Review Cascade-X Review and Availability Thread

[Hitman928]

Review embargo I believe lifts at 9 am ET so I will update this post as soon as reviews are published. As always, if there is a review you don't see in this post that you would like to have added, please PM me.

Video reviews
Linux Tech Tips

Print reviews
Hothardware
Tweaktown
Anandtech

For Sale
10980xe and 10920x listed on Newegg but both out of stock.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Linus is mad as hell over Intel's embargo lift timing.

 

[ehume]

Linus is mad as hell over Intel's embargo lift timing.

Why?

 

[Hitman928]

Linus is mad as hell over Intel's embargo lift timing.

Yeah, Ian basically saying intel moved up embargo so reviewers would post their reviews without being able to include the new Threadripper results (still under embargo until later today). Pretty sneaky intel.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1198930607595819008

 

[Sable]

Weasel and chicken.

 

[BigDaveX]

Remember when Intel would actually pull new and interesting products out of the bag for their Emergency Edition-type releases? Even if they still got completely curb-stomped by their AMD counterparts (or in the Core 2 and Nehalem era, weren't actually necessary to begin with), they were always neat to look at from a purely technical perspective.

This is just... meh. As Tweaktown (perhaps unwittingly) points out, all they've really done is gotten rid of the ridiculous price-gouging that they were getting up to with Skylake-X and, to a lesser extent, Broadwell-E.

 

[happy medium]

Remember when Intel would actually pull new and interesting products out of the bag for their Emergency Edition-type releases? Even if they still got completely curb-stomped by their AMD counterparts (or in the Core 2 and Nehalem era, weren't actually necessary to begin with), they were always neat to look at from a purely technical perspective.

This is just... meh. As Tweaktown (perhaps unwittingly) points out, all they've really done is gotten rid of the ridiculous price-gouging that they were getting up to with Skylake-X and, to a lesser extent, Broadwell-E.

Well that's all they needed to do,lower prices,they always had good products.

 

[tamz_msc]

It's unfortunate that the lower core-count CPUs in the lineup aren't being reviewed, especially the 10920X. That is in my opinion the most interesting chip in the lineup.

 

[TheGiant]

well we should try to find a reason to buy it Intel, at least one
ok i got one SVT video encoding with avx512
please give us second why to buy this crap
rebranded 7980XE...

 

[exquisitechar]

Surprisingly mediocre performance from the 10980XE. I thought it would pull ahead more often compared to a 3950x, but nope.

 

[DrMrLordX]

well we should try to find a reason to buy it Intel, at least one

Might be an interesting AI deep learning solution for people that don't want to use dGPUs for whatever reason. Haven't seen anyone benchmark that yet.

Surprisingly mediocre performance from the 10980XE. I thought it would pull ahead more often compared to a 3950x, but nope.

It's not really any faster than the 9980XE. At least not by much.

@ehume

@Hitman928 summed it up pretty nicely. Or you can just watch the Linus Tech Tips vid. Either way, Intel pulled a fast one.

 

[Hitman928]

Surprisingly mediocre performance from the 10980XE. I thought it would pull ahead more often compared to a 3950x, but nope.

It's a power/heat issue because they're still stuck on 14 nm. The chips overclock well if you have the desire and setup to deal with the heat put out by the chip at mid-4 GHz frequencies. Once overclocked they perform much better and outperform the 3950x consistently, but it's a lot of heat.

Interestingly LTT found the 9980xe outperformed the 10980xe in some cases. Intel confirmed the 10980xe performance but said that their 9980xe was above expectations. Linus assumed it was due to a difference in vulnerability mitigations being added recently but intel wouldn't confirm that so who knows.

 

[BigDaveX]

Well that's all they needed to do,lower prices,they always had good products.

Maybe that was true against the earlier versions of Ryzen and Threadripper. Against the newer ones? Not so much.

 

[TheGiant]

Might be an interesting AI deep learning solution for people that don't want to use dGPUs for whatever reason. Haven't seen anyone benchmark that yet.

yes, but those ppl have Xeon Gold or some I guess
with TR3 lineup there is no advantage that was here before with skylake-x lineup

It's a power/heat issue because they're still stuck on 14 nm. The chips overclock well if you have the desire and setup to deal with the heat put out by the chip at mid-4 GHz frequencies. Once overclocked they perform much better and outperform the 3950x consistently, but it's a lot of heat.

QFT, but we have this here since 2017

 

[Mopetar]

Maybe that was true against the earlier versions of Ryzen and Threadripper. Against the newer ones? Not so much.

The chips are still good though, just not at the prices Intel is asking and they mainly look worse by comparison because AMD has made such leaps and bounds in terms of both IPC and core count.

