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 '17CPUPro]
The 8 core, 16 thread 1900X is the third and entry-level processor from AMD’s Threadripper series of high-end desktop (HEDT) processors. The 1900X is based on AMD’s 14nm Zen architecture and features 20MB of cache (16MB of which is L3) and quad channel DDR4, which is twice as many channels as in the Ryzen 7 series. It has a base clock of 3.8GHz increasing to a boost of 4.0 GHz and has an additional short-term boost of 0.2 GHz when thermals allow. Most impressively, the 1900X features 64 PCIe lanes which is the same of number of lanes in the nearly twice as expensive Ryzen Threadripper flagship, the 1950X. This facilitates the simultaneous high speed PCIe connection of up to seven different graphics or storage peripherals. By comparison, Intel’s similarly priced 8 core, 16 thread i7-7820X which, even though it has an 11% effective speed advantage over the 1900X, only has 28 PCIe lanes (down from 44 lanes as recently seen in the recent i9-7900X). Both upgrade options may require new, and not inexpensive motherboards, the 7820X requires an X299 (Basin Falls) chipset and the 1900X utilizes the premium X399 motherboard. Despite the considerable price tags attached to the CPUs and motherboards, never before has HEDT processing been so affordable. [Oct '17CPUPro]
We calculate effective speed which measures real world performance for typical users. Effective speed is adjusted by current prices to yield a value for money rating. Our calculated values are checked against thousands of individual user ratings. The customizable table below combines these factors to bring you the definitive list of top CPUs. [CPUPro]
Welcome to our PC speed test tool. UserBenchmark will test your PC and compare the results to other users with the same components. You can quickly size up your PC, identify hardware problems and explore the best value for money upgrades.