Intel Xeon W-3175X Review: Supercharged 28-Core Skylake-SP

For our next series of tests, we moved on to some game-related metrics with 3DMark, specifically the physics benchmark that's part of the Fire Strike test, along with a couple of actual games. For the 3DMark Physics test, we simply create a custom 3DMark run consisting solely of the physics test, which is CPU dependent, and report the results...

Gaming: 3DMark Physics Taking the GPU out of the Equation

Although this is a multi-threaded test, it doesn't scale properly on some of the many-core processors. The Xeon W-3175X finishes about in the middle of the pack, on par with the Core i9-9900K and 7980XE. The Threadripper 2990WX's stock performance lands at the bottom of the stack, but the "b" result, which is using game mode (enabled in Ryzen Master), helps bring its performance up, in-line with the other Threadrippers.

High Resolution Gaming And Graphics Tests 1080P and 4K Gaming With GeForce GTX 1080

We also ran some high-resolution game and graphics tests on our test rigs 3DMark, Middle Earth: Shadow Of War and Rise Of The Tomb Raider. We used 3DMark's Fire Strike Extreme preset, and both of the games were run in two different configurations -- either 1080p with Medium details, or 4K with High/Very High details. The lower resolution tests are more CPU bound, while the higher resolution tests are more GPU bound.
Our 1080p / medium quality game tests are a mixed bag with the Xeon W-3175X. In Middle Earth: Shadow Of War, it performs well and nearly takes the top spot. In Rise Of The Tomb Raider, however, things took a turn for the worse and the Xeon W-3175X finds itself trailing all of the other processors.

Cranking the resolution and image quality up in the games, and shifting the bottleneck from the CPU to the GPU shows a completely different trend. Here, as you would expect when things are functioning properly, all of the systems finish right on top of each other and effectively tie -- both of these benchmarks typically have a margin of error of 1 - 2 FPS between runs.


3DMark Fire Strike Extreme technically has the Xeon W-3175X finishing in the upper third, but again, we're mostly GPU limited here. The Xeon W-3175X's lower than expected physics score drags down its overall results. If you look at the graphics score, it is right in-line with all of the ultra high-end processors.