Intel's upcoming Core i9 10980XE CPU is going to be their flagship HEDT part and the company has just recently slashed pricing to make it competitive to AMD. A report by PCGamesN reveals however that the flagship SKU, the Core i9 10980XE, can actually hit 5.1 GHz across all cores with a standard AIO cooler! Yes, you heard that right, no chillers involved (ahem). This is an incredibly impressive overclocking headroom and the fact that you can now get HEDT for half the price is the cherry on top of the cake.

Intel's new Core i9 10980XE CPU has a ton of OC headroom, eats the Ryzen 2950X for lunch with 32% higher performance per dollar

Keep in mind that this is subject to the silicon lottery. Not all chips are diffused equal and that means that some chips will have lower OC headroom than this and yes, some will have more. That said, an OC of ~5GHz on all cores is a great thing to look forward to for any HEDT enthusiast and should make for a killer platform especially considering the new price. Before we go any further, here is the excerpt from the PCGamesN interview:

“You can overclock the heck out of these and get some really interesting results,” Intel’s Mark Walton tells us. “For example, we’ve had the 10980XE, the eighteen core processor, up as high as 5.1GHz in the lab using standard liquid cooling. And that, I believe, is all cores.”

“This is just an example of one particular chip we’ve had in the lab,” says Walton, “so this might not be reflective of all chips. Just to be clear on that, every chip is different, some chips will overclock better than others, but it is possible.” -PCGamesN

Intel has an incredibly mature 14nm+++(+?) and this means that you are going to be able to hit stable clock rates at levels absolutely unheard of. Intel's HEDT platform is one area where enthusiasts are rewarded for investing in motherboards with beefy VRMs and a powerful enough PSU. If you were on the market looking for an HEDT chip to buy, wait for the 10980 XE to hit the shelves because it does not get better than this.

That's not all, if you look at the benchmarks that had leaked previously you will see that Intel now has the performance per dollar lead as far as HEDT goes (how times change).

Intel Core i9-10980XE 18 Core and Core i9-10900X CPUs compared against Skylake-X and AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPUs in Geekbench. (Image Credits: HotHardware)

If you take a look at the benchmarks above, the Intel Core i9-10980 XE scores 51514 points while the AMD Threadripper 2950X scores 35691 points. Now, these are stock clocks I might add but the point stands. At these performance levels and with pricing of $979 and $900 for the Intel and AMD part respectively, you are looking at Intel with a roughly 32% lead in performance per dollar as compared to the red counterpart. Not only that but you get significantly more features as well.

Intel 10th Generation HEDT Pricing Update