Gadgetory

the Intel Xeon w31 35 X started life has one of the most scrutinized parts at copy tax 2018 after being unveiled as a 5 gigahertz 28 core part with a chiller behind the scenes but it has since evolved into a real product that has a lower price point than expected and it's still overclockable so it's actually an unlocked Xeon this isn't the rumoured $4,000 and certainly not the rumored $8,000 that we saw online but instead a $3,000 Xeon CPU with twenty eight cores it's about a grand more than the 18 core 99 ATX II and then the AMD 2990 WX today we're benchmarking the 31 75 X in premiere blender Photoshop gaming workloads and of course we're overclocking it before that this video is brought to you by thermal grizzly and their high-end thermal compounds thermal grizzly makes cryo not paste for high thermal performance and conductivity without being electrically conductive so you don't have to worry about shorting components Crona is particularly good for replacing stock GPU pastes as cryo not is a non curing compound learn more at the link in the description below the 31 35 X is sort of difficult part to review because it's one really expensive there are two motherboards that go with it a gigabyte board and the Asus dominus which is what we used and the dominus isn't even supposed to be available via retail it's going to be an SI board a system integrator board for my pc building companies CyberPower at all and those companies from what we understand spend about $1,700 on the board but we don't have an actual price from Asus because it's not a consumer part it's not a retail part so that leaves us with this thing which is a very impressive piece of hardware by all accounts the motherboard is impressive the CPU is impressive despite what you may think based on its price or otherwise as a part stand-alone ignoring all other factors they are impressive it's just that it's going to be difficult to to purchase for a number of reasons like price or availability of the CPU or the board so it does make it a bit difficult but we're going to be focusing on some of the production tests in case you really care about those and then we're also pushing some of the overclocking angle a bit because that's really where we think this one's going to be the most fun and for that reason we have a live stream which you should have already seen and announcement in the bottom for that that'll be the day this video goes up which is Wednesday that whatever date that is we'll put it on the screen and we're gonna probably stream at about 6 p.m. Eastern Time in the US for that so check back for the live stream we're gonna be putting it under a chilled water and seeing how far the CPU can overclock but we did there's some overclocking on these solutions on the table so this is an ace attack solution it is a sort of hacked together cooler that ASA tech did we we learned about this years ago but did not know the processor it would be used for at the time and the reason attacked together is because if you know other ACE attack coolers it's got the same sort of pump block and the same size cold plate as previously except it's going on a CPU that's almost exactly the size of a thread Ripper CPU that's the size of the 3175 X so this is not the best solution but it's supposed to be more affordable I don't know the price of it because I think this is also an SI part so I don't know what more affordable means but it's mostly more affordable than an ek solution and ours unfortunately one of them got damaged in shipping but this would be an ek solution as an example and we saw these at CES just recently so the asa tech cooler then in order to overclock on this thing the affordable one whatever that may mean we had to push noise levels to 70 decibels and as you can tell it's excruciatingly Li loud and then we also had to use a few tricks so in BIOS there's a setting that allows you to increase t.j.maxx to the maximum temperature per core we increased that to at least 90 degrees we might push it higher during the stream high up to 100 and it gets a bit dangerous but t.j.maxx stock is 85 degrees Celsius which is extremely limiting for overclocking but you can get away with pushing and another 5 degrees for sure and might be able to do more though we we hesitate to recommend more than that with an extra 5 degrees that we were able to achieve a 4.5 gigahertz clock and and our definition of achieve means it passes all tests so this includes blender with a V workloads not just games if we just did games we'd probably get up much higher but passing all tests 4.5 gigahertz 30x mass just for a quick and easy one didn't really try too hard on that we'll do that in the stream and we ran all the memory at 3200 megahertz standard for our benchmarks it is six channels so he populated six slots and ran 3200 megahertz for our Corsair Vengeance memory for voltages we found that we were able to basically be stable at 1.15 volts it gets extremely hot at these temperatures so easily 85 degrees easily throttling at 1.15 volts 4.5 so it's not really 4.5 increasing t.j.maxx by five degrees allows you to get away with it but you're within two degrees to the point where we ran AC just to make sure it didn't throttle during testing so this is a very hot CPU and it's because it's 28 cores so of course it's going to be hot it's just like thread Ripper these the 2990 WX is also a very hot CPU once you start overclocking it and that's just from the density of the parts in the silicon