They’re still serviceable chips that are the best in certain niches. I don’t mind some much deserved ribbing, but this is far from a Bulldozer situation. If you’re an Intel fan you can still get comparable performance in a lot of cases. You just might need your own coal-fired power plant to get there though.

 

[Markfw]

Surprisingly mediocre performance from the 10980XE. I thought it would pull ahead more often compared to a 3950x, but nope.

And the disgusting part is that the HEDT top of the line Intel is beat by a consumer chip ! And the 3950x is less expensive as well. Not to mention that 18 cores is beaten by 16 cores. (more than 50% of the time)

 

[Mopetar]

And the disgusting part is that the HEDT top of the line Intel is beat by a consumer chip ! And the 3950x is less expensive as well. Not to mention that 18 cores is beaten by 16 cores. (more than 50% of the time)

I guess it turns out that it's much harder to get high-level consistent performance from a huge monolithic die than it is when you bin your best chiplets and "glue" them together.


(Yeah this is about server chips, but the idea still applies)

 

[TheGiant]

I guess it turns out that it's much harder to get high-level consistent performance from a huge monolithic die than it is when you bin your best chiplets and "glue" them together.

View attachment 13631
(Yeah this is about server chips, but the idea still applies)

I tried to ask it here many times, never got any answer
can you provide benchmarks where the uniform latency of mesh has a measurable benefit?

 

[Zucker2k]

10980XE performance on Linux...



Core for core, I don't see any problem here. Plus, Intel shows much value here; and once overclocked, it gets even better. It's difficult to use "Intel" and "value" in the same sentence but for all the flack that's been directed at Intel for lack of innovation and so on, the above image is testament to the legendary staying power of the skylake microarchitecture and the 14nm process.

Intel has nowhere to go, but up, and AMD is not holding out on putting out the best they can as soon as they can. This means Intel has no choice but to throw everything they can at the competition as soon as they can. Things are going to get interesting soon enough.

 

[Hitman928]

10980XE performance on Linux...

View attachment 13634

Core for core, I don't see any problem here. Plus, Intel shows much value here; and once overclocked, it gets even better. It's difficult to use "Intel" and "value" in the same sentence but for all the flack that's been directed at Intel for lack of innovation and so on, the above image is testament to the legendary staying power of the skylake microarchitecture and the 14nm process.

Intel has nowhere to go, but up, and AMD is not holding out on putting out the best they can as soon as they can. This means Intel has no choice but to throw everything they can at the competition as soon as they can. Things are going to get interesting soon enough.

The problem is that Phoronix used 111 benchmarks (not the problem) many of which were single threaded tests (there it is). So yeah, if you have a use case where you want to buy an 18+ core CPU and find yourself needing single/lightly threaded performance a significant amount of time, the 10980XE doesn't look too bad. But I can't imagine that anyone buying any of these CPUs care much at all about their single threaded performance. When you take that away from the average and look at multi-threaded performance (what the vast majority of people buying these will care about), it looks more like this:

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3960X und 3970X im Test: Benchmarks in Anwendungen und Spielen

Threadripper 3970X & 3960X im Test: Benchmarks in Anwendungen und Spielen / Benchmarks in Anwendungen

www.computerbase.de

Now, all of a sudden AMD not only dominates on a performance and perf/W level, but still wins perf/$ as well though intel is almost equal in the last regard. Now, how many cores do you actually need, how big is your budget, what are the specific apps you'll be using, etc. all need to be accounted for, but in a general sense, AMD has the crown on HEDT and it's not even close.

The bigger problem (for intel) is that AMD is coming out with a round 4 of TR in probably about 14 - 18 months and it looks like intel will again have nothing substantial with which to counter. Maybe I'm wrong but at this moment, it seems like AMD will still be dominating the HEDT arena 2 years from now.

 

[DrMrLordX]

@Hitman928

You will also notice that the Phoronix result composite graph includes no results from the 3950x.

Intel is being massacred. The 3950x is a serious competitor to Intel's top-end HEDT CPU at a lower price on cheaper motherboards with cheaper cooling. The only argument that I can see for the 10980XE is that it can be overclocket to 4.5 GHz+ with heavy custom watercooling while a 3950X has less all-core headroom. So if you're willing to spend $250 extra on your CPU, ~$100 extra on your board, maybe $200-$400 or more extra on your cooling, and an unknown amount on your power, you can get (probably) more performance from a 10980XE than a 3950X under any circumstance. That's kind of a weird situation, though: if you're buying 18c chips like the 10980XE and you're willing to spend that much extra in cooling and platform costs, why aren't you just getting the 3960X instead? The only situation where I see the overclocked 10980XE being a clear winner is where I need maximum ST IPC, more than 8c (read: not a 9900KS), but less than 24c. And let's face it, that overclocked 10980XE isn't going to be that much faster than a properly-optimized 3950X. There's a lot you can do to improve the performance of a Matisse rig (that doesn't necessarily show up in reviews) without necessarily overclocking it or even trying to use PBO.

