The Intel Haswell-E CPU Review: Core i7-5960X, i7-5930K and i7-5820K Tested
by Ian Cutress on August 29, 2014 12:00 PM ESTLoad Delta Power Consumption
Power consumption was tested on the system while in a single MSI GTX 770 Lightning GPU configuration with a wall meter connected to the OCZ 1250W power supply. This power supply is Gold rated, and as I am in the UK on a 230-240 V supply, leads to ~75% efficiency under 50W and 90%+ efficiency at 250W, suitable for both idle and multi-GPU loading. This method of power reading allows us to compare the power management of the UEFI and the board to supply components with power under load, and includes typical PSU losses due to efficiency.
We take the power delta difference between idle and load as our tested value, giving an indication of the power increase from the CPU when placed under stress. Unfortuantely we were not in a position to test the power consumption for the two 6-core CPUs due to the timing of testing.
Because not all processors of the same designation leave the Intel fabs with the same stock voltages, there can be a mild variation and the TDP given on each CPU is understandably an absolute stock limit. Due to power supply efficiencies, we get higher results than TDP, but the more interesting results are the comparisons. The 5960X is coming across as more efficient than Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E, including the 130W Ivy Bridge-E Xeon.
Test Setup
Test Setup | ||||
Processor |
Intel Core i7-5820K Intel Core i7-5930K Intel Core i7-5960X |
6C/12T 6C/12T 8C/16T |
3.3 GHz / 3.6 GHz 3.5 GHz / 3.7 GHz 3.0 GHz / 3.5 GHz |
|
Motherboard |
ASUS X99 Deluxe ASRock X99 Extreme4 |
|||
Cooling |
Corsair H80i Cooler Master Nepton 140XL |
|||
Power Supply |
OCZ 1250W Gold ZX Series Corsair AX1200i Platinum PSU |
1250W 1200W |
80 PLUS Gold 80 PLUS Platinum |
|
Memory |
Corsair 4x8 GB G.Skill Ripjaws4 |
DDR4-2133 DDR4-2133 |
15-15-15 1.2V 15-15-15 1.2V |
|
Memory Settings | JEDEC | |||
Video Cards | MSI GTX 770 Lightning 2GB (1150/1202 Boost) | |||
Video Drivers | NVIDIA Drivers 337.88 | |||
Hard Drive | OCZ Vertex 3 | |||
Optical Drive | LG GH22NS50 | |||
Case | Open Test Bed | |||
Operating System | Windows 7 64-bit SP1 | |||
USB 2/3 Testing | OCZ Vertex 3 240GB with SATA->USB Adaptor |
Many thanks to...
We must thank the following companies for kindly providing hardware for our test bed:
Thank you to OCZ for providing us with PSUs and SSDs.
Thank you to G.Skill for providing us with memory.
Thank you to Corsair for providing us with an AX1200i PSU and a Corsair H80i CLC.
Thank you to MSI for providing us with the NVIDIA GTX 770 Lightning GPUs.
Thank you to Rosewill for providing us with PSUs and RK-9100 keyboards.
Thank you to ASRock for providing us with some IO testing kit.
Thank you to Cooler Master for providing us with Nepton 140XL CLCs and JAS minis.
A quick word to the manufacturers who sent us the extra testing kit for review, including G.Skill’s Ripjaws 4 DDR4-2133 CL15, Corsair for similar modules, and Cooler Master for the Nepton 140XL CLCs. We will be reviewing the DDR4 modules in due course, including Corsair's new extreme DDR4-3200 kit, but we have already tested the Nepton 140XL in a big 14-way CLC roundup. Read about it here.
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MrBungle123 - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
Is there anything but 'edge case' justification for upgrading any more? PCs used to be exciting because things were always changing, this is just getting boring.edzieba - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
VR. The frame rendering time requirements are pretty stringent. This is more on the GPU than the CPU for graphics, but you want to try and keep physics tics at a good rate to prevent objects jumping around the world.tech6 - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
Even the 'edge case' is not longer a slam dunk as most workstation workloads like CAD do very well on the 4960X.The only real cases are heavy scientific number crunching, animation rendering and cracking password hashes by brute force.
