In addition to a brand new tier of consumer-grade processors, the Core i9 family, Intel also recently introduced the “X-series.” Here’s where things get confusing, because Core X processors don’t fit into a single line, family, or even chip architecture—it’s purely a marketing term, similar to the previous “Extreme Edition” processors that Intel offered a few years ago.
Basically, Core X processors are faster and more expensive models aimed squarely at PC performance enthusiasts, available in Core i5, Core i7, and Core i9 variants with commensurate features at each tier. Let’s take a look at the new offerings, and what changes at each level of price and performance.
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A Technical Breakdown of Every X-Series Processor
Here’s the technical breakdown of the new Core X series. Note that a lot of information on the more powerful Core i9-X CPUs, coming in the latter half of 2017, hasn’t been released.
So we have nine new chips: five Core i9s (the first ever), three Core i7s, and one lonely little Core i5, all bearing the “X” suffix. The insanely powerful i9-7980XE gets an extra “E” thrown in there, because it’s still bearing the “Extreme Edition” moniker used in some of the older high-end Intel chips.
All of the X-series chips use the new LGA2066 socket and its accompanying X299 chipset, and all except the i7-7800X will support super-fast DDR4-2666 memory (or possibly faster for the more expensive models). That’s about all they have in common, though: the prices range from practically budget at around $250 to impractically ludicrous at $2000 for the 18-core i9 7980XE.
The bottom two chips support “only” 16 PCI express lanes—an important factor for gamers who like to build multi-GPU rigs—up to 44 or better for the more expensive chips. That’s an important detail: to get more lanes than the previous $500-level Intel processor, you’ll need to spend at least a thousand dollars.Core count is a big differentiation as well. The cheapest X-series chips at the i5 and i7 level will use quad-core designs with higher base clocks, with processor cores and threads increasing up to 10 for the i9-7900X (the highest Intel had produced in a consumer CPU before the X series) up to 12, 14, 16, and 18 in the even more expensive models, all of which have hyperthreading. Power draw will be high, starting at 112 watts and going up to at…
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