Intel vs AMD: Who Makes the Best Pancakes?

The latest generation of processors has noticeably increased the number of available cores, but that means we must be more careful in their cooling, unless... we use the heat for something else. How about cooking pancakes? The folks at Tom's Hardware took an Intel Core i9-9980XE (18C/36T) and an AMD Threadripper 2990WX (32C/64T), two excellent representatives among HEDT platforms, to test which of these processors makes the best pancakes.

Do processors get hot? Some models reached legendary levels. Almost the entire Pentium 4 family based on the NetBurst microarchitecture suffered temperature problems, to such an extent that Intel never managed to exceed 3.8 GHz. On the graphics card side, Nvidia's Fermi chips were the center of complaints and mockery, while AMD also has several questionable examples. However, as users we must be willing to accept certain compromises. High-performance hardware consumes a lot of power, and cooling needs to be up to the challenge.

The alternative is... to put all that heat to another task, and a recurring joke in the computer world is cooking. In the past we've seen tests with eggs and bacon, but what about a pancake? The folks at Tom's Hardware decided to find out with two true HEDT monsters. On Intel's side we have a Core i9-9980XE with 18 cores and 165W TDP, and from AMD comes the Threadripper 2990WX, with 32 cores and 250 watts.

The first step was to get a frying pan small enough (a little over 10 centimeters), and even then they had to remove the VRM cooling on the X299 motherboard because they couldn't place it over the processor. With the 9980XE, they entered the BIOS to raise the throttling limit to 105 degrees Celsius, a temperature they reached with a stress test in AIDA64 (other programs are also valid). That's when the system shut down due to lack of cooling on the VRMs, but an extra fan over them solved the problem. 16 minutes later, the pancake ended up broken into several parts... although cooked and tasty.

On the other hand, luck with the AMD Threadripper 2990WX wasn't as good. The X399 motherboard had room for the pan, and initially the response was very good... but the system started shutting down. Error codes and sudden crashes before reaching the desktop plagued the session. Even with the system locked up, the chip retained some heat, and they continued cooking that way; however, after 18 minutes they ended up with raw and inedible batter.

In summary... if you want to cook pancakes with an HEDT platform, the Core i9-9980XE is a superior option, although not the most economical. Currently, the processor has a price of 2,000 dollars online, to which you must add motherboard, memory, power supply... and the rest.