MrBungle123 - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
It used to be that if you were 2 generations behind your system was so slow and irrelevant that you just couldn't run modern software at anything approaching an acceptable level. Now we have a situation where ancient systems on X58 (circa 2008) are still close enough in performance to the extreme high end in 2014 to not only be in this review but also fit somewhere into the top half of the product stack of modern Haswell based hardware.If you compare a top of the line Nehalem chip to its equivalent from 6 years prior (a Northwood core P4 from 2002) it would make a mockery of 8 of them at the same time. This article is saying a 31% jump from Nehalem to Haswell-E -- that kind of performance increase (as a percentage) would have amounted to 2 or 3 months worth of clock speed bumps at any other time in the history of PCs.
wireframed - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
Somewhat true, but consider that you get 30% IPC increase, 25-30% frequency increase and a 50% core-count increase, and it adds up to around a 100% increase in performance.Granted, 100-110% over 6 years is hardly impressive compared to earlier, but there isn't that much low-hanging fruit.
Also, the mainstream which drives revenue is, as you point out, largely content. They're looking at adding devices like tablets and consoles, instead of upgrading their computers. That probably plays into the amount of R&D Intel decides to spend on the HEDT platform.
Kain_niaK - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
Exactly exactly exactly! I am still on X58 with a i7 990x. I don't play much games any more but even to play the newest games ... I do not need to upgrade my CPU and have not needed to upgrade my CPU since 2010. And even my i7 975x or a i7 920 from 2008 would still be more then fast enough. Then music. I use my system mainl as Digital Audio Workstation. Most of my plugins and music applications support multithreading. I cannot realistically ad so much stuff to a project that it maxes out the CPU. And rendering time? Who cares, most of my renders are done before I am done playing chess on the toilet anyway. Then overclocking. The i7 920 and anything on X58 was great. After that ... the fun and the excitement kind of went away and has never come back. What's the SUPERPI MOD record these days? I have not heard about any significant record breaking for a long time. Back in 2008, 2009,2010 I was hearing news about famous new overclock records. After that, it stopped. Let's face it. We hit a clock limit and for a breaktrought in singlethreated speed ... it's just not gonna happen until some genius designs a totally different system. Probably not using electricity but light. But that's like 20 years away because you don't just start over. All we have been doing is improving old technology not inventing something completely new. We are hitting the limits of nature ... so all the geeks and the nerds will just have to way at least another 10 years before we get to the exciting stuff again.MrBungle123 - Friday, August 29, 2014 - link
At this rate 10 years from now any Haswell i7 is still going to be within spitting distance of whatever the best is. lolIf you wan't Skylake performance today OC your Haswell by 250MHz, Ivy Bridge by 400MHz, or Sandy Bridge by 600MHz.
Laststop311 - Saturday, August 30, 2014 - link
it wont be the cpu performance difference that makes u upgrade it will be the new features. Skylake will have pci-e 4.0 and usb 3.1 and then chipsets after that will add more new things faster storage standards and who knows what else.I was already in this position. The speed of the i7-980x was still rly good. Got mine oc'd to 4261mhz. But guess what on x58 you get not pci-e3.0 no sata 3 no usb 3.0. These features have become very standard. You also get no sata express or pci-e ultra m2 which will soon be commonplace as well as no quad channel memory and no ddr4. All the missing features made me upgrade, not the speed. Similar situations in the future will cause people to upgrade every 4-6 years.
TiGr1982 - Tuesday, September 2, 2014 - link
You can still plug the PCIe USB 3.0 extension board there and get at least 2 USB 3.0 ports on the back of the case, to somewhat mitigate the age of the platform.But, with PCIe 2.0 and SATA 2, one is stuck, indeed.
actionjksn - Saturday, August 30, 2014 - link
Nehalm was great, but the last big bump was really Sandy Bridge. After that, not so much. This is actually a big concern for the processor makers. The technology and the silicon itself is reaching its limits as far as making significant gains on the next generations. They were getting big performance gains from just die shrinks alone, but those days are over. And how much more can they shrink them? It's getting harder all the time, they may get to 7nm to 10nm.