It appears that the first gaming benchmarks for the upcoming Cascade Lake-X desktop processor, the Intel Core i9 10980XE. This processor comes with 18 cores, supports 36 threads, and can turbo boost on all cores at 3.8GHz. However, it appears that this particular CPU is slower in PC games than both the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X and the Intel Core i9 9900K.
The games that Lab501 tested were: Far Cry: New Dawn, Dawn of War 3 and Metro Exodus. In Metro Exodus, the performance difference was minimal (mainly due to the fact that this is mostly a GPU-bound title). In Dawn of War 3, the i9 10980XE was slower by almost 20fps than the i9 9900K and the Ryzen 9 3900X.
The big shocker in the gaming performance, though, comes from Far Cry: New Dawn. As we’ve reported in the past, Far Cry 5 and Far Cry: New Dawn mainly use/stress one CPU core/thread. As such, the Intel i9 10980XE is slower by 31fps than the Intel i9 9900K. It’s also slower by 26fps than the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X.
Now obviously, the Intel i9 10980XE does not target PC gamers. As such, it comes as no surprise that it cannot beat its older i9 high-end gaming models. Moreover, do keep in mind that the i9 9900K can turbo boost to 4.7Ghz (on all cores). In other words, we’re talking about a 1Ghz difference – on all cores – between these two CPUs, something that obviously explains their performance difference.
Before closing, it’s worth noting that Lab501 initially had some issues booting the Intel i9 10980XE. Whether newer BIOS updates – for the motherboards that are currently available on the market – will improve performance remains to be seen.
Kudos to our reader Metal Messiah for bringing this to our attention!
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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