Intel Xeon W-3175X Review: 28 cores of blistering performance - bardwellfread1948

At a Glance

Pros

Easily the fastest Central processing unit for multi-threaded tasks today
A law-breaking non to overclock
Pretty much screams in most workloads

Cons

Requires enamored expensive and in love huge motherboards
Sucks down electricity
Doesn't offer the value of AMD's Threadripper 2990WX

Intel's enthusiastic-ass 28-core Xeon W-3175X isn't a CPU built for you, me, surgery most of us.

Sure, Intel pitches it as a high-end workhorse: "Improved for handling heavily rib applications and tasks, the Intel Xeon W-3175X delivers uncompromising single and each-nucleus world class performance for the most advanced professional creators and their demanding workloads."

But make no mistake, the 28-core Xeon W-3175X is a chip made to do same thing: make waves and push back off at an increasingly assertive AMD. And it delivers—for a pretty penny. Fasten your seat belts, because you'ray about to see some big motherboards, a huger number of benchmarks, and the hugest background Central processor price ever.

Xeon W-3175X 28-core Intel CPU — The sedate Xeon stigmatization belies the actualized intent of Intel's new 28-core CPU.

What is Xeon W-3175X?

If you've read reviews of Intel's previous 18-core Core i9-7980X or 18-core Inwardness i9-9980X that replaced it, you already know something about the Xeon W-3175X. Like them, IT's essentially a Skylake-SP aimed at a high-performance crowd. It's stacked along a 14nm process and has a stock TDP of 255 Isaac Watts. To support its cores fed, it features support for vi channels of DDR4 memory in Error correction code or non-ECC trim.

Perhaps its most life-and-death lineament may be its unlocked status. As always, Intel doesn't actually condone overclocking, the same way Lamborghini doesn't recount you to break local speed limit Pentateuch.

What's in the name? Why ISN't this a Core i9? Or, maybe a Core i11? Intel didn't enounce wherefore it chose to keep the Xeon call, but in the end it doesn't matter overmuch. With a list terms of $3,000, t's how it performs that matters.

gigabyte ax1 xeon w — The Gigabyte AX1 motherboard for Intel's Xeon W-3175X can support two great power supplies in case you somehow need much amps than a single 1600 James Watt power supply.

Crazy-ruling motherboards

One deal the first cardinal motherboards designed for Xeon, and you bed this isn't for someone to run a SQL database to manage the inventory for a supermarket. Gigabyte's AX1 features nix less than a 28-phase angle power electrical circuit for the new Xeon W-3175X.

Hell, the Asus Xeon W-3175X motherboard weighs 10 pounds alone. Look-alike the AX1 it, has enough appurtenant power connectors to illuminated in the lead a small city.

You don't need ii 1,600-watt big businessman supplies to run few virtual machines. Zero, the only time you'd need that amount of power is for sinful overclocking. Yes, it's benchmark time.

Asdominus extreme — One of two present-day motherboards for the new 28-core Xeon W-3175X is the Asus Dominus Extreme—a 14×14-inch motherboard using the SSI EEB form factor.

How we tested

For our tests, we au fon made quad-burden and Eight-core CPUs forget the building. What? Just 18 cores? Get out! Nary, for this slug fest we wanted to find forbidden the eternal question of what would happen if The Hulk fought Superman. Yes, nerds, you only want to know what happens when 28-Congress of Racial Equality Xeon W-3175X faces unsatisfactory against 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX.

For our tests, we misused the same configuration as our avant-garde Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX review here. The only divergence from the original brushup were updated motherboard drivers, updated GPU drivers and an updated BIOS and the latest version of Microsoft Windows 10 Pro RS5. While we exploited the same GPU, computer storage and OS for both, we did vary on computer storage and cooling.

The Threadripper 2990WX ran in quad-channelise configuration with 32GB of three-fold-rank, DDR4/3200. The Xeon W-3175X, ran 48GB of ECC DDR4/2667in hexa-channel configuration.

For cooling, the Threadripper 2990WX used the same Enermax TR4 CLC tank, spell the Xeon W-3175X was cooled with an Asetek 690LX-PN.

The motherboard for the Xeon W-3175X was Gigabyte's soon-to-be-discharged AX1, ,while the Threadripper in use the same MSI X399 MEG from the novel review.

One last note earlier we get overly far-off: Since our final review, AMD released its "Dynamic Topical anaestheti Mode," which helps keep threads happening the to the highest degree efficient cores in the CPU kinda than let Windows randomly throw them at the paries. Normally DLM works really well, but at that place were moments when it slightly hurt performance. Because you deliver to enable DLM through Ryzen Master, we opted to run both DLM and the default configuration for our tests.

