AMD Ryzen 9 5900X vs Intel Core i9-7980XE

Ryzen 9 5900X vs Core i9-7980XE specs and performance

Our benchmark analysis concludes that the Core i9-7980XE performs better than the Ryzen 9 5900X. Despite this, the Ryzen 9 5900X has the advantage in our gaming benchmark.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i9-7980XE has significantly more cores with 18 cores compared to the Ryzen 9 5900X that has 12 cores. It also has more threads than the Ryzen 9 5900X. These CPUs have different clock speeds. Indeed, the Ryzen 9 5900X has a slightly higher clock speed compared to the Core i9-7980XE. Also, the Ryzen 9 5900X has a slightly higher turbo speed. A Ryzen 9 5900X CPU outputs less heat than a Core i9-7980XE CPU because of its significantly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Modern CPUs generally have more logical cores than physical cores, this means that each core is split into multiple virtual cores, improving efficiency for parallel workloads. Indeed, the Ryzen 9 5900X has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.