underneath the IHS another note the 31 75 X is not soldered so it is using thermal paste we didn't feel adventurous enough to delete it before the stream we would like to hopefully get some value out of it before risking that type of damage but you could theoretically delete it and throw something liquid metal on it we'll see if there Bauer makes a tool for it although the volume seems low and this cooler we'll talk about more later we'll talk about the cooler in the stream so the processor itself is what's interesting by overclocking was pretty straightforward it's it's skylake X it is skylake X overclocking all steps are the same as sky X everything to do with the 99 80 X C so 90 DX e 7900 X so 960 X any of those it's the same process for the 31 35 X for overclocking so let's get into the benchmarks will talk premier blender Photoshop here v-ray games and the power consumption as well then try and come to some sort of conclusion our first test uses Adobe Premiere to encode a real GN clip the video is an 11 minute truncated GPU review using only a roll and b-roll clips at k60 and rendered at 45 megabits per second well place some of that file back now so you can get an idea for what's being rendered the render is cuda accelerated it has some limit reese copes effects applied to it and some basics but the majority of the work is still bottlenecking on the cpu we firmly believe that this is a real-world scenario knowing most of the tech youtubers you all watch and what they use to render and we find this is representative as a workload piece for content creators h.264 is used as YouTube isn't really ready for primetime on h.265 our experience has also taught us that premiere really pushes things like our charts to the GPU but a roll and b-roll sections are very heavy on the CPU at least with the clips and the settings we use here's our results chart Adobe software in general including Photoshop really seems to like frequency premiere like scores more than Photoshop does but it's still heavily frequency dependent the Intel I nine ninety nine hundred K stock CPU completed our render in 24 minutes or 21 minutes when using quick sync which isn't available on the h EDT CPUs that have no I know what that IGP acceleration helps primarily with our charted reviews which this is not but they don't do as much for a heavy a roll and b-roll video like this one the Intel I $9.99 ad XE stock CPU completed the same rendered in 22 percent less time than the 9900 k with IGP acceleration with the $3,000 Intel Xeon 31 35 X completing its render in 12 minutes reducing the time required from the $2,000 980 XE by about 27% how meaningful that improvement is will depend upon your use case for professionals where every single minute counts like we'll talk about with blender and thread repair momentarily that 27 percent reduction could be worth it in exchange for $1000 that might be value that gets money back when considering employee time and all of the other costs factored in with time for most of our sort of normal viewing audience it's pretty rough value when considering the already reasonable performance of the 9900 K so it's just going to depend on how much that time is worth to the individual or the organization for us a 27% reduction would add up to several hours of render time per week but for a hobbyist it's better value to buy something else like $2.99 hundred K or 8700 K ask for a thread Ripper it doesn't handle our 4 K 60 clip as competitively as it handles our blender rendering which we'll look at next this is an artifact of how applications are built premieres built at least with this standard YouTube ready encoding configuration it's a favored frequency heavily and threader fur does fall behind on that front load balancing isn't as even across the cores in Premiere as it is for blender you'll see spikes on individual cores a lot more frequently in Premiere and in this scenario Intel is more consistent as a good bet for our premiere benchmarking note that Premiere is hugely complex as a program so it's possible that there are some filters or effects were rising does better than Intel but we have not yet encountered those in our workloads that we use at GM for this workload Intel is firmly in the lead blender got a lot of mentions in the premiere section blender is one of the world's most heavily used 3d modeling and animation programs and is another one that we use in the house for our own 3d work Andrew the editor for this video made our GN intro logo and blender shown on the screen now which has proven to be one of the most intensive render scenes we've ever tested the scene trace is raised for lighting effects and has high sample counts for cinema ready quality Andrew also made our upcoming Ram timing explanation animations in blender but will only show a short teaser clip of those for this review we found that a.m. these threaded for CPUs tend to do well with the GM logo animation for which we'll show some data now the performance between CVS changes depending on the type of animation so we have multiple tests to get a full picture of the lineup the $3000 31 75 X toxemia completes the GN logo render in 9.3 minutes functionally equivalent to the $1,800 2009 TW X and that's not counting the high board costs for the X 599 platforms where Intel looks very compelling in the premiere bench and he looks compelling in the blender tests a zero point two minute difference or about 12 seconds is well within error margins we didn't get a chance to