At long last, all of the tests were run at "stock time" which oddly, means many things to many people these days. Basically, it's the default setting happening both boards.

heavy hitters — Information technology's clear Intel and AMD are vying to see World Health Organization can make the best Wendy's Baconator of burgers.

Xeon W-3175X 3D Modelling Performance

Sometimes we apologize for using 3D modelling tests for performance testing because it's not really what most citizenry are doing. Well, if you bribe a 28-meat Xeon or a 32-gist Threadripper 3D rendering is in all likelihood your jam.

The first effect is from Maxon's Cinebench R15. Although IT uses a somewhat experienced version of the engine than the one in its Cinema4D product, it scales with core count and draw count exceptionally well. More cores typically stand for more performance

The clear winner here is the Xeon W-3175X, which crosses the finishing line well-nig 10 percent ahead of the Threadripper 2990WX. Some will see the proximity of the AMD CPU (as you dismiss run into, turning on AMD's slashing local mode slightly depresses performance) and think it's a tie—only you should remember that we are talking about 64 togs vs. 56 threads. We had expected the Threadripper 2990WX to take the win here instead of losing it.

xeon w 3175x cinebench nt — Despite having 8-more threads, the Threadripper 2990WX loses to the 28-kernel Xeon

The Threadripper's loss to the Xeon isn't righteous in Cinebench. In the Persistence of Visual sensation ray tracer, the 32-core chip off loses to the 28-core chip by astir 8 percent. Over again, DLM slimly depresses its performance.

xeon w 3175x pov ray nt — POV-Ray of light also puts the 28-core Xeon ahead of the 32-core Threadripper

Where it gets particularly ugly for Threadripper is in the Corona 1.3 Hand over. The Corona Renderer is an "unbiased photo-bought realistic renderer." Unbiased" refers to its rendering technique—not an allusion to any ironware leanings. The test embraces multi-core CPUs, so we expected iThreadripper would do finer than Xeon. Nope: t to be analogous to the Cinebench performance but the Xeon absolutely hammers the Threadripper to the strain of 28 percent.

xeon w 3175x corona — Corona puts the 28-core Xeon about 28 percent (concurrence?!) ahead of the 32-core Threadripper 2990WX.

Next ahead is the Chaos Group's V-Ray renderer. Generally, the many cores you throw at it, the quicker it gets. And yet the Xeon W-3175X again whups the Threadripper, despite the last mentioned's advantage in meander count. Mathematical reasons include each CPU's particular micro-architecture design, the actual clock speeds apiece CPU runs at when pissed up, to the compiler used for each. We'll effort to circle back to ascertain out more.

All that is academic, though. if the only affair that matters to you is less waiting for your V-Shaft Beaver State Corona-based depict to finish.

xeon w 3175x vray 1.08 — V-Ray puts the Xeon ahead of the Threadripper by about 20 pct.

Not everything is that ugly though. Using the latest beta version of Liquidizer and Mike Cooking pan's BMW model, the Xeon again wins, merely past just 5 percent. Information technology's close enough to be oil production, unless, of course, you're wondering why the extra 8 threads in Threadripper aren't pulling their weight.

xeon w 3175x blender 2.80 bmw — Liquidizer 2.80 puts the two chips much closer, but despite its thread advantage, Threadripper loses.

Our last multi-rib rendering result is Blender's new benchmark. It smashes together multiple best-selling bench mark models, runs them against Blender, and spits out a final result settled on how long it took. There's the alternative to bunk it against the GPU or the CPU, so we opted for the CPU screen.

The result, again puts the 28-core Xeon on top by some 6 percent. Again, not a huge win, merely it's doing it against a 32-core CPU.

xeon w 3175x blender benchmark 1 beta 2 — Blender's newfangled Benchmark mashes six-fold disparate tests together to make you a I score. Xeon wins once more.

Want to see how it performs in mainstream apps? Hold reading to learn.

Xeon W-3175X Single-threaded Performance

If you bought a very high-ticket CPU to run single-threaded tests, you overdid it. Still, in that location's value in seeing just how fast these particular chips are in such lighter loads. First ahead is Cinebench R15 where, no surprise, we visit Intel's advantage in time speeds come on: The Xeon comes in about 11 percent ahead of the Threadripper. Intel has long held the win for single-threaded performance.

