Intel Core i9-7960X Intel's 16-core Core i9 chip hews close to its pricier 18-core Core i9 Extreme Edition counterpart. It's a powerful chip, no denying, but AMD's competing Threadripper 1950X, at many hundreds of bucks less, is strong competition.

Intel Core i9-7960X

  • Pros

    Similar performance, in many relevant instances, to Intel's pricier 18-core chip. Compatible Core X-Series motherboards start at lower prices than boards for AMD's Threadripper.

  • Cons

    $700 pricier than AMD's competing 16-core counterpart.

  • Bottom Line


We've seen and tested so many new high-end desktop CPUs from Intel and AMD over the last several months that it's becoming tough to fit all the relevant models into any single benchmark chart. Plus, these new processors span so many different platforms, our test bench is getting mighty crowded with all the required test machines. Some days, it looks like we're assembling our own local branch of Best Buy or Micro Center, given all the parts required to test them all.

Of course, while these are minor problems for us reviewers, it's all good news for consumers. Whether you're in the market for a budget-minded, around-$100 chip like the AMD Ryzen 3 1200, a wildly pricey $2,000 18-core monster like the Intel Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition, or something in the vast gulf between those two, there's likely an appealing new CPU option to fit your budget and/or workload.

Intel Core i9-7960X (In Box 2)

To put it another way, the 16-core Intel Core i9-7960X that we're looking at here, one step down from the Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition chip mentioned above, is the 18th processor we've reviewed this year. It's also the sixth chip we've looked at on Intel's enthusiast Core X-Series platform alone—out of nine total Core X-Series chips that now span both the "Skylake" and "Kaby" Lake architectures. And then there's AMD's competing Ryzen Threadripper platform that, while it doesn't offer quite as many chip options (just three, at this writing), is highly competitive on price. The top-end AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, which just happens to have the same 16-core count as the Intel chip we're looking at here, sells for $999. Intel's suggested price for the Core i9-7960X, meanwhile, is $1,699. Yes, that's a $700 price difference between the two similarly outfitted chips. And yes, that's huge.

The Core i9-7960X does have a few things working in its favor. One is the fact that its compatible motherboards (which use the Intel X299 chipset) start at about $130 less than AMD's least-expensive Threadripper X399 boards. (Threadripper motherboards, at this writing, started at a pricey $339 and went up from there.) And the Core i9-7960X sports the same maximum Turbo Boost 3.0 clock speed (4.4GHz) as its $300-pricier Extreme Edition Core i9 sibling chip, along with a 200MHz-higher base clock of 2.8GHz.

All of that adds up to a 16-core part that performs nearly as well as its 18-core Extreme Edition counterpart. But before you plunk down that big pile of hundreds, you have plenty of other things to consider if you're in the market for a chip this powerful and pricey. That includes available PCI Express lanes, the cost of the necessary CPU cooling gear and motherboards, and chipset features. Given that we've just covered much of that in our review of the $1,999 Intel Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition (a chip very similar to this one, just with two extra cores), we'll direct you there to the finer details of that discussion. Once you're all caught up, we'll join you below for our benchmark, overclocking, and gaming tests to find out just where this chip lands in this suddenly crowded market of extremely high-end CPUs.

CPU-Specific Performance Testing

For our test setup, we dropped the Core i9-7960X into the Asus Prime X299-Deluxe motherboard of our Core X-Series testbed PC, along with 32GB of Corsair memory running in a quad-channel setup. An Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition video card handled display output for our CPU-specific tests, and a Kingston HyperX Savage was our SATA-interface boot drive.

Intel Core-i9-7980XE Testbed

We stuck all those components into the Deepcool GamerStorm Genome ROG Certified case, which includes a self-contained liquid cooler with a large three-fan radiator.

The Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition sits at the top of today's consumer CPU heap, with the Core i9-7960X we're looking at here one step down the Core X-Series ladder. Both of those chips sit far, far above mainstream offerings such as the four-core Intel Core i7-7700K and AMD's eight-core Ryzen 7 1800X. In the space between, bridging those two sides, here at the end of summer 2017 sit enthusiast-class silicon such as the eight-core Intel Core i7-7820X, the 12-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1920X, and the 10-core Intel Core i9-7900X.

As noted earlier, the 16-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X will be the Core i9-7960X's chief competitor. Both sport 16 cores and 32 computing threads. To round out our charts, we included the older, previous-generation Intel Extreme Edition chip, the "Broadwell X," 10-core Intel Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition. That last chip sold at launch for about the same price as the 16-core CPU we're looking at here, so it should show how far we've come, from a price-to-performance standpoint, in the last year or so—at least when it comes to tasks that like lots of cores and threads.

