Intel Xeon W3550 vs Intel Core i7 X 990

Xeon W3550 vs Core i7 X 990 benchmarks

Our benchmark analysis concludes that the Core i7 X 990 performs better than the Xeon W3550. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Xeon W3550 in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Core i7 X 990 has significantly more cores with 6 cores compared to the Xeon W3550 that has 4 cores. It also has more threads than the Xeon W3550. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i7 X 990 has a slightly higher clock speed than the Xeon W3550. In terms of cache, the Core i7 X 990 has significantly more L2 cache when compared to the Xeon W3550

Most CPUs have more threads than cores. This technology, colloquially called hyperthreading, improves performance by splitting a core into multiple virtual ones. This provides more efficient utilisation of a core. Indeed, the Xeon W3550 has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.