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
The Test
To keep the review length manageable we're presenting a subset of our results here. For all benchmark results and even more comparisons be sure to use our performance comparison tool: Bench.
| Motherboard: |
ASUS P8Z68-V Pro (Intel Z68) ASUS Crosshair V Formula (AMD 990FX) Intel DX79SI (Intel X79) |
| Hard Disk: |
Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) Crucial RealSSD C300 |
| Memory: | 4 x 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-1600 9-9-9-20 |
| Video Card: | ATI Radeon HD 5870 (Windows 7) |
| Video Drivers: | AMD Catalyst 11.10 Beta (Windows 7) |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows 7 x64 |
Cache and Memory Bandwidth Performance
The biggest changes from the original Sandy Bridge are the increased L3 cache size and the quad-channel memory interface. We'll first look at the impact a 15MB L3 has on latency:
| Cache/Memory Latency Comparison | ||||||
| L1 | L2 | L3 | Main Memory | |||
| AMD FX-8150 (3.6GHz) | 4 | 21 | 65 | 195 | ||
| AMD Phenom II X4 975 BE (3.6GHz) | 3 | 15 | 59 | 182 | ||
| AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (3.3GHz) | 3 | 14 | 55 | 157 | ||
| Intel Core i5 2500K (3.3GHz) | 4 | 11 | 25 | 148 | ||
| Intel Core i7 3960X (3.3GHz) | 4 | 11 | 30 | 167 | ||
Cachemem shows us a 5 cycle increase in latency. Hits in L3 can take 20% longer to get to the core that requested the data, if this is correct. For small, lightly threaded applications, you may see a slight regression in performance compared to Sandy Bridge. More likely than not however, the ~2 - 2.5x increase in L3 cache size will more than make up for the added latency. Also note that despite the large cache and thanks to its ring bus, Sandy Bridge E's L3 is still lower latency than Gulftown's.
| Memory Bandwidth Comparison - Sandra 2012.01.18.10 | |||||
| Intel Core i7 3960X (Quad Channel, DDR3-1600) | Intel Core i7 2600K (Dual Channel, DDR3-1600) | Intel Core i7 990X (Triple Channel, DDR3-1333) | |||
| Aggregate Memory Bandwidth | 37.0 GB/s | 21.2 GB/s | 19.9 GB/s | ||
Memory bandwidth is also up significantly. Populating all four channels with DDR3-1600 memory, Sandy Bridge E delivered 37GB/s of bandwidth in Sandra's memory bandwidth test. Given the 51GB/s theoretical max of this configuration and a fairly standard 20% overhead, 37GB/s is just about what we want to see here.
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Tchamber - Friday, December 2, 2011 - link
I think it's funny that so many people hated on AMD for making a 2B transistor count CPU that ran at 125watts, but no one says anything about Intel making 2.27B, and a CPU that runs HOTTER than FX's 125watts. Seems to me there are Intel fanboys too :) I supposed I'm one too, I'm running a Core i7 970.joaopft - Sunday, December 4, 2011 - link
These SB-E chips have been cobbled from the Xeon chips. Now Intel is cost-slashing on the enthusiast market? They must be insane! This core fused parts are an infamy to any enthusiast. Adding injury to infamy, SB-E's price/performance is below SB. Also, performance/watt numbers for this platform are not good at all. Intel is facing stiff competition from... Intel? No doubt it may be tempeded to kill the 2600K and the 2700K, when Ivy Bridge debuts.danacee - Monday, December 26, 2011 - link
I am really annoyed by the incredible short sightedness of Anands recent microarchitechture articles. The reviews here at time comes off as pretentious bile trying to forget the fact that the primary readers of this website are hardware enthusiast, not people in charge of the IT department budgets at illustrious companies!Would it really kill you to go into a bit more detail of X79 versus X58 era cpus and their per mhz scaling and power consumption? Because I can guarantee you NO ONE who owns an 1155 platform is giving x79 a second look, 90% of people upgrading to this platform are from the quad core X58, or even p35/x38/x48 era and you completely ignored us.