Cinebench R15

First up in our testing regimen: Maxon's CPU-crunching Cinebench R15 test, which is fully threaded to make use of all available processor cores and threads, using the CPU rather than the GPU to render a complex image. The result is a proprietary score indicating a PC's suitability for processor-intensive workloads.

Along with the usual test that makes use of all available cores, we've added the single-core results here to get a sense of how Intel's 16-core chip fares in lightly threaded workloads.

Intel Core i9-7960X (Cinebench)

As we expected, the Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition landed on top on the multi-core test here, with its 18 cores besting the 16-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X by about 12 percent. The Core i9-7960X was only about 6 percent behind its pricier Extreme Edition sibling chip, but it was also about the same amount ahead of the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X here, despite costing $700 more than that chip. On the single-core test, all of Intel's recent high-end chips were effectively tied, with AMD's Threadripper parts landing about 15 percent behind.

In one way, the Core i9-7960X is undoubtedly impressive: On the multi-core test, it's almost 80 percent faster than 2016's 10-core Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition. But even if you're an Intel die-hard, you have to thank AMD for pushing its CPU rival to release a consumer chip this much more powerful from one generation to the next.

iTunes 10.6 Conversion Test

We then switched over to our venerable iTunes Encoding Test, using version 10.6 of iTunes. This test taxes only a single CPU core, as much legacy software still does.

Intel Core i9-7960X (iTunes)

Music encoding doesn't push a modern CPU anything close to its limits—and certainly not these chips. But this is precisely the kind of test that shows Intel's chips to their best advantage. Intel's recent Skylake and Kaby Lake architectures do better than AMD's Zen on single-threaded or lightly threaded tasks. That said, unless you're hanging on to some very old programs, most software that can take good advantage of multiple cores and threads has been updated to do so, at this point.

Interestingly, the eight-core Core i7-7820X was the fastest chip here, with the Core i9 CPUs close behind. The recent AMD parts lagged a bit further back, but they weren't left in the silicon dust, by any means. All that said, if you care most of all about lightly threaded or single-threaded performance, get thee out of Intel Core X and AMD Threadripper altogether: The Core i7-7700K is a much better value on that front, at under $350.

Handbrake 0.9.9

This is a time-consuming test of video-crunching capabilities. Handbrake, a tool commonly used for converting videos from one format to another, benefits from having lots of cores and threads at your disposal. In this test, we use a nice, big hunk of 4K video to see how the chips perform with a sustained task of this kind. We tasked the CPUs to convert a 12-minute-and-14-second 4K .MOV file (the 4K showcase short film Tears of Steel) into a 1080p MPEG-4 video.

Intel Core i9-7960X (Handbrake)

This is our first real-world test, so far, that takes advantage of lots of cores and threads. We again saw the Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition finish first. But the difference here between it and the 16-core Core i9-7960X was minimal. And the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X was only 6 seconds behind, while costing a whole lot less.

We have taken a huge leap in core counts over the last year or so. Perhaps software will need to be rewritten to unlock the full potential of these high-core-count beasts. Given the pace of hardware advancements, that would be understandable, though hardly a consolation for consumers investing in a $1,000-plus chip today.

POV-Ray 3.7

Next up, using the "All CPUs" setting, we ran the POV-Ray benchmark, which challenges all available cores to render a complex photo-realistic image using ray tracing. After that, again to get a sense of how the Core i9 handles single-core performance, we ran the same benchmark using the "One CPU" setting.

Intel Core i9-7960X (POVRay)

Once again here, the Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition landed on top on the "All CPUs" test, but it was only 2 seconds ahead of its 16-core Core i9 counterpart, and 6 seconds ahead of the Threadripper 1950X. On the single-core test, some of the lesser Core X chips pulled ahead, but the Core i9-7960X did manage to trump the top Threadripper chip—by about 9 percent.

Blender 2.77a

Blender is an open-source 3D content-creation program that can be used to design and create visual effects, animation, and 3D models for use in video games or 3D printing. We open a standard test file (it's of a flying squirrel) and time how long the test processor takes to finish the render.

Intel Core i9-7960X (Blender)

The results here were all fairly close, with the Ryzen 7 1800X the only real outlier (by far the least-expensive AMD chip on our charts). Interestingly, though, it was the Core i9-7960X that landed in the lead here by a couple of seconds. But given the $700 price difference between it and the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, it's hard to see a five-second victory meriting $700 on this front.

7-Zip File Compression

Last, we fired up the popular 7-Zip file-compression software and ran its built-in compression/decompression benchmark, which is another useful test of a CPU's raw multi-core abilities.

