Over at Computex a lot of Intel partners have been showing the new Skylake-X. We have spoken to many board partners and have asked them a thing or two related towards normal overclocking, and the test samples they have at hand.
So, what we learned is that Intel will be releasing just the Skylake-X processors with up-to ten cores in a week or two. All motherboard partners had the 10-core SKU which would be the Core i9 7900X that will be priced at 999 USD.
None, and I do repeat this none of the partners have had their hands on, or even seen the 12, 14, 16 or that 18-core part. So that does raise some questions as earlier on we have already stated that Intel is rushing things as an answer towards AMD’s upcoming Threadripper processor series. So on that note, we can confirm that X299 and the respective processors will launch with up-to 10-core processors in the Skylake-X processor series.
So that means that there will be three (Skylake-X) SKUs at launch, the Core i7 7800K six core, the 7820X with eight cores and the Core i9 7900K with 10 cores. I highlighted these in the upper overview. The 7740X and 7640X are the Kaby-Lake-X based procs, these are four core processors.
There is another thing that we did look into, overclocking. I am honestly getting a little tired of 6 & 7 GHz overclock announcements in situations where LN2 or sub-zero cooling is being used. Its getting old and it is not at all important or relative towards you guys, the end user.
Above the Skylake-X 10-core part, Core i9 7900K. You can see the 4.3 GHz tweak (on LCS cooling) for all cores locked in at that freqeuency. Highlighted in the red column is the Cinebench multi-threaded CB score, overclock on all cores that results into 2364cb.
Now I did some rounds with the mobo partners and simply asked them what clock frequencies they can tweak the 8 and 10 core parts at with a more normal cooling method, like LCS or a really proper heatpipe cooler. The magic number seems to be 4.2 to 4.3 GHz depending on the ASIC quality. And if you are wondering about it: the 4.5 GHz Turbo 3.0 you see noted as a spec means that likely only two cores will be able to run that frequency simultaneously (while others are clocked lower).
So the tweaking results seems to be roughly at the same level as Haswell-E and the current 8 and 10-core Broadwell-E (6900K/6950X) parts. These are still pretty good numbers and these tweaks are based on an all-core 4.3 GHz tweak of course. Obviously the quad-core Skylake-X processors will clock higher.
In the end it will be interesting to see much of a difference the new Skylake-X are really going to make in that initial launch wave that simply holds just the up-to 10-core parts.
