen’s i7-6700K quad-core managing to conquer AMD’s 1800X eight-core. It’s hard to compete with such established optimization.