Intel Core i9-7960X (7-Zip)

This last test showed Intel's 18-core chip once again besting the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X by about 15 percent. The 16-core Core i9-7960X was, surprisingly, only about 5 percent behind its 18-core sibling, and almost 10 percent ahead of the top Threadripper chip. But again, that price difference between Intel and AMD's competing processors is tough to ignore

Overclocking, Game Performance & Conclusion

Overclocking these high-end Core X-Series chips has been an interesting experience, starting with the 10-core Core i9-7900X. With that chip, high temperatures were the limiting factor, not the system stability and lockup issues you more often see when pushing a processor to its limit. And reporting from our sister site, ExtremeTech, indicates we weren't alone in seeing those specific thermal issues with that CPU.

That wasn't the case with the Core i7-7820X, likely in part due to the fact that it has just eight cores to the Core i9's 10. But when we tested the 18-core Core i9-7980XE, as well as the Core i9-7960X we're looking at here, heat was again the primary issue, even with our massive, triple-fan Deepcool self-contained liquid cooler. Of course, overclocking abilities often vary from chip to chip, so your results may vary.

Using Intel's Extreme Tuning Utility (XTU), we were initially surprised at our ability to push the Core i9-7960X up from its fairly low stock clock of 2.8GHz, to above 4GHz. The system never once locked up, and our benchmarks ran reliably. We noticed, though, that core temps ramped up high very quickly, up to and above 100 degrees C, resulting in throttling.

So we dialed things down for the sake of saving the chip from an early grave due to excessive heat, and we eventually settled on running all cores at 3.8GHz. Anything above that resulted in a hot chip after just a few minutes of hard-hitting benchmarking.

At that 3.8GHz clock on all cores, our Cinebench score jumped to 3,505 (from 3,189, at stock), an increase of about 10 percent. On the POV-Ray test, our overclock resulted in a change from 41 seconds on the "All CPUs" test at stock, to 37 seconds when overclocked. That's again an improvement of about 10 percent. With some truly powerful, exotic cooling solutions, it's probably possible to eke out even more of a performance boost while keeping your cores at reasonable temperatures. But given the price of this chip, we wouldn't suggest attempting such a task unless you're a serious, veteran overclocker and/or can stomach possibly frying your $1,699 computing investment, or at least reducing its service life.

Gaming Performance

We don't ordinarily run graphics tests when testing processors without integrated graphics. That's mostly because graphics performance has much more to do with what graphics card you have installed than what processor you're using—especially when you're talking about a powerful chip like the Core i9-7960X.

But after testing AMD's initial run of Ryzen 7 and 5 chips, we noted they had issues keeping up with Intel's recent mainstream Core i5s and Core i7s at 1080p in games. Given this, and the fact that the 10-core Core i9-7900X had some similar gaming issues as the Ryzen chips, we wanted to see if the Core i9-7960X acted in a similar way. So we used the same Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Founders Edition card that we tested with the Ryzen chips to run a couple of the tests that we also use for graphics-card testing.

Before we get into the gaming results, it's important to point out that some games have an issue where they won't launch on systems that have a large number of cores. Those games include Far Cry Primal, which we use for testing, as well as Dirt Rally, and possibly others. This issue occurs with both AMD's Threadripper chips, as well as Intel's recent parts.

To get these games to run, you actually have to physically disable a number of cores, which you accomplish with AMD through either the BIOS or via the company's Ryzen Master overclocking/monitoring software, engaging a so-called "Game Mode." With Intel's chips, the solution the company came up with is to jump into MSCONFIG (via the Run command in Windows), click the Boot tab, then hit Advanced options, check the "Number of processors" box, then choose the number of cores you want to use, and click OK. With both AMD and Intel, you need to reboot when enabling or disabling cores. For our Far Cry Primal testing, we did this for both the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X and the Intel Core i9 chips, cutting the number of available cores in half for that test.

Intel Core i9-7960X (On Bench 2)

Having to disable cores and reboot to run a game is unquestionably a pain, and something you won't have to do if you have a chip with 10 or fewer cores. But as far as we know (and from what we've heard from both AMD and Intel), the issue is limited to just the two game titles mentioned above. And it's possible that the developers will release updates at some point to fix this issue, so it may be fixed by the time you read this. But if Far Cry Primal and/or Dirt Rally rank on your favorite-games list, be prepared to jump through some hoops with these chips, at least for now.

