Intel Core i7 3960X (Sandy Bridge E) Review: Keeping the High End Alive
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 14, 2011 3:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i7
- Sandy Bridge
- Sandy Bridge E
Gaming Performance
Most games have a tough enough time stressing more than four cores, so the move to the 3960X won't do much for gaming in most cases (particularly when GPU bound). That being said, the added cache may help give SNB-E a slight bump over its quad-core brethren.
Civilization V
Civ V's lateGameView benchmark presents us with two separate scores: average frame rate for the entire test as well as a no-render score that only looks at CPU performance.
In GPU bound scenarios the 3960X is no different than the 2600K. Civ V is a unique game in that its CPU workload does scale reasonable well across multiple cores:
Here the 3960X is nearly 30% faster than the 2600K.
Crysis: Warhead
Dawn of War II
The larger cache helps give the 3960X a 9% advantage over the 2600K in Dawn of War II. At 1680 x 1050 the game isn't entirely GPU bound on our 5870.
DiRT 3
We ran two DiRT 3 benchmarks to get an idea for CPU bound and GPU bound performance. First the CPU bound settings:
DiRT 3 is an example of a CPU bound title (at lower resolutions) that doesn't scale well with core count or cache size. The 3960X is barely 2% faster than the 2600K.
Metro 2033
It is interesting to note that while SNB-E and SNB perform similarly here, both parts do offer a performance improvement over the Gulftown based 990X.
Rage vt_benchmark
While id's long awaited Rage title doesn't exactly have the best benchmarking abilities, there is one unique aspect of the game that we can test: Megatexture. Megatexture works by dynamically taking texture data from disk and constructing texture tiles for the engine to use (note that Rage doesn't store textures in a GPU-usable format). As a result whenever you load a texture, Rage is transcoding the texture on the fly. This is normally done by the CPU.
The Benchmark: vt_ are all the virtual texture commands. Vt_benchmark flushes the texture cache and then times how long it takes to transcode all the textures needed for the current scene, from 1 thread to X threads. Thus when you run vt_benchmark 8, for example, it will benchmark from 1 to 8 threads (the default appears to depend on the CPU you have). Since transcoding is done by the CPU this is a pure CPU benchmark. I present the best case transcode time at the maximum number of concurrent threads each CPU can handle:
Starcraft 2
World of Warcraft
WoW does enjoy the 3960X's larger cache, here we see a 13% increase in performance compared to the regular Sandy Bridge parts.
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mino - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
"Quick Sync leverages the GPU's shader array"This is simply not true. And you know it. Shame.
Steelski - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
irrelevant CS4 test because someone buying this kind of hardware would appreciate the CS5 advantage other websites show.jewie27 - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
I was waiting for X79 but after I read the initial reviews I bought a Z68 motherboard and 2500K cpu for gaming.C300fans - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
Me too. 999$+X79 for 0% improvement in gaming. What a crab! Bulludozer seems not that crab comparing to 3960x overall.yankeeDDL - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
Making unsubstantiated claims about something that is non-intuitive falls, in my dictionary, under fanboy-ism (if that's a word).The fact that Win7 "runs better" on a certain, relatively old, PC, is one thing. Stating that Windows7 is faster than XP (in spite of a documented benchmark proving otherwise) is another one.
Like I said, you can compare OS in terms of HW support, ease of use, even responsiveness, however, neither of those translate into one OS beinf "faster".
Faster means that when you run a benchmark (pick any of the ones that Anand run in this article), you get a noticeable increase in speed.
The OSes provide the infrastructure to run applications, they cannot provide any fundamental speed difference, unless, of course, you have a PC without enough RAM, for example, and in that case the OS that uses less RAM will have an obvious advantage (because it offers more "free" RAM for apps to run), but that again, has nothing to do with one OS being faster: if anything, it is more efficient.
I have 4GB on both my laptop (Win7) and on my desktop (WinXP) and the difference is negligible: I nearly always have more than 2GB of RAM committed, so it is no surprise that on your PC Win7 with ReadyBoost is faster: just spend ~$15 on 2GB of RAM and you'll see a huge performance improvement both on XP and 7.
jmelgaard - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
So "Faster" must not apply to the OS's capability to respond to the user, it must only apply to the OS's capability to server application requests?...Wait what?...
Kob - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
You guys need to look at the engineering of your requests: 6 sata3 ports require feeding 6*6gb/s = 36 Gb/s data, while the total max theoretical mem bw of the chipset is 37 Gb/s. Can't do that while also taking care of OS, apps and video memory requirements.cbutters - Monday, December 12, 2011 - link
6*6gb/s isn't going to be happening constantly.....you build out one bridge that has a certain amount of bandwidth, 12GB perhaps, I don't know, and let the ports use the available shared bandwidth, doesn't mean you can't add additional ports, this is one of the benefits of serial interfaces.C300fans - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
Intel Gulftown 6C 32nm 6 1.17B 240mm2Intel Sandy Bridge E (6C) 32nm 6 2.27B 435mm2
SB-E, What a crab! Double Transistors, Double size, merely 20% gain from SB 2600k. 999$ for this? I would rather get 2 pcs Interlagos 6200 instead.
sna1970 - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
using 5870 CF to show us that dual 8x PCIE are same as dula 16x is a mistake I am shocked some one like you fall in ...you should have tested 6990 in CF , or 590 ... and see the difference between 16x SLI/CF and 8x SLI/CF
and how do you consider a 5870 a MODERN GPU ?
Quote : "Modern GPUs don't lose much performance in games, even at high quality settings, when going from a x16 to a x8 slot."
Answer : WRONG . try high end dual GPU cards in SLI/CF !