Intel Xeon Platinum 8176 Review

The Xeon Platinum 8176 is one of Intel's high-end Server processors. It was released in 2017 with 28 cores and 56 threads. With base clock at 3.8GHz, max speed at 3.8GHz, and a 165W power rating. The Xeon Platinum 8176 is based on the Skylake (server) 14nm family and is part of the Xeon Platinum series.

The Intel Xeon Platinum 8176 is an absolute behemoth of a processor, as it absolutely should be with its 28 cores, 56 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 Platinum 8176 can handle them with ease.

As the higher-priced version of the Xeon Platinum 8175M, the Xeon Platinum 8176 has higher base and Boost frequencies of 3.8 and 3.8 GHz, respectively. That's an increase in base frequency and a bump to boost clocks, but the real advantage should lay in the higher Package Power Tracking (PPT) envelope, which is a measurement of the maximum amount of power delivered to the socket. The Xeon Platinum 8175M's PPT tops out at 165W, while the motherboard can pump up to 142W to the Xeon Platinum 8176 at peak performance. That opens up much more aggressive boost behavior, on both single and multiple cores, that could widen the performance gap beyond what we see on the spec sheet.

What this all means is that the Intel Xeon Platinum 8176 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 Platinum 8176.

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 Platinum 8176 can be achieved with $90 memory, while the Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX 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.

Now the biggest question is can Intel’s Xeon Platinum 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 Platinum 8176 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.

Fresh from a successful roll-out of mainstream Xeon Platinum CPUs, Intel's attack on AMD now extends down into the high-end with its Xeon Platinum 8176 processors, which the company is making available as of 25 April 2017.