If anything, we're really popeyed the Threadripper is as close A it is, so in some ways, it's a come through for AMD as well. We as wel see the Dynamic Local Mode actually help it slightly.

xeon w 3175x cinebench 1t — In single-threaded performance the Xeon comes in about 10 per centum to 11 percent faster, which is almost a win our book.

We an POV Ray using a single thread and, well, surprise, 10 percent.

xeon w 3175x pov ray 1t — POV Ray puts the two chips or so 10 pct apart happening light up single-threaded loads.

Xeon W-3175X Compression Performance

Succeeding up is public presentation of the two chips in compression, starting with WinRAR. We've been running it long adequate to have intercourse that Ryzen just doesn't like it. Besides testing AMD's DLM mode, we also tested BitSum's CorePrio free utility, a DLM competitor that also fixes the mysterious problem in Windows that sees performance in some tests merely plummet. Most fingers point to problems with Microsoft Windows scheduler. CorePrio's NUMA Dissassociator sport implements work discovered by Level1Techs.

First finished is the decompression portion of 7-Nothing which is mostly heavy in integer performance. Without the CorePrio substitute, The Xeon has and advantage by about 10 percent. With the utility though, it's mostly a standoff. Intel fan, will of of course point to 8-fewer threads substance Xeon still wins right? But so, AMD fans testament steer to the dollar amount. So yeah.

xeon w 3175x 7 zip decompression — BitSum's CorePrio utility is worth having along your Threadripper machine

Of many interest to the States is the compression performance of 7-Travel rapidly. The developer has stated this part of the test is particularly sensitive to memory bandwidth. As you cognize, the 32-core Threadripper has four channels of memory bandwidth broadcast among all of its cores. The new 28-core Xeon has six channels of memory bandwidth. This theoretically gives each nucleus about 27 percent more retentiveness bandwidth at the speeds we tested and you'ray likely seeing some of that Here.

We're saying likely because the memory bandwidth issue in Threadripper may not be as dread every bit it looked some months ago when we wrote this. With the CorePrio NUMA Dissassocator running we saw the huge gap of 58 percent for the Xeon versus just AMD's DLM mode (bloody bar to a higher place) pull back to just 31 percent. Sure, 31 percent is still, umm tender when you consider it has more cores and this is a multi-threaded test, only IT's advisable than 58 percent (green relegate above). Expect more on this in the prox hopefully. The short solvent is: Xeon wins massive even.

IDG

Xeon W-3175X Content Creation Performance

Not everyone WHO might buy these CPUs does only 3D modelling. There's a good chance they will also do content creation tests, which traditionally lean heavily on the CPU.

Our archetypical test tasks the free and popular HandBrake utility with converting a 4K, 4GB charge using the app's H.265 profile. HandBrake is multi-threaded but it typically South Korean won't habituate each of the threads of a 32-core, surgery even 28-sum CPU. T

he big winner here is the Xeon, which comes out on top by 17 percent when DLM is off. When DLM is along, the Xeon is actually 21 percent quicker.

What's up? Well, there's a keen chance that where Handbrake maxes out is just in that zone where the Xeon is at its peak performance connected clock speeds. Sure, in that location's that memory bandwidth thing, but we honestly have not seen memory bandwidth make that some of a dispute in most encryption tasks.

xeon w 3175x handbrake 1.12 performance — The Xeon wins big in our Handbrake transcode examination

Our next trial uses Adobe Premier Creative Cloud 2019 to exportation a short video shot on a 4K Sony Alpha camera using the app's Blu-Ray preset for export. Because the resolve changes, we besides check off the Uttermost Render quality option, which improves visual tone when resizing.

Lastly, we do the encoding on the CPU, which some video nerds claim gives you the highest possible quality over GPU encoding. The winner: Xeon by about 15 percent.

xeon w 3175x 7 adobe premiere cpu render — Our Premiere export puts the Xeon ahead away about 15 percent.

Those who actually use First CC are probably slamming their fists on the postpone locution, "no one uses the CPU strictly for a video encoding anymore!" So yes, we did also encode it forbidden victimization the GeForce GTX 1080. The advance still goes to the Xeon, but it closes to about 11 percentage.

xeon w 3175x 7 adobe premiere gpu render — In a GPU encode, the Xeon still has the lead by about 11 percent.

Our next test uses the recently released benchmark test by Puget Systems. The company is far-famed for its systems and also for its in-profoundness testing of workstation-level hardware. The test uses Adobe After Effects Creative Cloud 2019 to deplete several popular tasks through in Afterward Effects. If you have Afterward Effects, you can download the bench mark here.

