Der8auer was one of a handful of overclockers who were invited to the ASUS Labs in Taipei to lend his assistance to the ROG team a few weeks ago. The team were invited to push the latest Core-X processors from Intel using the ASUS ROG Rampage VI Apex motherboard, the X299 platform of choice for many overclockers right now. Today Roman has published a video in which he expounds his opinions on what he describes as the new ‘King of the Hill’, the Intel Core i9 7980XE.

The new flagship processor from Intel is a total beast. AMD fans will point to Threadripper being a better value offering with the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 1950X offering 16-cores and 32-threads for around half the price of the new Intel flagship. However it does not change the fact that with the Core i9 7980XE, Intel have fully regained their performance crown, and as Roman explains, it’s not just because it has two more cores.

In his video Roman reveals a great of detail about his experiences with the new chip. For example, if you want to get the most from the new Skylake-X chip, you will need to delid it and replace the thermal paste. For extreme, sub-zero overclocking, Roman recommends using Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut which is designed specifically to operate at extreme temperatures. Whereas you usually need only a little thermal paste, testing has proved that with the new Intel High Core Count silicon, it’s best to simply apply as liberally as possible. Just cake it on! If not, you may be missing out on as much as 3-400MHz of performance. Another tactic that Roman experimented with is direct-die mounting. Mounting the cooler or LN2 pot directly to the die usually causes the CPU’s PCB to bend just a little, a fact that means poor contact with the socket pins beneath the chip. To prevent this from happening Roman created a modified heat spreader that allowed for direct mounting without bending the CPU.

Roman goes on to reveal more about his experiences with the new 18-core beast of a processor including FIVR and cold bug issues. If you want to get up to speed with extreme overclocking with the new flagship from Intel, you really should check out this video.