Intel Xeon W CPU Sneak Peek

Intel recently announced its lineup of Sapphire Rapids Xeon CPUs for workstations. They’re still a month or two away, but in the lead-up to the on-sale date, Intel invited German overclocker de8auer to its labs for a quick overclocking test. That some Sapphire Rapids workstation CPUs are overclockable is both a first for Intel and a big selling point. To demonstrate the possibilities, de8auer and an Intel employee showed some impressive preliminary results, despite it being on pre-release hardware. However, the performance comes at the cost of serious power consumption.
The chip being tested here is the flagship W9-3495X, which has 56 cores and 112 threads. The motherboard is an Intel validation board, so it’s fairly pedestrian as far as VRM cooling goes. The CPU is cooled by a 360mm AIO made by Cooler Master. There’s 192GB of DDR5 running at 5,600MHz across eight channels. As the host notes, a system like this would probably start at around $10,000.

In the video, the Intel employee runs Geekbench 5 Pro but CPU-Z is open to monitor clock speeds. For the test, all 56 cores were running at 4.2GHz. For context, this CPU has a maximum single-core turbo frequency of 4.6GHz and a Turbo Boost 3.0 frequency of 4.8GHz. In other words, this is a modest all-core overclock.
Despite the above reality, it was still able to smash the world record in Geekbench. The title was previously held by a 64-core AMD Threadripper Pro CPU that scored 48,025 points. The Sapphire Rapids CPU crushed that to the tune of a 53,817 multi-core score. That’s a 12% delta, impressive as the Intel CPU has fewer cores and was also running at lower clocks: 4.2GHz versus 4.3GHz on the Threadripper.

While the chip was busy setting a new world record in Geekbench, it seems to have also set a new record for power consumption. Power draw was measured at the wall with a Watts Up? meter, and it showed it hitting 1,097W briefly. When running the single-threaded portion of the benchmark, it hovered around 375W before spiking up to around 700W, then 800W, and so forth. After going over 1,000W, it settled back down to around 650W. de8auer noted that with better cooling, it could have probably overclocked to around 4.6GHz.
If you’re not into overclocking, Cinebench was also run in “stock” trim on an Asus workstation board. One interesting highlight of the visual walkaround is the Asus board offers dual 24-pin power connectors in case you want to run two PSUs. Overall the system hit around 70,000 in Cinebench with only XMP enabled on the memory. The W9-3495X CPU was running all cores at 2.9GHz. For comparison, our colleagues at PCMag got 39,022 out of a Core i9-13900K in its review.
One final note; right as we went to press, we noticed someone has indeed already applied exotic cooling to this CPU. According to a new submission to the HWBOT leader boards for Cinebench, a W9-3495X now holds the top spot. A user named Safedisk applied some LN2 cooling to the chip, allowing it to hit 5.2GHz on all cores. That enabled a mind-bending score of over 128,000 on Cinebench.
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