Intel Xeon Gold 6242 Review

The Xeon Gold 6242 is one of Intel's high-end Server processors. It was released in 2019 with 16 cores and 32 threads. With base clock at 2.8GHz, max speed at 3.9GHz, and a 150W power rating. The Xeon Gold 6242 is based on the Cascade Lake 14nm family and is part of the Xeon Gold series.

Xeon Gold 6242 is also the successor of Intel's last gen Xeon Gold 6142F processor that was based on the Skylake SP and 14nm process and was released in 2017.

The Intel Xeon Gold 6242 is an absolute behemoth of a processor, as it absolutely should be with its 16 cores, 32 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 6242 can handle them with ease.

The Xeon Gold 6242 slots in beneath the Xeon Gold 6244, which comes with 14nm compute die to yield a 8-core 16-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 6242s single-compute-die design, paired with a higher TDP rating that facilitates more aggressive boost clocks, could actually rival the Xeon Gold 6244 in some applications – games included.

We covered the deep dive details of the Cascade Lake chip design in our Intel Xeon Gold 6244 and Xeon Gold 6240 review, so head there for more information on the Xeon Gold 6242's architecture, which is identical to the Xeon Gold 6240.

What this all means is that the Intel Xeon Gold 6242 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 6242.

Intel has been having some trouble as of late which has made it even harder to compete with the incoming wave of EPYC processors. That has forced the chip maker to be a little more creative and make do with their current product lines. Today we have the Intel Xeon Gold 6242 on hand, which in itself isn’t anything new. It’s basically a refreshed Xeon Gold 6142F with a clock speed boost. We say basically because it’s not a straight refresh however, there’s another change.

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 EPYC processor. The base performance we showed for the Xeon Gold 6242 can be achieved with $90 memory, while the Epyc 7402 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 6242 was more capable than many might have expected. The basic high-end processor from Intel that can be picked up for $2529 was able to out perform the Epyc 7451 that runs $2400 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 16-core processors can still manage to get by today. Being able to play current game titles and stream to Twitch on the Xeon Gold 6242 was something we give playable results, but we were pleasantly surprised. As games become more threaded the ‘value’ in a 16-core processor continues to go down, but you can still get by with something like the Xeon Gold 6242 in a pinch.

With Xeon Gold, Intel continues to innovate on its new architecture and 14nm process. Like Xeon Gold, Intel has engineered Xeon Gold to operate on a 3647 chipset with all the modern amenities of computing. This includes support for DDR4 RAM, the fastest NVMe SSDs and Thunderbolt 3 ports.

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 85% in our benchmarks.

Regardless of those external factors, the Xeon Gold 6242 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.