overclock our loaner 2990 WX unfortunately but Intel's 3175 X demonstrates that there is limited scaling at this level of performance even with an OC blender is hugely threat dependent and cares about threads more than anything else even a hyper threading offers great value in blender as illustrated by the difference between the 8700 kala 9600 K when both are at about 5 gigahertz overclocking a 31 75 X does get a time reduction of 8.6 percent but the power consumption and noise increases counter much of that gain finally for reference the $2,000 990 X II CPU completes the scene in 13.8 minutes when stock with a 7 idatx II at 4.6 gigahertz completing the scene in 10 minutes if you need to save $1,000 the 2990 WX or 7 idatx you might both be considerations somebody on the type of workload although thread Ripper does have generally good value or better value in this scenario switching to our chart for the GN monkey had render the scene you see on the screen now in the video anyway we see the performance for multiple types of rendering effects and techniques this includes material type changes transparencies and changes to roughness and other visual effects to create realistic stress testing and the intent I'll deviate more on this workload than an hour heavily ray-traced GN logo render with AMD completing the render in ten point nine minutes on the 2990 WX and intel's 31 75 X completed in seven point eight minutes for 28% render time reduction when both are stock the 1980 XE completes the same scene in 11.6 minutes demonstrating about the 2990 WX maintains a general lead with thread count but starts to exchange some of its lead with Intel at the high end depending on frequency finally for the splash render the 31 35 X completes in about nine point seven minutes with the 2990 WX at eleven point six minutes and the ninety nine ATX ECB you stock at eleven point eight minutes that rough sixteen percent time reduction against either of the $2000 options is hard to justify in a lot of instances it's especially difficult since overclocking the ninety nine eighty XD gets it to nearly tie the 31 35 X when its stock though you could obviously no see that as well and yet another one minute reduction it's just a question of if the business considering this option would get benefit daily in which instance the cost may be worth it but it really does have to be a business to start making sense and it does have to be something you're doing it regularly enough with intensity that these differences make an impact to the bottom line gaining back that thousand dollars quickly Photoshop tends to be more frequency dependent than anything else as evidenced by this chart the 99 hundred K is the best value here by a long shot - and the 3125 acts only begins to compete once it's been over clocks to four point five gigahertz and is screaming at 70 decibels on the ASA tech cooler using the puget system Photoshop benchmark we simply cannot justify the 3175 acts for this use case a much lower and higher frequency intel part makes far more sense than these h EDT platforms there may be photoshop use cases where it really makes sense like maybe accompanying photo management tasks but we could not find them just with the comprehensive puget benchmark that we use POV is our last production test in this benchmark this one position is the 3175 ex stock cpu at 25 seconds for multi-threaded elapsed time to complete the render with the 2990 WX stock cpu at 27 seconds to complete the difference is outside of error margins but generally insignificant the 70 idatx EE at 4.6 gigahertz completes in twenty nine point six seconds demonstrating that the extra threads in the 31 75 X are put to work overall though the 1000 dollar difference is tough to accept for these leads overclocking pushes the 31 75 X further up the chart of course though at the cost of power and significant noise on the asus net cooler and then to be fair you can overclock the others as well like the 29 to WX the 31 75 X holds a bigger lead in single threaded performance with pov-ray but then again so does a 9900 case so we'll just look at multi-threaded here power consumption is expected ly rather high with this CPU with blender and stock settings the 31 75 X ends up following the turbo duration limitations set by Intel and followed by Asus with MCE disabled after the loading period the power consumption down the EPS 12-volt cables is 312 watts remember this is a total system power draw so we are looking at numbers much closer to actual power consumption of the CPU here the 2990 WX ran at about 191 watts during this test or roughly 16 amps this is the same logo render that completed in equal times on the 2990 WX and the 3175 x in the previous charts and so Andy is significantly advantaged power consumption for this test despite Intel being significantly ahead and premier testing since they're tied here Andy gains the advantage with the lower power consumption overclocking the 31 25 X gets it up to a staggering 672 watts which is the highest power consumption we've yet measured without using an exotic cooling like chilled water or liquid nitrogen for perspective a previous high was the 79 80 XC at one point to 5 volts at about 548 watts and then the 2990 WX at one point three seven volts for 432 watts although stability was sort of troublesome with that setting games aren't really the targeted use case of the $3000 31 75 X clearly much like they aren't the intended use case of the 2990 WX but we always