For comparison numbers, we ran the same set of benchmark tests on our 16-core Core i9-7960X, as well as the 18-core Core i9-7980XE, our non-X Intel Kaby Lake testbed running the Core i7-7700K, our Threadripper testbed equipped with the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X, as well our Ryzen testbed with the Ryzen 7 1800X. The RAM in our Core X-Series testbed was specifically running at 3,200MHz, the same speed that we used when testing the Ryzen chips, using the motherboard's built-in XMP profile. The Kaby Lake Z270 testbed had its RAM clocked to a slightly lower 3,000MHz, which was the highest speed officially supported by our Corsair RAM kit.

The memory clock-speed issue is important because the Ryzen chips tended to perform quite a bit better at 1080p with faster RAM. And after some initial testing running the RAM at lower (2,166MHz) speeds, we can say the same is true for the Core X-Series chips, as well. All that said, the performance issues tend to vary from game to game, depending on whether or not a given title is affected by memory latency. And that latency tends to increase as the number of cores goes up.

We ran two of the test titles we use for graphics testing: Far Cry Primal and Rise of the Tomb Raider. Here's a look at how five recent chips performed on those titles, when paired with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 card, across two resolutions.

Intel Core i9-7960X (Gaming Performance)

As you can see, when the resolution is cranked up to 4K (3,840x2,160 pixels), the CPU bottleneck is effectively out of the picture, with just a frame or three separating the lowest- and highest-priced processors here.

Step down to 1080p (that's 1,920x1,080 pixels), though, and things are much different. The Ryzen 7 1800X performed the worst overall at that resolution. But none of the high-end, high-core-count parts came close to matching the mainstream Core i7-7700K on Far Cry Primal. The Threadripper 1950X was 12 frames per second (fps) behind the Core i9-7960X here. But both chips were pushing triple-digit frame rates, for extremely smooth gaming.


Moving to Rise of the Tomb Raider, all our chips performed similarly, save for the lower-priced Ryzen 7 CPU. The Threadripper 1950X was one frame behind the Core i9-7960X; effectively, a tie.

What does that tell us? At least for these two test titles, if you primarily care about gaming at 1080p, a lesser processor, be that from Intel or AMD, is a better choice. But no one—we repeat, no oneshould be spending this much on a processor and a card like a $500 GeForce GTX 1080 just to game at 1080p. If gaming is by far your primary concern, you should not be buying a processor with this many cores unless you plan on doing serious multitasking, too—like, say, playing a game while live-streaming your exploits, and encoding a video of one of your previous matches in the background. If you care only about gaming performance, you should stick to a CPU on a cheaper mainstream platform, such as the four-core Core i7-7700K.

All that said, let's not forget: Even if you are gaming on a 1080p screen, the triple-digit performance we saw in testing with the Core i9-7960X and the Ryzen Threadripper 1950X chips is still very smooth. Down in the real world where most of us still game (in the 60fps range), all of these high-end chips deliver "more than good enough" performance for serious gaming. And if you're investing in a high-end card like the GeForce GTX 1080, you should probably be playing on a monitor that has a higher native resolution than 1080p, anyway. Otherwise, it's like taking out your Ferrari to do laps around the local Wal-Mart parking lot.


In many ways, our thoughts about this $1,699 16-core chip are quite similar to our conclusion about the 18-core, $2,000 Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition. Both are fine performers, and a huge leap over what were the best consumer chips available from Intel (or anyone else) a year or so ago. There's no denying the impressive abilities—in certain workloads like scientific research and video editing—of having so many cores and threads at your disposal.

Intel Core i9-7960X (On Bench)

But then there's AMD's Ryzen Threadripper platform to consider. While its chips aren't quite as fast as Intel's best on either a per-core or per-clock basis, chips like the Threadripper 1950X more than make up for that by costing several hundred dollars less comparable Intel-based silicon.

Yes, you'll have to pay a bit more for a motherboard with AMD. But you also get more PCI Express lanes in the bargain—64 on the Threadripper chips versus 44 on the Core i9s from Intel. We're not sure what most people are actually going to do with those extra lanes. But if you can afford CPUs this expensive, you probably have some ideas about high-end, bandwidth-hungry components, too.

While it's easy to peg AMD's Threadripper chips as better-value options in this high-end CPU space, there's certainly nothing wrong with the Core i9-7960X. It's a powerful performer that sticks surprisingly close to the Core i9-7980XE Extreme Edition, while costing a few hundred dollars less. With some powerful cooling, we were pretty easily able to push the 16-core chip's performance up to the stock level of the Extreme Edition part via overclocking, despite its two fewer cores. Again, though, we'd only suggest doing any of that if you're a veteran overlocker and are willing to pay close attention to your temperatures. No one wants to spend this much on a CPU, only to shorten its service life due to overheating and/or overvolting.

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