In the past few days, Intel has launched their biggest, baddest, and most expensive Core i7 chip yet, the 980x, and it’s a real beast.

This bad boy is Intel’s first sex-core chip, and since it supports hyper threading natively, that means you can have an effective 12 threads running on their own real and virtualised cores; all at once. Each of these cores is clocked at 3.3GHZ straight out the box and between them they share a staggering 12mb of onboard L3 cache. Those without too much overclocking know-how may want to delve into the Turbo OC facility offered by supporting motherboards that will give it a 10% speed boost, upping one of the high powered cores to an envious 3.6GHZ. If you want to overclock all the cores at once though, you can only hit a maximum of 3.46GHZ.

Unfortunately all this power doesn’t come without a price and you will notice a nice little jump in your power consumption when plugging this into your system. Anyone utilising a lower end i7 – 860s, 870s etc. – will be used to a chip TDP of around 95-100w when running at full tilt. The 980x extreme edition jumps this up a notch to 140w rivalling some mid-range graphics cards in its power consumption.

This is quite a bit of power usage as well, considering that this chip saw another die reduction in the i7 range. Based on the Westmere process, and until now codenamed Gulftown, the 980x is based on a 32nm die and ups the transistor count from previous Nehalem offerings of 731million to the mind boggling amount of 1.17billion.

Of course there’s also the hit to your wallet that needs to be taken into consideration. Anyone hoping to pick this up with their pocket change is going to be a little disappointed, as this beast will set you back $999 at the usual etailers. While this isn’t far off what you would have paid for the previous i7 king the 975 a few weeks ago, this price tag is almost double that of the bronze medallist in the range, the 960, which usually runs you about $500.