Running the AE test on the Xeon and Threadripper, it was basically a dead-even tie between the machines (although Threadripper performance dropped slightly with DLM on). In our book that's a win for AMD.

xeon w 3175x puget systems after effects cc — The Threadripper 2990WX and Xeon W-3175X are dead even in Puget's Aft Personal effects bench mark.

Although Adobe Photoshop tends to be pretty cushy for whatsoever modern computer to hunt, we did want to see which CPU had the vantage in Puget's Photoshop test. Like the After Personal effects mental testing, it's disentangled to download from Puget Systems and again—we extremely recommend you head complete to Puget Scheme's site if you are interested therein level of line of work hardware. IT's simply a treasure treasure trove.

Photoshop rarely loads up the cores of a CPU so the chip with the high clocks was in all likelihood forever active to win this and no surprise, the Xeon comes outgoing ahead by all but 8 percent.

If you driving force Photoshop exclusively, a machine with as many cores as a Threadripper or Xeon is probably direction overmuch.

xeon w 3175x puget systems photoshop cc — The Xeon comes in about 8 percent faster than the Threadripper but you really wear't need either if all you do is Photoshop.

Watch the Xeon juggle multiple tasks happening the next page.

Xeon W-3175X Multi-Tasking Carrying out

In the real reality, few applications can use all of the togs in a 64- Beaver State 56-thread CPU, indeed we've been stressful to measure performance when you do binary things at once. We say 'endeavour.' because multi-tasking can embody inherently unreliable for performance.

Nonmoving, we've done this particular test enough that we smel the results are reliably repeatable. We run Blender while also simultaneously running Cinebench. The result for Blender is almost a tie, but the big, big win for Threadripper is in Cinebench where it simply blows the Xeon away.

It's almost, hmm, like the 32-core Threadripper has an additional 8-threads of compute world power unmoving around to tap happening that the 28-core Xeon doesn't have. Acquire: Threadripper.

xeon w 3175x threadripper 2990wx cinebench and blender simultaneous — When you run two to a great extent multi-threaded tasks, the Threadripper comes out smell like roses.

Cardinal thing about the above test: It's probably not that realistic for soul to do a Cinema4D render at the same meter as a Blender render. So we too uses Premiere CC to encode a 4K video to the Blu-ray planned while too version out a scene in Blender. This may sound weirdo to you, but if you're an indie movie maker, it's an totally realistic workload.

For the most part it's a tie, but the Xeon ekes impossible a little more performance in the Premiere encode. Enough to name it a win? No, much like a draw.

xeon w 3175x threadripper 2990wx premiere and blender simultaneous — Running Premiere and Blender, the Xeon has a very slightly vantage over the Threadripper.

Xeon W-3175X Gambling Performance

Let's atomic number 4 clear: If you bought a $3,000 Xeon or a $1,800 Threadripper to play a game 90 percent of the time—you'Re doing it wrong. Still, you do want to have it away how it performs so we present brief set of results culled from other gaming tests we ran.

The result is no surprise: At resolutions and game settings that take in the graphics card power the bottleneck, information technology's nothing to write home about. The Xeon has about a 5- to 7-percent advantage in frame rates, but let's just call it a tie.

xeon w 3175x rise of the tomb raider very high dx12 1080p — At resolutions and settings you would actually play at, it doesn't matter that much.

The gap that has haunted Ryzen since day one remains, though. In point of fact, when you take the GPU out of the equation by sullen the nontextual matter quality, we find out the very familiar 15 to 17 percent reward for the Intel CPU. If you are buying a wide-ranging CPU and do contrive to secret plan with the fastest GPUs in the world and do 3D rendering, modelling and other mental object origination, the advantage will generally attend Intel. If you'Ra just performin games sometimes, then it really doesn't matter that much.

xeon w 3175x rise of the tomb raider lowest dx12 1080p — We get wind the familiar "Ryzen gap" when you remove the GPU as the constriction.

Overclocking Execution

The vast majority of our testing is supported baseline speed which is whar almost people will beat with. It is, after all, pretty scary to flirt with hard overclocking a $3,000 CPU.

Still, information technology would honestly be a law-breaking non to at to the lowest degree do some basic overclocking with Xeon W-3175X. It was snap to push the Xeon W-3175X to a 4GHz all-core encouragement just away goosing the multiplier. We pushed all cores dormy to 4.1GHz and and then also put off turbo ratios for higher pin grass on hoy loads. The results of a casual hour netted epoch-making performance dividends.

oc xeon w 3175x vray 1.08 — Overclocking all of the cores to 4.1GHz was a Thanos-snap easy.

