Xidax X-8 Gaming PC Review: Skylake-X And Dual GTX 1080 Ti Cards For The Win

Xidax's X-8 is primarily geared towards gaming, but we'll kick off our benchmark gauntlet with some standard productivity and content creation metrics.

Cinebench R11.5 64-bit Content Creation Performance

Based on Maxon Cinema 4D software, this test uses a 3D scene and polygon and texture manipulation to assess GPU and CPU performance. We ran the Main Processor Performance (CPU) test, which builds a still scene containing about 2,000 objects, for a total polygon count above the 300,000 mark. Here we're focusing strictly on software rendering on the CPU and it's heavily taxing on this one aspect of system performance, both with multi-threaded and single-threaded rendering. 

To start things off, the X-8 with its Core i9-7900X showed it can rub elbows at the top with Dell's Alienware Area-51 outfitted with a Threadripper 1950X, AMD's flagship high-end desktop (HEDT) processor. Single-threaded performance was faster on the X-8, and in the multi-threaded portion of the benchmark, only a point-and-a-half separated the two setups.

Also impressive is that the X-8 was able hang with Cybertron's heavily overclocked CLX Ra, with a Core i7-6950X processor (Broadwell-E) inside. Like the Core i9-7900X, it has 10 cores and 20 threads to throw at workloads, but the CLX Ra sports a more aggressive overclock—Cybertron pushed it to 5GHz, whereas the X-8 is running at 4.1GHz, up from its 3.3GHz base clock. Even with a slower clockspeed, the benefits of Intel's Skylake-X architecture are on display here, with the X-8 coming out on top by a hair.

We have only recently started collecting scores for Cinebench R15 on gaming rigs, so our graph is not nearly as fleshed out. However, this gives us another look at how the Xidax X-8 with its Core i9-7900X stacks up against a previous generation Core i7-6950X, both with 10 cores and 20 threads at their disposal.

We also get a look at how the Core i9-7900X fares against AMD's Threadripper 1950X processor, a 16-core/32-thread chip. The Threadripper has an obvious multi-core advantage, though in single-core performance, the X-8 skips ahead by nearly 30 points.

Futuremark PCMark 8 Simulated Application Performance

PCMark 8 simulates the workloads computers face in several different settings, including home, office and content creation. The benchmark also has a test that simulates a creative professional’s usage, as well as battery and storage tests. We ran the tests with OpenCL acceleration enabled to leverage the power of the system's GPUs, CPU and storage subsystem combined.

In PCMark 8, the X-8 took the top spot in the Home Accelerated test and a finished second to Maingear's Vybe in the Work Accelerated test. Even though the X-8 has a core and thread advantage on the CPU side, PCMark 8 tends to heavily favor the storage subsystem and benefits from higher single-thread performance. For this setup, the X-8 is running a "Xidax Performance" NVMe SSD, which is a 512GB WD Black drive pushing data through the PCIe bus.

There's also 32GB of DDR4-3200 memory underneath the hood. Along with the dual graphics cards, the X-8 is easily capable of handling productivity chores, including ones that are heavily weighted with content creation and media manipulation.

That said, this isn't the kind of setup you purchase for crunching numbers on an Excel sheet. The X-8 is geared towards gaming, so let's leave PCMark 8 behind and jump into the system's graphics performance...