Intel Xeon Gold 6128 Review

The Xeon Gold 6128 is one of Intel's high-end Server processors. It was released in 2017 with 6 cores and 12 threads. With base clock at 3.4GHz, max speed at 3.7GHz, and a 115W power rating. The Xeon Gold 6128 is based on the Skylake SP 14nm family and is part of the Xeon Gold series.

The Intel Xeon Gold 6128 is an absolute behemoth of a processor, as it absolutely should be with its 6 cores, 12 threads and high price tag. If you’re looking for the absolute best processor money can buy on a mainstream processor, then look no further. Whether you’re playing PC games or even doing hardcore video and 3D work, the Intel Xeon Gold 6128 can handle them with ease.

The Xeon Gold 6128 slots in beneath the Xeon Gold 6130, which comes with 14nm compute die to yield a 16-core 32-thread part. Intel has worked wonders to reduce the impact of this sort of multi-chip arrangement, but it's fair to assume that the Xeon Gold 6128s single-compute-die design, paired with a higher TDP rating that facilitates more aggressive boost clocks, could actually rival the Xeon Gold 6130 in some applications – games included.

We covered the deep dive details of the Skylake SP chip design in our Intel Xeon Gold 6130 and Xeon Gold 6126 review, so head there for more information on the Xeon Gold 6128's architecture, which is identical to the Xeon Gold 6126.

What this all means is that the Intel Xeon Gold 6128 is an absolute beast when it comes to multi-threaded workloads, especially at this price point. If you're counting on doing some video editing or compiling one hell of an Excel spreadsheet, you're going to see firsthand a performance boost with the Xeon Gold 6128.

If you're mostly playing games on your PC, you will be happy buying either processor. Both proved to be solid options and are evenly matched with a slight advantage to the AMD chip if you don't tune up the Ryzen Threadripper processor. The base performance we showed for the Xeon Gold 6128 can be achieved with $90 memory, while the Ryzen Threadripper 1900X will require $110 - $120 memory in order to enable the frame rates shown here. It’s not a big cost difference and right now with anything less than an RTX 2070 or Vega 64 you’ll more than likely become GPU limited.

The gaming tests with an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti installed in the test system showed the Intel Xeon Gold 6128 was more capable than many might have expected. The basic high-end processor from Intel that can be picked up for $1697 was able to out perform the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X that runs $799 shipped in the three games we tested on. We know that you can’t test on just three games and declare something the overall victor, but it just goes to show that 6-core processors can still manage to get by today. Being able to play current game titles and stream to Twitch on the Xeon Gold 6128 was something we give playable results, but we were pleasantly surprised. As games become more threaded the ‘value’ in a 6-core processor continues to go down, but you can still get by with something like the Xeon Gold 6128 in a pinch.

That said, Intel still lags behind in frequency when the Ryzen Threadripper 1920X operates at 3.5GHz at any given moment and 4GHz when push comes to shove.

Now the biggest question is can Intel’s Xeon Gold processor play games? The answer is simply yes as it got a respectable gaming score of 82% in our benchmarks.

Regardless of those external factors, the Xeon Gold 6128 proves it has the chops to be your main gaming system and a just as effective media creation platform – two things that are becoming intrinsically connected in this age of live-streaming, eSports and uploading gameplay videos.