Intel Xeon w9-3495X and w9-3475X Watercooled
Wrap Up and Video
When we did our full review of the Intel Xeon w9 processors the end result was the, unsurprising, fact that they are phenomenally fast in the right scenario and, like all the Xeons that have come before them, not all that in tasks for which they are not designed.
Keen eyed readers will have noted that we’ve not included any pure gaming benchmarks. We have often said that clock speed is the key element in any gaming rig, which is why we think the processors like the AMD Ryzen 7600X or Intel Core i5-13400 are more than enough to power a modern gaming platform. Xeons, even with our overclock, really aren’t designed for this. They’ve too many cores and run too warm to really be the basis of a frame munching machine. It’s part of the reason the Intel Core i9-13900KS isn’t quite as quick as the Core i7-13700K. Obviously the bigger CPU is better in rendering and encoding tasks. That truth is made even bigger when considering the Xeons. If some cores is good, and more cores are better, then most cores is best. If you’ll forgive the terrible grammar.
In our initial review it was clear that the stock settings are fine and dandy on our chosen cooler, but even a hairs breadth of an overclock quickly caused the temperatures to go into the stratosphere. 100MHz extra might not seem a lot, but when you apply it to 36 or 56 cores, it exponentially increases the heat. Hence today’s review with a watercooling setup. Because no good deed goes unpunished it transpires that once you’ve solved the cooling issue, the power limitations of our ASROCK motherboard became too little to sustain an overclock on the Xeon w9-3495X, with the system constantly shutting off. We just about got a Cinebench R23 run out of it, and as you saw the results are interesting enough that we’re awaiting a motherboard with better power handling to test the beefy Xeon on.
However, in the right test the Intel Xeon w9-3475X showed that the need for great cooling is there, and if you can supply it with such then the results are clear for all to see. The w9-3475X with a watercooled overclock was better than our air-cooled overclock in every single test except our two 3DMARK ones. Not a massive shock, obviously, but it’s reassuring to know that the Intel offerings scale so well. We can’t wait to revisit this on a new W790 motherboard and see how much more we can squeeze from the 36 core model, and if the big 56 core model brings the same rewards.
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