Intel Xeon W9-3495X: Unboxing £12k of Workstation Hardware

Intel sent Leo a box of expensive workstation hardware, including two 4th Gen Xeon Scalable Processors (aka Sapphire Rapids) that have 56 cores and 36 cores respectively. Before we dive into benchmarking and testing we felt the urge to share the good news with an unboxing and a backgrounder on the latest Intel Xeons.

Time stamps
00:00 Introduction
02:37 £10k of processors!
03:48 The kit. tech and roadmap details
10:12 How Intel sees their workstation platforms
10:56 Leo’s signoff

As we detail in our video, Intel sent a 56-core Xeon W9-3495X and a 36-core Xeon W9-3475X, along with an ASRock W790 WS motherboard and a Noctua NH U14-S DX-4677 cooler. We have also sourced 64GB (16GBx4) of Kingston Fury Renegade Pro DDR5-6000 ECE memory and an EK-Pro CPU block for socket 4677 in Ni+Acetal.

The details of 4th Gen Xeon Scalable are fascinating and we cannot wait to see how they perform. While the power limits seem scarily high at 420W for the 56-core and 360W for the 36-core, we figure that is in the same ballpark as Core i9-13900K which has a much smaller area. With our fingers crossed and our four leafed clover in place, it's time to get testing.

KitGuru Says: Intel 4th Gen Xeon Scalable looks Mega on paper and now it's time to see how it fares in practice.

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