Question 1

As ridiculous as this sounds, does this CPU come with a sticker? I've seen that Ryzen boxes have stickers, but have never seen a video that shows that a boxed Intel CPU including a sticker in the box. A bit of a weird question, I know, but I  like the idea of having a sticker on my monitor...

Accepted Answer

I completely understand how you feel. I was disappointed when I bought my brother the 6700k and a 7700k for a friend. But all the top notch processors like the 6800k and this 7800x come with stickers!

Question 2

What would be a good Fan/Heat Sink and thermal compound to use with this CPU?

Accepted Answer

You could do a massive air heat sink like the hyper 212 or noctua equivalent if you wanted. I used the deepcool 360ex. a mid to large air cooler or a aio liquid cooler should be fine. As far as a thermal compound goes pretty much any will be fine; however, I'm guessing you have not installed many cpu's before. i recommend arctic mx 4 since it is non electric conductive and if you use too much it won't short anything out.

Question 3

The website states that only DDR4-2400 is supported.  Does this mean that DDR4-2666 will not clock down and work with it forcing me to purchase DDR4-2400 memory?

I am trying to avoid the DDR4-2400 since I'll likely upgrade the CPU sooner rather than later and would want the memory to work with the new CPU.

Accepted Answer

You can use DDR4-2666 without any problems.  2400 is the stock speed of most DDR4 memory, 2666 is essentially overclocked DDR4 memory.  Your computer will recognize DDR4-2666 as DDR4-2400 by default.  Follow your motherboards manual's instructions to enable the faster clock speeds/voltages/timings for your specific memory (likely will require some version of XMP mode).

Question 4

Windows 7 support ..............or not?   ;(

Accepted Answer

Yes windows 7 works just fine and I have all the updates without the notifications that people talk about.

Question 5

Is this processor vulnerable to the Meltdown and/or Spectre vulnerabilities?

Accepted Answer

Virtually every processor made within the last 10 years is vulnerable to the Meltdown/Spectre vulnerabilities.

Question 6

Is it worth replacing my i7-4790k setup with these new 400$ i7  x299 chips and boards? i use my current setup for gaming, streaming, and surf-shopping. i'm leaning towards waiting until these new chipsets are more proven.

Accepted Answer

Upgrading your cpu/chipset only after 1-2 years generally isn’t worth it. However, if you are invested in an upgrade, and want 6 cores, I would go with coffee lake 8700k. The 8700k has a higher clock, and the chipset is much cheaper than x299.

Question 7

Does this work with Windows Server 2016?

Accepted Answer

Yes, it does, I did try it with my windows server 2016 and everything worked fine with this CPU.

Question 8

recommended air cooler for 7800x running in stock? all so not to big so it will not block low profile ram

Accepted Answer

Noctua makes some pretty beast coolers i would always recommend them if your not getting a AIO or custom loop

Question 9

Windows 8.1 support?

Accepted Answer

No. By default, it only supports Windows 10.  There are some kludge work-arounds that will let you use Windows 8.1/Windows 7, but they don't work very well.

Question 10

This one of the few newer CPUs Intel is offering with quad memory channels. Is quad channels much of an advantage for video encoding with encoding programs that fully utilize all the cores which is mostly what i want in a new CPU? I do know from past experience that the more CPUs and the faster the CPU speed that the encoding times are almost proportionally faster but I am not sure about dual versus quad memory channels. Thanks, Bob

Accepted Answer

As reference, I encode 30 min videos in 4k, with 32 GB RAM and it takes about 30 mins. There isn't a significant dip in performance if I'm capturing at the same time but I haven't benchmarked any figures yet.

Questions & Answers