Choosing a Gaming CPU October 2013: i7-4960X, i5-4670K, Nehalem and Intel Update

For an article like this getting a range of CPUs, which includes the most common and popular, is very important.  I have been at AnandTech for just over two years now, and in that time we have had Sandy Bridge, Llano, Bulldozer, Sandy Bridge-E, Ivy Bridge, Trinity and Vishera, of which I tend to get supplied the top end processors of each generation for testing (as a motherboard reviewer, it is important to make the motherboard the limiting factor).  A lot of users have jumped to one of these platforms, although a large number are still on Wolfdale (Core2), Nehalem, Westmere, Phenom II (Thuban/Zosma/Deneb) or Athlon II.  I have attempted to pool all my AnandTech resources, contacts, and personal resources, together to get a good spread of the current ecosystem, with more focus on the modern end of the spectrum.  It is worth nothing that a multi-GPU user is more likely to have the top line Ivy Bridge, Vishera or Sandy Bridge-E CPU, as well as a top range motherboard, rather than an old Wolfdale.  As time progresses I hope to obtain greater ranges of CPU speeds, core counts, and caches to suit almost all tastes.

The CPUs

My criteria for obtaining CPUs was to use at least one from the most recent architectures, as well as a range of cores/modules/threads/speeds.  The basic list as it stands is shown below, with the CPU.GPU on the left showing what we were able to test:

Note: the indication on the left hand side is whether we have tested the CPU in terms of our CPU tests or our GPU tests.  In certain circumstances GPU tests were unavailable, but the CPU tests provide interesting data points.

This is Part 2 of our Gaming CPU series, with Part 1 covering a basic range of CPUs and a Haswell update covering the i7-4770K.  For Part 2 this is primarily an Intel 4670K/Nehalem update, whereas Part 3 of our testing will focus on the AMD side.  I currently have many AMD CPUs in house (Richland, Trinity, K10) and am on the request list for a few more (Vishera, more Richland).

The GPUs

My first and foremost thanks go to both ASUS and ECS for supplying me with these GPUs for my test beds.  They have been in and out of 60+ motherboards without any issue, and will hopefully continue.  My usual scenario for updating GPUs is to flip AMD/NVIDIA every couple of generations – last time it was HD5850 to HD7970, and as such in the future we will move to a 7-series NVIDIA card or a set of Titans (which might outlive a generation or two).

ASUS HD 7970 (HD7970-3GD5)

The ASUS HD 7970 we use is the reference model at the 7970 launch, using GCN architecture, 2048 SPs at 925 MHz with 3 GB of 4.6 GHz GDDR5 memory.  We had four cards to be used in 1x, 2x, 3x and 4x configurations where possible, also using PCIe 3.0 when enabled by default, although for this update we were limited to three.

ECS GTX 580 (NGTX580-1536PI-F)

ECS is both a motherboard manufacturer and an NVIDIA card manufacturer, and while most of their VGA models are sold outside of the US, some do make it onto e-e-tailers like Newegg.  This GTX 580 is also a reference model, with 512 CUDA cores at 772 MHz and 1.5 GB of 4 GHz GDDR5 memory.  We have two cards to be used in 1x and 2x configurations at PCIe 2.0.

The Motherboards

The CPU is not always the main part of the picture for this sort of review – the motherboard is equally important as the motherboard dictates how the CPU and the GPU communicates with each other, and what the lane allocation will be.  As mentioned on the previous page, there are 20+ PCIe configurations for Z87/Z77 alone when you consider some boards are native, some use a PLX 8747 chip, others use two PLX 8747 chips, and about half of the Z87/Z77 motherboards on the market enable four PCIe 2.0 lanes from the chipset for CrossFireX use (at high latency).  We have tried to be fair and take motherboards that may have a small premium but are equipped to deal with the job.  As a result, some motherboards may also use MultiCore Turbo, which as we have detailed in the past, gives the top turbo speed of the CPU regardless of the loading.

As a result of this lane allocation business, each value in our review will be attributed to both a CPU, whether it uses MCT, and a lane allocation. 

Motherboards
Socket	Chipset	Motherboard	PCIe
1150	Z87	ASUS Z87-Pro	PCIe 3.0 x8/x8 + PCIe 2.0 x4
		MSI Z87-GD65 Gaming	PCIe 3.0 x8/x8/x4
		GIGABYTE Z87X-UD3H	PCIe 3.0 x8/x8 + PCIe 2.0 x4
		MSI Z87 XPower	PCIe 3.0 x8/x8/x8/x8 via PLX8747
1155	Z77	ASUS Maximus V Formula	PCIe 3.0 x8/x4/x4
		GIGABYTE Z77X-UP7	PCIe 3.0 x8/x8/x8/x8 via PLX8747
		GIGABYTE G1.Sniper M3	PCIe 3.0 x8/x8 or x16 + PCIe 2.0 x4
2011	X79	ASRock X79 Professional	PCIe 2.0 x16/x8/x8/x8
		ASUS Rampage IV Extreme	PCIe 3.0 x16/x8/x8/x8
		Gigabyte X79-UD3	PCIe 3.0 x16/x8/x8/x8
1366	X58	GIGABYTE X58A-UD9	PCIe 2.0 x16/x16/x16/x16 via NF200
		ASRock X58 Extreme3	PCIe 2.0 x16/x16 + x4
	5520	EVGA SR-2	PCIe 2.0 x16/x16/x16/x16 via NF200
775	975X	MSI Platinum Power Up	PCIe 1.1 x8/x8
	P965	ASUS Commando	PCIe 1.1 x16 + x4
FM1	A75	GIGABYTE A75-UD4H	PCIe 2.0 x8/x8
		ASRock A75 Extreme6	PCIe 2.0 x8/x8 + x4
FM2	A85X	GIGABYTE F2A85X-UP4	PCIe 2.0 x8/x8 + x4
AM3	990FX	ASUS Crosshair V Formula	PCIe 2.0 x16/x8/x8
BGA400	VX900	ECS VX900-I	N/A
BGA1023	NM70	ECS NM70-I2	N/A
FT3	A6-5200	ASRock IMB-A180-H	N/A

The Memory

Our good friends at G.Skill are putting their best foot forward in supplying us with high end kits to test.  The issue with the memory is more dependent on what the motherboard will support – in order to keep testing consistent, no overclocks were performed.  This meant that boards and BIOSes limited to a certain DRAM multiplier were set at the maximum multiplier possible.  In order to keep things fairer overall, the modules were adjusted for tighter timings.  All of this is noted in our final setup lists.

Our main memory testing kit is our trusty G.Skill 4x4 GB DDR3-2400 9-11-11 1.65 V RipjawsX kit which has been part of our motherboard testing for over twelve months.  For times when we had two systems being tested side by side, a G.Skill 4x4 GB DDR3-2400 10-12-12 1.65 V TridentX kit was also used.

For The Beast, which is one of the systems that has the issue with higher memory dividers, we pulled in a pair of tri-channel kits from X58 testing.  These are high-end kits as well, currently discontinued as they tended to stop working with too much voltage.  We have a sets of 3x2 GB OCZ Blade DDR3-2133 8-9-8 and 3x1 GB Dominator GT DDR3-2000 7-8-7 for this purpose, which we ran at 1333 6-7-6 due to motherboard limitations at stock settings.

Our Core2Duo CPUs clearly gets their own DDR2 memory for completeness.  This is a 2x2 GB kit of OCZ Platinum DDR2-666 5-5-5.

For Haswell we were offered new kits for testing, this time from Corsair and their Vengeance Pro series.  This is a 2x8 GB kit of DDR3-2400 10-12-12 1.65 V.