 

[Zucker2k]

@Hitman928

You will also notice that the Phoronix result composite graph includes no results from the 3950x.

Intel is being massacred. The 3950x is a serious competitor to Intel's top-end HEDT CPU at a lower price on cheaper motherboards with cheaper cooling. The only argument that I can see for the 10980XE is that it can be overclocket to 4.5 GHz+ with heavy custom watercooling while a 3950X has less all-core headroom. So if you're willing to spend $250 extra on your CPU, ~$100 extra on your board, maybe $200-$400 or more extra on your cooling, and an unknown amount on your power, you can get (probably) more performance from a 10980XE than a 3950X under any circumstance. That's kind of a weird situation, though: if you're buying 18c chips like the 10980XE and you're willing to spend that much extra in cooling and platform costs, why aren't you just getting the 3960X instead? The only situation where I see the overclocked 10980XE being a clear winner is where I need maximum ST IPC, more than 8c (read: not a 9900KS), but less than 24c. And let's face it, that overclocked 10980XE isn't going to be that much faster than a properly-optimized 3950X. There's a lot you can do to improve the performance of a Matisse rig (that doesn't necessarily show up in reviews) without necessarily overclocking it or even trying to use PBO.

How are you cooling your 3900x?
What's the recommended cooling for the 3950x by AMD?

 

[BigDaveX]

That's kind of a weird situation, though: if you're buying 18c chips like the 10980XE and you're willing to spend that much extra in cooling and platform costs, why aren't you just getting the 3960X instead?

As things stand, there's a pretty huge jump in CPU and motherboard costs from the 10980XE to the 3960X. Going by UK prices, for the cost of just the 3960X and one of the cheaper TRX40 motherboards, you can buy every component of a 10980XE system except for the GPU - and that's assuming you need something more than just basic display output, otherwise you could probably squeeze a GT1030 or something similar into the budget.

For the most part it's been a very impressive launch by AMD and a very unspectacular launch by Intel, but the pricing on the TRX40 platform and rapid discontinuation of the older Threadrippers has left a gap in the market for those who need the I/O capabilities of an HEDT platform, but don't want to pay crazy bucks. Granted, it's probably not a very big niche, but it's one that does exist.

 

[DrMrLordX]

How are you cooling your 3900x?

Using a cooling rig that's mostly suitable for a 10980XE. Honestly it doesn't help my 3900X much, which is how I reasonably can infer that a 3950X isn't going to OC like a 10980XE will under "big water". It probably buys me a few MHz here and there, but it isn't pushing my all-core clocks up by 700 MHz or more which is what a 10980XE could get under the same circumstances. Hotspotting makes it a PITA to cool Matisse when you start overclocking it.

(it's a MO-RA3 with two D5 Varios)

What's the recommended cooling for the 3950x by AMD?

AMD ships the 3950X with Wraith Prism I think, so there's your answer. Anyway you can easily get away with an NH-D15 or similar if you aren't trying for a top-end all-core OC. If you want 4.4 GHz or better then you may have to start splashing big on cooling with (as I mentioned above) less-than-stellar results. Just because I throw a ton of cooling capacity at a Matisse, doesn't mean it's going to pick up a lot of clocks. It really needs active cooling to achieve that effect (see some of Der8auer's early Matisse reviews for his LN2 scaling chart).

Going by UK prices, for the cost of just the 3960X and one of the cheaper TRX40 motherboards, you can buy every component of a 10980XE system except for the GPU - and that's assuming you need something more than just basic display output, otherwise you could probably squeeze a GT1030 or something similar into the budget.

Which board are you speccing for the 10980XE? Anything that's going to get you the power delivery you need to push that chip to its limits on water is going to be more expensive than the low-end x299 boards. And you still haven't factored in the costs to cool that beast.

 

[Zucker2k]

AMD ships the 3950X with Wraith Prism I think, so there's your answer.

But the AMD recommended cooling solution for the 3950x is a 280mm AIO or better.

it's a MO-RA3 with two D5 Varios

So you put a 3900x under a MO-RA3 with two D5 pumps! Well, I just wanted to show how far some would go to cool their desktop chips, and then make it sound like keeping an hedt adequately cool is an outlandish proposition.

Here's a 10980XE overclocked to 5.1GHz on water:

GN got 4.9 GHz, so these chips will respond to good cooling.