Today, I would like to talk about power-hungry CPUs and “phantom” throttling, featuring 10980XE. Intel’s 10980XE can require more than 500+W to reliably run at overclock speeds surpassing ~4.7GHz. In our testing we found an issue that was more difficult to spot with the 7980 or 9980. At that time we could hit what we saw as the maximum safe daily overclock on the 7980XE with our cooling solution, so we didn’t experience issues with power delivery to the CPUs to obtain the 4.4-4.7GHz they were running at.