Intel's HEDT woes continue: Core i9-10980XE looks to trail behind the Core i9-9980XE by 2.6% in Cinebench R20, 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X is within striking distance

Intel recently announced the Cascade Lake-X line of HEDT CPUs with the 18-core 32-thread Core i9-10980XE Extreme Edition topping the SKU list. Cascade Lake-X is expected to be available in November, which is when we can expect to see reviews as well, but Romanian tech site Lab501 has managed to publish an early review of the Core i9-10980XE and they seem to have found some interesting test results.

The Core i9-10980XE is still based on the Skylake architecture. Skylake is now a very mature platform and allows for excellent boosts — in fact, by Intel's own admission, you should be able to overclock the 18-core chip to hit 5.1 GHz on all cores on air! That being said, the platform is also starting to show its age. Lab501's tests show the Core i9-10980XE being challenged by the AMD Ryzen 9 3900X, which is not only neck-to-neck in terms of numbers but also manages to beat Intel's HEDT flagship in a few of them as well. This is interesting as we have seen benchmarks earlier in which the 10980XE is far ahead of the 3900X — just like it should be. 

We see the Ryzen 9 3900X taking the lead in benchmarks such as 3DMark Fire Strike Extreme-Physics, Time Spy, and PCMark 10, and is not too far behind the Core i9-10980XE in tests such as Blender, 3DMark Port Royal, Da Vinci Resolve 15, and Handbrake 1.2.2. The 10980XE had a slight set back in most gaming tests with the Core i9-9900K and the Ryzen 9 3900X battling it out for the average frame rate leads at 1080p. 1440p and 4K scores were on par for all three processors.

In Cinebench R20, the Ryzen 9 3900X (7076 points) trailed significantly behind the Core i9-10980XE (8563 points). Interestingly, the 10980XE seems to be lagging behind by about 2.6% when compared to the Core i9-9980XE, which scores 8791 points.

In most other tests though, the Core i9-10980XE seems to have a good lead over the competition. We should still wait for a few more reviews before coming to a conclusion, but the bigger issue lies elsewhere. If a 12-core Ryzen 9 3900X can come this close to the 18-core Core i9-10980XE, we can only speculate as to how well the 16-core Ryzen 9 3950X would perform.

Also, the first Threadripper 3000 series processors, the 3960X, 3970X, and the 3990X starting from 24-cores are just around the corner and are expected to put up an impressive multi-core performance as well. It remains to be seen whether Cascade Lake-X's overclocking abilities and the newly discounted prices can help in steering buyers away from the competition.

Check out Lab501's review at the Source link below for all the benchmark comparisons.