Intel’s TDP has long been questioned, but this particular generation put the 95W TDP under fire as users noticed media outlets measuring power consumption at well over 100W on most boards. It isn’t uncommon to see the 9900K at 150W or more in some AVX workloads, like Blender, thus far-and-away exceeding the 95W number. Aside from TDP being an imperfect specification for power, there’s also a lot that isn’t understood about it – including by motherboard manufacturers, apparently. All manufacturers are exceeding Intel guidance for the Turbo boosting duration in some way, which is causing the uncharacteristically high power consumption that produces unfairly advantaged performance results. The other end of this is that the 9900K looks much hotter in some tests.

Intel broke silence this week in response to media reports that its 10nm process "died," denying the claims outright and reaffirming target delivery for 2019. This follows reports emboldened by Semiaccurate of the discontinuation of the current 10nm process development, a site that previously accurately predicted issues with 10nm production. We've also seen plenty of AMD news items this week, including a slumped earnings report, Vega 20 rumors, and RX 590 rumors.

The shows notes are below the video, as always, for those favoring reading.

After our launch-day investigation into delidding the 9900K and finding its shortcomings, we’ve been working on a follow-up involving lapping the inside of the IHS and applying liquid metal to close the story on improvement potential with the delid process. We’re also returning to bring everyone back to reality on delidding the 9900K, because it’s not as easy as it may look from what you’re seeing online.

We already know that it’s possible to see performance improvement, based on our previous content and Roman’s own testing, but we’ve also said that Intel’s solder is an improvement over its previous Dow Corning paste. Considering that, in our testing, high-end Hydronaut paste performs nearing the solder, that’s good news when compared to the older thermal compound. Intel also needed to make that change for more thermal headroom, so everyone benefits – but it is possible to outperform it.

Intel’s i9-9900K’s most boasted feature in all marketing is its solder, so we decided to test thermals with the new soldered interface, then delid the CPU and put thermal paste back on it for more testing. It’s backwards from what we typically do (which is removing paste for liquid metal), so we’ll be looking at soldered vs. paste tests, gaming benchmarks, Blender workloads, overclocking, and livestreaming benchmarks in our review of the i9-9900K today. Benchmarks include comparative testing versus the Intel i7-8700K, AMD R7 2700 (and overclocked/2700X variant), R7 1700, i9-7900X, 7960X, and more. The full list of primarily featured CPUs is below.

After our exhaustive in-person interview with Principled Technologies, published on our YouTube channel, we followed-up via email to clarify some questions that were left unanswered during the initial video. As we noted in the initial interview, we give credit to Principled Technologies for endeavoring to sit down with us for these discussions. We recognize that it is not an easy decision to make – one of ignoring the problem (us showing up unannounced, in this instance) or confronting it – and we appreciate PT’s willingness to partake in a rational discussion about test methodology.

For full details of the interview, check the embedded video below. This written accompaniment aims to address follow-up questions where PT technicians closer to the testing had to be consulted. We are not going to transcribe the 40-minute interview and encourage that you watch the content to gain full perspective on both primary sides of the debate. We have timestamped key points in the video (timestamps are rendered within the video).

Following Intel’s 28C CPU announcement from earlier today, the company also announced its i9-9900K CPU and “9th Gen” desktop CPUs. On stage, Intel dubbed its 9900K “the best gaming processor in the world – period,” before holding up the CPU in new packaging that clearly targets the Threadripper 2 packaging. Intel also declared that “we are breaking the laws of physics to bring you these parts,” which is clearly vehemently false, but we do get the point. The more correct phrasing is that “they’re fast.” We get the point, though.

Intel today announced its Xeon W-3175X 28C/56T CPU, not to be confused with the previously demonstrated 28C HEDT Skylake-X CPU from Computex. The CPU targets workstation users on Xeon platforms. Its intended use is for production, like Blender (a tool we use for our own animations) and other heavily multithreaded render applications. As these are heavily core-dependent, the use case is more pronounced than in production software like Premiere, which is frequency-dependent.

For frequency, the 28C/56T Xeon part operates at a native boost frequency of 4.3GHz – but Intel did not specify if this is single-core or all-core. It’s almost certainly single-core Turbo, leaving us uncertain as to the frequency in all-core boost.

“How frequently should I replace liquid metal?” is one of the most common questions we get. Liquid metal is applied between the CPU die and IHS to improve thermal conductivity from the silicon, but there hasn’t been much long-term testing on liquid metal endurance versus age. Cracking and drying are some of the most common concerns, leading users to wonder whether liquid metal performance will fall off a cliff at some point. One of our test benches has been running thermal endurance cycling tests for the last year now, since September of 2017, just to see if it’s aged at all.

This is a case study. We are testing with a sample size of one, so consider it an experiment and case study over an all-encompassing test. It is difficult to conduct long-term endurance tests with multiple samples, and would require dozens (or more) of identical systems to really build-out a large database. From that angle, again, please keep in mind that this is a case study of one test bench, with one brand of liquid metal.

Other than news that our move into an office is nearly complete -- and that is big news, at least, for us -- the industry has been largely focused on GPUs for the past few weeks. NVidia's remaining 10-series GPU inventory has been purged down-channel to board partners, who are now working to drop 10-series video card prices in fire sales that lead into the RTX 20-series launch. We've also heard of Spectre and Meltdown again (it's been a while), with Intel pushing more microcode updates to assist in mitigating attack vectors. Those updates came with a brief "no benchmarks" clause, but that seems to have been addressed in the time since.

Separately: We'll be at PAX West this weekend for one day (Friday), and will be joining Corsair and PC World on a PC gaming panel at 7:00PM in the Sandworm Theater. Learn more here.

The show notes and article are below the video embed, if you prefer reading.

AMD’s new Threadripper 2 CPUs are slated for launch in the immediate future. We have AMD Threadripper 2 specs, prices, and topological information for the 2990WX, 2970WX, 2950X, and 2920X, most of which have been detailed today. Additional details and reviews are pending publication from sampled outlets. We are not technically working with AMD on this launch, but are looking into review/test options. These will likely be pushed back past our move-in for the new office.

The new AMD Threadripper 2 2990WX will use cores enabled in dies 0, 1, 2, and 3 – so all 4 of the dies under the IHS – which more or less confirms Der8auer’s findings earlier this year. The 2950X and 2920X will be using dies 0 and 1, leaving the other two unutilized.