Intel Core i9: The Fastest Consumer CPU Prepares For Ryzen War

Intel Core i9: The Fastest Consumer CPU Prepares For Ryzen War

- Gordon Mah Ung

WE’RE REVIEWING THE first Core i9 chip—Intel’s 10-core Core i9-7900X ($1,000 on Newegg, go.pcworld.com/1on)—as a veritable CPU storm looms. Sure, Core i9 blew in as the most powerful CPU the company has ever sold to consumers, and it’s currently the fastest Core-series CPU available. But an ill wind is blowing: AMD’s Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 chips offer stiff competition in the low end, while its massive 12-core and 16-core Threadripper CPUs loom on the high end. Because there’s so much to say about Core i9, we put the prices,

features and FAQs (go.pcworld.com/pff) into a separate story you’ll want to read for background. For this review, we’ll walk through some of the under-the-hood issues directly related to performance, and then we’ll dive into the benchmarks.

Core i9, under the hood

Core i9 is the first new “Core i” Intel has introduced in 10 years. The company guarded the secret so closely that it even intentionally mislabeled the chips (including our review sample) as “Core i7” to throw off leakers. In fact, the review sample you see here still identifies itself as Core i7 rather than a Core i9.

Like most major Intel launches, the Core i9 family represents a new platform, not just a new CPU, which means a new chipset, the X299, and a new socket, the LGA2066, all incompatible with previous CPUs.

The new platform also does something no previous one did by unifying two CPU families. Before today, if you wanted the company’s latest Kaby Lake core, you had to buy a motherboard using the LGA1151 socket. And if you wanted to buy, say, a 6-core Skylake CPU such as Intel’s Core i7-6800K, you had to buy an LGA2011 V3-based motherboard.