While an all-core of 4.1GHz sounds jolly weak, it's something many tin can aim for and not feel squeamish about. But all the indicators are in that respect's a long ton more headroom in the chip. Speaking with vendors planning to deal Xeon systems at CES, they suggested an all-core overclock to 5GHz wasn't far from reality, with the only when limits beingness force and thermals.

That likely tells us why both of the launch motherboards for the Xeon W-3175X feature dual power stimulation.

To give you an idea of where that falls, the current HWBot record for a single 28-core Xeon 8180 Platinum is 5,010. We kicked extinct 5,859 without breaking a sweat.

oc xeon w 3175x cinebench nt — Information technology didn't take US long-staple to thrust up near 6,000 in Cinebench using the 28-core Xeon.

It's a big businessman hogg

And yes, the Xeon W-3175X is a power hog. Along stock, we saw it regularly pushing tons of 550 watts at the socket (we'd estimate 60 watts to be scarce the fans in the organisation). The Threadripper 2990WX system was far more 'common' down at 350 watts under full load. Overclocking our Xeon W-3175X to a moderate 4.1GHz, we power saw powerfulness climb into the 700-Watt scope, to a fault.

Mind you: That's with a single power supply. IT's loosely recommended that if you want to seek to push all cores to 5GHz and up, you should run a second matched PSU to keep the power-desirous Xeon happy. After all, if you bought a muscle elevator car with a 440-cubic-inch engine, you wouldn't complain about the throttle mileage, would you?

xeon w 3175xsocket 2 — Hera's the "Socket P" the unaccustomed Xeon goes into.

Xeon W-3175X Thread scaling

The parthian performance graph we want to depart you with shows how the Xeon W-3175X performs when you ordered series from 1 to 64 threads in Cinebench. Rather than the actual ensue we'll give you the performance advantage for the Xeon W-3175X over the Threadripper 2990WX.

With the original Core group i9-7980X, the 18-core CPU would outpace the AMD break away on lighter loads but eventually get hammered as the 32-CORE Threadripper 2990WX's advantage took over. Hera, at stock speeds, the Xeon W-3175X has a huge performance reward crosswise the board, especially with applications that sit in that middle land.

This doesn't needfully mean all applications will keep an eye on suit, but we bequeath note that our HandBrake trial run, which put away the Xeon W-3175X ahead aside 17 per centum to 20 pct, typically only used about 28 threads.

cinebench thread scaling dlm on — The Xeon W-3175X pretty much has the advantage across the board in performance.

The upshot, As the vast majority of our tests have got shown, is that the 28-core Xeon W-3175X is faster most of the time finished the 32-core Threadripper 2990WX.

Then in that location's the cost

Our rule price counseling in the gallant echelons of superior chips is not to care about damage or prise. When you'Ra shopping for a custom-built, custom-painted PC that costs at a minimum $12,000, warm about how much the CPU costs is corresponding haggle to get the floor mats on a $300,000 car.

Still, we do induce to look at the value of the $3,000 Xeon W-3175X per yarn. We looked upward the list prices of AMD and Intel's big socket chips and computed how much they cost per string. The worst are the 28-core Xeon Platinum chips that go into servers, which is not a surprisal.

Among the CPUs that might conceivably comprise used in a (very fancy) screen background, the $3,000 Xeon W-3175X is in reality in line with most Intel CPUs. The unexcelled value hush up belongs to AMD, which is basically charging you half of what Intel charges per thread for its CPUs.

bucks per thread — You know what's crazy? The 28-heart and soul Xeon W-3175X isn't a bad value—for Intel.

Conclusion: Lacking information technology all

Here's a rummy story: When we originally received the Xeon W-3175X for testing at what we thought was a price of $4,000 we actually thought Intel had actually created a CPU at a price configured to in reality earn AMD's Threadripper 2990WX look better. Afterall, with a 32-burden Threadripper 2990WX going for $1,800, zero amount of performance was leaving to rattling survive a product worth considering for anyone World Health Organization doesn't fly around on a private super C.

With a terms of $3,000 and an actual demonstrable performance vantage in a peck of areas though, IT's actually a contender. It's not a knock taboo by whatever substance but for those who do want it all and don't nou remunerative for it, information technology's going to Be really hard to find a quicker CPU kayoed today than the Xeon W-3175X.

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One of innovation fathers of loyal tech reporting, Gordon has been coating PCs and components since 1998.

Source: https://www.pcworld.com/article/403239/intel-xeon-w-3975x-review-28-core-cpu.html

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