Core i9-7900X

Intel’s core i9-7900X, from the Skylake-X series, is Intel’s latest 10-core, 20-thread flagship processor. It's the first to bear the i9 moniker and utilize the new X299 (Basin Falls) chipset/motherboard. The 7900X is the fastest CPU on the market today, however, imminent competition from AMD’s 16-core, 32-thread Ryzen Threadripper CPUs and the forthcoming release of more Intel Core X series mean that its reign will be a short one. The i9-7900X supersedes the 10-core Broadwell-E core i7-6950X that held the crown for little over a year. Both are extremely powerful and pricey high end desktop processors (HEDTs) which excel in multi-threaded tasks such as media encoding. However, despite the same power draw (TDP 140W), the newer i9-7900X betters the i7-6950X in terms of peak overclocked performance by 10% mostly thanks to increased clock speeds from 3.0GHz/4.0GHz to 3.3GHz/4.3GHz for base/turbo. It also betters the i7-6950X on price by around 28%. This all translates to the i9-7900X offering around 20% more value for money, even despite its eye-watering $999 price tag. The more accessible pricing (albeit not accessible for the majority) and hurried release of the i9-7900k to market is widely perceived as a reaction to AMD’s Ryzen Threadripper CPUs, rumoured for release towards the end of July 2017. So if you want to own the fastest consumer CPU in the world, it would be wise to wait for the dust to settle. ^{[Jul '17 CPUPro]}