Intel Core i9 7960X

Now that Intel has gone core crazy with its Skylake-X 16- and 18-core parts, Jarred Walton is as happy as an open source pig in muck.

- Jarred Walton

The Core i9-7960X is a sensible alternative to the monster 18-core i9-7980XE. Not to put too fine a point on it, but beyond the Core i9-7900X, it becomes hard to justify buying any of Intel’s Core i9 products, especially for gaming tasks.

You still need a good reason to go beyond the base level i7-7800X, or a Ryzen 7 1800X, at least from a CPU performance standpoint. Sure, the additional cores can help speed up video encoding times, and the 7960X has four complete (more or less) i7-7700 chips inside it, but unless you’re waiting on your CPU to catch up, you’re better off putting your cash elsewhere.

Power use from the Core i9 parts is very high. While there are many elements to total system power draw, we only have equipment to measure total load. Running ‘stock’, the 7960X uses 369W in Cinebench – and more in other workloads, particularly those that use AVX instructions.