Intel Core i7 3960X (Sandy Bridge E) Review: Keeping the High End Alive

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• yankeeDDL - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link

  I'm with you xpclient.
  I will never understand Microsoft's fanboys. Why do they expect the OS to make such huge impact on the benchmarks?
  It's like for motherboards: you can differentiate for ease of use, stability, features, supported hardware ... but the benchmarks, will substantially be the same.
  XP trails Windows7 on multi core because it was never designed to support so many cores, and MS has no interest in updating it.

• Per Hansson - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link

  Hi, what resolution and in game graphical settings where used for the World of Warcraft gaming test?
  It always amazes me how well that game scales with super high-end CPU's, but if it's at just a silly low resolution it does not really matter, so, which is it? (This isn't mentioned in "bench" either....)

• Per Hansson - Monday, November 21, 2011 - link

  Here is Anand's reply to this question incase anyone cares ;)
  ---
  1680 x 1050, 4X AA, all detail settings maxed (except for weather) :)
  
  Take care,
  Anand

• Mightytonka - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link

  Typo on the second page. Should read RST (Rapid Storage Technology), right?

• Ocire - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link

  Nice review! :-)
  
  If you want to test PCIe bandwidth, you could use the bandwidth-test that comes with the CUDA SDK. It's easy to setup, and you can also test configurations with multiple GPUs. You should get quite reliable results for pure PCIe Gen.2 performance with that.
  It would be really interesting to get some performance numbers for PCIe as that is the bottleneck in quite a few GPU-computing scenarios.
  
  Cheers!

• LancerVI - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link

  Sounds like a great, enthusiast proc, married to a mainstream chipset at enthusiast prices.
  
  That means 'no joy' for me.
  
  I guess I'll be hanging on to my little i7 920 that could for a bit longer. Going on 4 years now. That's unheard of for me!!!

• hechacker1 - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link

  I'm also going to hang onto the i7 920. Overclocked the x58 platform can still compete with the best of of Sandy Bridge for almost any workload. Sure we're missing some IPC and power enhancements, but nothing worth spending serious cash on.
  
  What I'm looking at now is the Gulftown prices. I'm hoping they come down from the $1000 Extreme part, and perhaps we get an affordable 6-core chip for the X58 platform.
  
  I'd be happy to stick with Gulftown until we see affordable 8 core parts, or major IPC improvements.

• Makaveli - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link

  the 980 non X version is already going for $550
  
  This is your next upgrade, as is mine i'm also on a 920.
  
  I doubt that price will drop any lower.

• hechacker1 - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link

  Yeah I'm going to be watching the prices closely for a while.
  
  At $550 for the lowest end Gulftown on newegg, it's still not affordable for me.
  
  It's still cheaper than the intro prices of Sandy Bridge-E including a new motherboard though.
  
  I'll have to watch forums closely for people wanting to sell their chips, I imagine you can snag one used for a good deal.

• davideden - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link

  I currently have a Core i7 2600K LGA 1155 processor. I am assuming that I won't be able to use this with the new LGA 2011 socket on the new Sandy Bridge E motherboards. Will there be any cheaper processors in the near future that are at the price point of the Core i7 2600K that are compatible? I was disappointed with not being able to utilize triple channel with my memory or being able to use all my sticks of ram with the current LGA 1155 motherboards. The quad channel ram along with the 8 slots have me most excited for the new platform as I do video editing/motion graphics/3D work. Thanks!