Just a few hours ago the press embargo was lifted on the new 18-core, 36-thread Intel Core i9 7980XE and i9 7960X, Core i9 7940X processors. You can catch one of the first reviews of the new HEDT chips here on Anantech where as usual Ian Cutress gives us a full technical appraisal. The new Extreme Edition chip, as you would expect offers some pretty exceptional performance. In fact it has already been put to good use by a handful of Elite overclockers who were invited to the ASUS labs in Taiwan to give the new silicon a test drive using the ROG Rampage VI Apex motherboard. ASUS are happy to report that the team managed to break 6 World Records and 16 Global First Placed scores using Intel's new Core-X memebrs. Here’s a sample of an article published on the ASUS ROG site:

Today, Intel is releasing the remaining members of the high-core-count (HCC) X-series family. We’ve already put the Core i9-7940X (14-core) and i9-7980XE (18-core) CPUs to the test in order to find out where the limits of these two chips stand, and we set six new World Records (WR) and 16 Global First Place (GFP) scores in the process.

Out of the box, the Core i9-7980XE is clocked at a 2.6GHz base frequency and tops out at 4.2GHz with turbo. Using liquid nitrogen to lower the CPU temperature to around -100°C, ROG overclocker ‘der8auer’ was able to save a CPU-Z validation at 6.104GHz on all 18 cores with Hyper-Threading enabled. That’s nearly 2GHz higher than the CPU's maximum turbo speed.

Overclockers der8auer (Germany), rsaninno (Italy) and alex@ro (Romania) have clearly been enjoying the new CPUs from Intel. You can find all the details related to the Core i9 7980XE processor and the new record scores made here on the ASUS ROG site.