benchmark games it is after all gamers and axis in f1 2018 at 1080p the Intel 31 35 X ended up at 290 FPS average with lows mostly reasonably timed sans these 0.1% values will look at frame times in a moment to illustrate this behavior the average frame rate positioning ranks the CPU as functionally equivalent to a 9900 K stock CPU no human could meaningfully tell the difference between the average of 290 and 284 fps though the 0.1% lows may be a bit more meaningfully noticeable f1 20:18 like scores more than most games do evidenced by the overclocked 3175 managing to land freshly at the top of the charge with its 308 FPS average and that's with an error of the GPU limitations of the 798 exe at 4.6 gigahertz the 9900 K at 5.2 gigahertz further illustrates the thread favored in f1 as its performance tops out at 291 FPS average in spite of its higher frequency frame times are important here remember that we want to see a lower number for frame time but also one which is consistent frame to frame from one frame to the next we don't want to see a delta greater than 8 to 12 milliseconds as this becomes noticeable to the user as a stutter this is the data that gets smoothed out in average charts and has even smoothed out by 1% metrics illustrated in the previous chart for frame times we see the 31:35 spike to 20 milliseconds once not too different from the 9900 K but then again spiking to 35 milliseconds drawing at 8 milliseconds for a bit and then 34 milliseconds then it goes back down to 5 milliseconds that hits 35 milliseconds and so forth this sporadic behavior is jarring to the user and although not unplayable the 9900 K is a better experience despite its overall lower average FPS thread Ripper also has issues with a lot of the games if left in creator mode which is when all of its cores are enabled so this seems to be a pattern with how games perceive the massive amounts of cores of some of these h EDT processors it may be best like with thread Ripper to disable some cores or use process lasso to set the used cores for an application to ensure that the game is not getting confused so to speak by the high core count resolution is the great equalizer for gaming performance among CPUs as the task instead becomes GPU bound at 1440 PF 1 2018 positions the 31 75 acts at 237 FPS average which is about where the overclocked variants the 9700 K at 5.1 gigahertz and the 9900 K all also get stuck this is a GPU limitation Assassin's Creed origins is up next at 1080p the 3175 x ends up at 133 FPS average stock which is between the 99 80 XC at 4.4 gigahertz and 9700 K at 5.1 gigahertz this is another instance where it is clearly more sensible to buy a gaming centric CPU for gaming just like thread Ripper or other xeon parts before you really shouldn't buy the 3175 ax for a gaming pc it's fine for use in a workstation PC that also plays games but it's really not suitable for use as a gaming only or gaming primarily CPU being the most expensive doesn't make the CPU the best at gaming though it may help in being good at its specialized workstation tasks with some gaming on the side the 31 35 X is capable in this test though clearly not a distinctive leader when compared to Intel's cheaper gaming centric CPUs like the 9900 or 9700 case cues 1440p shows mostly the same thing despite being up against the GPU bottleneck the 3175 ax falls slightly behind the 900 a likely resultant of lower single-threaded performance when considering the night I had a case higher frequencies civilization 6 will be our last one for today we have more gaming benchmarks but as this isn't really gaming targeted will cap it here for time besides the conclusion remains the same across all the titles civilization 6 looks instead at AI turn time processing versus fps which is a more useful metric for grant campaign or turn-based strategy games also one of the more interesting unique and useful metrics for CPU benchmarking from a gaming standpoint rather than FPS for this one the 3175 acts technically chart tops within error margins anyway at eleven point two seconds when overclocked to four point five gigahertz calculated across hundreds of turns and maybe five AI players this would certainly add up when compared to for instance an i3 or an r3 CPU or something lower down on the chart realistically though the difference between an eleven point two second turn completion time per player at an eleven point four second time of the 9700 K for instance isn't going to be noticeable and the 31:35 x stock performance is more realistically comparable to a ninety nine hundred K stock again the 31 75 X does well it's there's nothing wrong here but it's not like the performance scales linearly with the money spent at least not in gaming scenarios like these so as noted coming to a conclusion on this is difficult the first they need to know if you're buying one is that yes it is hot a few overclock and to the point that this thing with I don't know if those are Delta fans I haven't taken them off yet but with these massive fans that's been all three together at 70 decibels which is very loud it struggles to keep it cool at 4.5 1.15 volts and we had to go up to 1.17 for premiere with that t.j.maxx offset so it is is difficult to cool which you need to know if you're overclocking if you're not overclocking it's really not so bad auto fan speeds keep it within spec and it's not terribly loud but overclocking is of course one of the major features and I mean it's it's an enthusiast overclocking