iiiyraegr

The obvious answer to this is, "Wait for the 7980XE release and read the reviews", but the reason for the guesswork is that ebay Australia has a 20% sale for major computer stores running through August 21, which is a big saving for the systems I'm considering building. If I don't go with the i9 7980XE, then it will be a Threadripper 1950X for me.

I don't know, but I've found that it does alright up to 79C, at which point my code (which monitors core temperatures with a program called CoreTemp) does its own throttling, but that is rarely necessary. Maybe I got lucky.

A Xeon W3680 @ 3.9GHz , air cooling (I don't remember what fan), an open case with a floor fan blowing into the case when need be. It only reaches 100F in the room on maybe a couple dozen hot days in the summer, but I need to count on the system remaining stable (without throttling) under those conditions. I don't anticipate running any AVX code.

I have no desire to over-clock a Skylake-X (and I'm certainly not willing to put $2,000 at risk with a delidding), and would be happy just to get maximum stock performance under sustained 100% load. Based on your experience with Skylake X so far, is it reasonable for me to expect/hope to get this in a room that reaches 100F with just a cooler like the Corsair H115i, Arctic Silver and an open case?

I've come to the conclusion that the i9s, with their thermal-pasted heat-spreaders are just not worth the headache they would be to cool. I need every bit of performance that the i9 7980XE appears to offer on paper, but living in a hot climate with no air conditioning, I likely couldn't even get stock performance under sustained multi-threaded workloads due to thermal-induced throttling. Unless, just maybe, Intel learns from the fiasco that is the i9 7900X (IMO) and solders the newer 12-, 14-, 16- and 18-core CPUs to their heat-spreaders. Does anyone have an informed opinion on how likely that is? Is it a complete pipe dream that those CPUs will be useful to anyone outside of Greenland and Antarctica?