AMD vs Intel: Which CPU Cooks Better Pancakes?

[harlan4096]

There are lots of great cooking competitions. There’s Chopped, Hell’s Kitchen, MasterChef Junior. But in the Tom’s Hardware labs test kitchen, we don’t pit chefs against each other. We pit processors against each other. So we took Intel and AMD’s HEDT processors to find out, which of the two company’s high-end chips makes a better pancake?

The chips we used were the Intel Core i9-9980XE and the AMD Threadripper 2990WX, with the former on a MSI X299 XPower Gaming AC board and the latter running on an MSI MEG X 399 Creation board. Both used identical GPUs (an Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 used solely for video out) and power supplies.

The thing is, you can’t fit a terribly large pan on a motherboard. We got the smallest one we could find, at 4.25 inches, which would double as a heat sink. To better enable heat transfer to the pan, we smothered the processors in Cooler Master Ice Fusion thermal grease. It’s far more grease than we would normally use, but there were grooves in the bottom of the pan, and we wanted to fill those as much as we could. Besides, we weren’t actually using this for performance or cooling, just for cooking.

Ideally, we would have drilled holes in the pan and screwed them into the motherboards to turn it into a sort of mount. But we had to make this one pan work on two different motherboards with differently shaped processors, so we had to put as much equal pressure on the pan as possible.

Before we start regaling you with stories of breakfasts made over silicon, here’s your notice: don’t try this at home. You might ruin your CPU, motherboard or other components. Alternatively, you could burn yourself while applying pressure to the pan.

While much of the fun has been written up below, be sure to watch the video to see hijinks ensue.
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