Cascade Lake Effect: A Performance Look At Intel’s Core i9-10980XE

Benchmarking a CPU may sound like a simple enough task, but in order to deliver accurate, repeatable results, strict guidelines need to be adhered to. This makes for rigorous, time-consuming testing, but we feel that the effort is worth it.

This page exists so that we can be open about how we test, and give those who care about testing procedures an opportunity to review our methodology before flaming us in the comments. Here, you can see a breakdown of all of our test machines, specifics about the tests themselves, and other general information that might be useful.

Let’s start with a look at the test platforms, for AMD’s TR4 (MSI’s MEG X399 Creation) and AM4 (Aorus X570 MASTER), along with Intel’s LGA2011-v3 (ASUS’ ROG STRIX X299-E GAMING), and LGA1151 (ASUS’ ROG STRIX Z390-E GAMING).

On our Intel platforms that use ASUS motherboards, we disable the “MultiCore Enhancement” feature, which effectively operates the CPU beyond stock speeds. The same feature doesn’t exist on our AMD platforms. We validated our configuration with AMD, Intel, and ASUS before settling on it.

On the mitigation front, nothing is explicitly done outside of having the most up-to-date EFI and chipset driver installed on every motherboard. Systems are effectively default, and whichever security mitigations are applied will be automatic ones applied by the motherboard firmware or driver vendor. All platforms are run with 32GB DDR4-3200 (14-14-14) memory configurations.

Here’s the full breakdown of the test rigs:

Techgage’s CPU Testing Platforms

Testing Considerations

For our testing, we use Windows 10 build 18362 (1903) with full updates. Version 1909 was released in the middle of our benchmarking, so we’ve stuck to 1903 here. For the sake of sanity checking, we cloned one of our test platform SSDs to upgrade to 1909, and couldn’t find any change to performance across ten or so benchmarks. In the grand scheme of Windows releases, 1909 is minor, but we’ll still upgrade next time we need to start from scratch.

Here are some basic guidelines we follow:

• Disruptive services are disabled; eg: Search, Cortana, User Account Control, Defender, etc.
• Overlays and / or other extras are not installed with the graphics driver.
• Vsync is disabled at the driver level.
• Power profiles used: High / Ultimate Performance for Intel, Ryzen Balanced for AMD.
• OSes are never transplanted from one machine to another.
• We validate system configurations before kicking off any test run.
• Testing doesn’t begin until the PC is idle (keeps a steady minimum wattage).
• All tests are repeated until there is a high degree of confidence in the results.
• Benchmarks of modern workloads matter, so we always try to use the most up-to-date software.

Encoding Tests

Encoding: Adobe Lightroom

Encoding: Adobe Premiere Pro

Encoding: Blackmagic RAW Speed Test

Photogrammetry: Agisoft Metashape

Music Encoding: LameXP

Adobe Lightroom Classic
Adobe Premiere Pro
Agisoft Metashape
Blackmagic RAW Speed Test
HandBrake
LameXP

(You can click each name to go straight to that result.)

Rendering Tests

Rendering: Autodesk Arnold in Maya

Rendering: Blender

Rendering: Chaos Czech Corona Renderer in 3ds Max

Rendering: Chaos Group V-Ray Next in 3ds Max

Rendering: Luxion KeyShot

Rendering: MAXON Cinebench

Rendering: MAXON Cinema 4D

Rendering: POV-Ray

Rendering: V-Ray Next Benchmark

Arnold (Maya 2019) (Also relevant to: 3ds Max, C4D, Houdini, Katana, Softimage)
Blender
Cinebench
Cinema 4D
Corona (3ds Max 2019) (Also relevant to: C4D)
KeyShot (Also relevant to: 3ds Max, Maya, Creo, SketchUp, SolidWorks, NX, Rhino)
POV-Ray
V-Ray Next (3ds Max 2019) (Also relevant to: C4D, Houdini, Maya, Rhino, SketchUp)
V-Ray Benchmark
SiSoftware Sandra 2020

(You can click each name to go straight to that result.)

Gaming Tests

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Far Cry 5

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege

Total War: Three Kingdoms

UL 3DMark

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Far Cry 5
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
Total War: Three Kingdoms
UL 3DMark

(You can click each name to go straight to that result.)

If you think there’s some information lacking on this page, or you simply want clarification on anything in particular, don’t hesitate to leave a comment.