part it's something you do if you don't care too much about noise because you're gonna get a lot of it but as for the the part practically speaking and premiere does very well it does well enough where if we had an extra one we'd probably use it in our own render machine or maybe when this gets if it ever does get retired from overclock you might keep it around just as a backup or a primary render system because the the speed uplift and our type of rendering is significant it's it's less than half of the time requirement versus a ninety nine hundred K and it's significantly reduced versus even on ninety nine eighty XE so we see scaling and premiere with cores in a way that doesn't surface in Photoshop but it still clearly prefers frequency or some other architectural edge that intel has because AMD doesn't do quite as well in our premiere benchmarks as intel does especially if you're looking for decor so very impressive for premiere again though it's three thousand dollars and the board is TBD we don't even know if you're gonna be able to buy either of these things retail the cpu you probably should be able to buy retail but asus tells us that their board is an SI part and retail might be later so that leaves you with gigabyte and gigabyte isn't a hundred percent sure what's happening what there's either so it makes it sort of difficult to gauge the value because we don't know what the combined price is if the boards are truly going to be over a thousand dollars your functional price of the CP is is obviously much higher than otherwise but it's good at premiere it's just we don't know if the value is good because we don't know what the motherboards will cost but assuming they aren't over $1000 then a business that runs premier all day every day would get value out of the part they the bottom line would be affected by the speed increase if you're not a business then don't buy it is what it comes down to unless you're an enthusiast overclocker because the value just isn't there but i think everyone probably knows that this is a business class part the 99 ad XE is clearly competitive the 2990 WX is clearly competitive in blender if you're doing something that's tile based rendering then and these for 2990 WX pulls ahead and well in value anyway and in performance it's just behind it's functionally tied and some of our renders and it's it's a bit behind in some of the others just depends on which render it is so value eyes though a thousand dollars less you might be better off with that I mean you could buy a couple of them you probably buy two of the 29 at 90 W X's and 2 4 or $500 X 399 boards and be very close to the total cost of one board plus the 31 35 X assuming the board prices are very high and that's certainly something to consider because if you can once you're stacking two CPUs versus one CPU and a board value goes up tremendously for the two which would be AMD of this instance so it's a bit of a trade depend on what type of workload you're running this CPU is is good it's just that the price is really difficult to work with especially because we don't know what the total price is going to be so as a product performance wise the 3175 X is objectively good it is a leader value is where we can't say that so in premiere if you're making money on it then it's potentially worth it but then again a ninety nine eighty XE is good and I mean the ninety nine hundred K with an IG p and QuickSync is extremely good value so we can't make that decision for you you're gonna have to gauge is your business doing enough videos we're cutting the render time to the extent that the 3175 X does is really worth it and it has to be the right type of video to because some of them like our charts are GPU accelerated primarily not really CPU and you'd have to do some in-house testing to figure that out for a consumer versus the twenty nine ninety and pov-ray and blender the twenty nine ninety is better value in Premiere Photoshop well Photoshop beach by ninety nine hundred k if that's the only thing you ever do and then or eighty seven hundred K and then premiere the 3175 axe again is is in a lead gaming well I mean kind of who cares it's fine but it's not a gaming CPU so you shouldn't buy for only gaming because there's no value there but I think everyone knows that just making sure we're on the same page so that's the CPU that's that's our review of it it is very difficult to come to a conclusion without knowing the rest of the ecosystem this is an odd part but a very interesting one it's just that the value I first of all it is yeah it's skylake X it didn't get it didn't get the changes that you might have thought it would get last year at Computex it will require chilled water for us to run it at 5 gigahertz almost certainly and that's in line with what we learned at Computex as well so this is not a part for everybody and it's it's for a very strict enthusiasts who are competing and overclocking as you'll see in our stream that's a small audience and maybe businesses and in that instance will defer to you to make the decision because we don't really speak with businesses we speak with consumers so if you're interested in the part that's how it performs thank you for watching as always subscribe for more we don't know what the boards will cost but maybe once this video goes up you will so let us know what you think and you can get a store dock game as exit sign at the elbows out directly check back for the stream I'll see you all next time