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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yankeeDDL - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
That's what I was doing: blaming AMD. Intel is doing what any company that is interested in making money/profit would do.yankeeDDL - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
Sorry ... I replied to the wrong post :) I meant to hit the one below!JlHADJOE - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
If you compare it to the extreme edition chip, then Bulldozer looks like good value. But then the 3960X is a halo model for those people who care nothing about price.Considering the 3930K gives you 95% the performance of the 3960X for 50% of the price (see xbitlabs), there's really no reason to get the X-edition chip unless you are building a system purely for bragging rights.
Now when compared to the 3930K, the FX8150 doesn't look nearly as good. If we consider total platform costs with either system having a $300 motherboard and $200 in ram, then we're looking at something in the region of $750 for BD, vs $1000 for the SB-E. +$250 is small change for double the performance at a similar power envelope.
yankeeDDL - Tuesday, November 15, 2011 - link
JIHADJOE, yes, that was my point.The 3960X is -arguably- the fastest CPU available, but it is faster by a tiny margin, while being radically more expensive than anything else.
So yes, nothing looks as bad in terms of price/performance ratio, not even the FX8150. And that's, basically, bad for everyone (except Intel)
actionjksn - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
I agree too AMD's poor Bulldozer performance is having a huge effect on what we can get from Intel and at what price. And I blame AMD not Intel, because Intel or any other company is supposed to do what's best for their company. Heck if Intel did what we want they would probably cause serious harm to AMD. Because it would make AMD even less competitive. And I don't think Intel really wants to put AMD out of business.yankeeDDL - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
That's what I was doing: blaming AMD. Intel is doing what any company that is interested in making money/profit would do.GeorgeH - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
One of the bigger advantages of this platform to me is the 8 DIMM slots. However it was rumored that the first revision of SB-E had/has VT-D problems, which spoils things a little bit as VMs are one of the bigger reasons for lots of RAM. Can you confirm or deny if there are VT-D issues?Anand Lal Shimpi - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
VT-d is supported, checking to see if there are any functional issues now.Take care,
Anand
GeorgeH - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
ArsTechnica is reporting that VT-D is broken, but they don't cite any sources. A short article explaining what VT-D is for those who don't know and what (if anything) is broken might be in order.Filiprino - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
That thing is really big!As for Quick Sync, it's not really useful. If you want quality you'll have to use x264, and with lower qualities x264 has some presets that are near as fast as Quick Sync.
The winner combo is LGA2011+Kepler/Souther Islands.
If you have a hole in your pocket you can throw in a dual socket motherboard, some liquid cooling and a big SSD.