by Rob Williams on November 25, 2019 in Processors
We’ve reached the third generation of eighteen core desktop processors from Intel, with the launch of the new Core X-series, and its flagship Core i9-10980XE. Even with a bump to the max Turbo clock, and an increase of officially supported memory speed and total density, the most notable thing about Intel’s latest flagship is actually something else: its sub-$1,000 price tag.
In recent years, we haven’t had a huge gaming focus in our CPU reviews, simply because we’ve had so much other testing to take care of, some of which isn’t tackled many other places (if anywhere else on a regular basis). But, with such a massive focus on gaming with CPUs lately, we had to renew our focus, and thus, we have four games and a couple of synthetic benchmarks on-hand to help.
For our testing with real games, we’re sticking to testing with 1080p and 4K resolutions. If we’re going to benchmark games, it makes sense to us to run them at realistic resolutions, because a gain seen at 720p or lower quite literally doesn’t matter if there’s no differences seen at higher resolutions people actually play at.
With the four games here, we have two esports titles, as well as two bigger AAA titles that are actually designed to punish your system, rather than run as fast as possible without looking awful. Synthetics found at the end of the page will act as an easy second opinion.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
Far Cry 5
Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege
Total War: THREE KINGDOMS
Synthetic Benchmarks