Intel i9 7900X Skylake-X Review

Test Setup

Intel i9-7900X
ASUS X299-A Prime
Corsair ROG Dominator Platinum 3200 – Stock Tests
G.Skill Trident-Z 3600 – OC Tests
Corsair RM1000i
Corsair MP500 512GB
Corsair H110i GT
Windows 10

Undervolting and Temperatures

It’s always handy to be able to reduce the voltage of your CPU if you plan on running it at stock, particularly given the nature of the thermal solution implemented on the i7-7900X. We think that this is a definite candidate for de-lidding. Anyway, at stock we saw the CPU hit 60°C, but with a little bit of tinkering to undervolt it that dropped down to 54°C. Clearly some benefits are there to be had from delving into the BIOS. 

  

Overclocking

It is difficult to imagine anyone wanting more power than you can get from a 10/20, but on the off-chance you do then it is capable of running at 4.8 GHz. We had to back off down to 4.6 GHz for our overclocking tests, but that is largely due to the thermals where the thermal paste solution employed by Intel led to us seeing 90 temperatures despite our beefy cooling option. With a delid and some tinkering you could really see this flying along, but we always review things in the way that you will receive them, so down to 4.6 GHz we went at 1.22v and the temperatures stabilised enough to get through all of our benchmarks.