Gaming
We have deliberately tested at a resolution and quality setting that marries up well with the GeForce GTX 1080 graphics card. Doing so shows that the 18-core chip is not much better than an Intel Core i5 costing one-tenth of the price.
Intel will readily admit that game-performance scaling from four cores to six cores is, on average, slight. It's even less moving from eight to 10 cores, so it's inevitable that jumping up to 18 cores doesn't help.
Point is, most of the Core i9 7980XE's execution resource is left twiddling its silicon thumbs when gaming. But look at it another way, if you purchase the Core i9 for massive multi-threaded goodness in professional applications, you still have a no-compromise gaming platform with more PCIe lanes than on most Core i7.
Intel's chip also doesn't seem to have the suggested foibles of running too many cores, as AMD's Threadripper had. Notice the GM (Game Mode) suffix on that chip? The performance differs depending on which mode the AMD processor is in. Intel's performance is consistent at all times.
