Intel Core i7 4960X (Ivy Bridge E) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 3, 2013 4:10 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Ivy Bridge
- Ivy Bridge-E
Video Transcoding
With our lightly threaded tests behind us, it's time to move to more CPU intensive pastures.
We migrated to the latest verison of the x264 HD benchmark which features a much newer version of x264 and a much heavier workload. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
Here we see all of the 6-core parts rise to the top, including Intel's old Gulftown based Core i7-990X. Despite being a few years old at this point, the 990X's 6-core design and relatively high clock speed gives it better performance here than the quad-core Haswell 4770K.
The 4960X manages to be around 30% faster than the old 990X, and is 40% faster than the 4770K. For heavily threaded applications, there's simply no replacement for more cores.
Just like I did earlier, I dusted off one of our really old x264 tests so we'd have comparison data to even older CPUs including the Pentium 4 and Penryn based Extreme Edition parts:
The 4960X manages to deliver nearly 3x the performance of Intel's flagship from 6 years ago. The Pentium EE 955 comparison is even more insane. IVB-E is basically an order of magnitude faster than the last high-end Pentium 4s to come out of Intel back in 2005.
3D Rendering
Our new POV-Ray benchmark uses the latest beta binary (3.7RC6) and runs through both single and multithreaded versions of the popular raytracing benchmark.
Isolating a single core shows us exactly what we're missing by having Ivy Bridge at the heart of the 4960X instead of Haswell. Here the 4770K manages a 16% performance advantage over the 4960X, which costs 3x as much and draws substantially more power. Looking at AMD's FX-8350 however it's clear why Intel can get away with launching a high-end 6-core chip without its latest cores. Piledriver's single threaded performance falls somewhere between Nehalem and Sandy Bridge, giving Intel room to launch another Ivy Bridge based high-end SKU in 2013 and get away with it.
The multithreaded performance story is very different. Here even the Gulftown based 990X is faster than Haswell thanks to its six cores. The 4960X is 40% faster than the Haswell based 4770K. Even AMD's FX-8350 does really well here, basically equalling Haswell's performance.
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
In Cinebench, the single threaded Haswell/IVB-E gap narrows to 5%.
Multithreaded performance continues to be just stellar. Here the 4960X is just under 50% faster than the 4770K. Note the relatively small gap between the 4960X and the SNB-E based 3970X however - the performance gain is only 5%. The bulk of Ivy Bridge's advancements were in GPU performance (not applicable to IVB-E) and power consumption (which we'll get to shortly).
Our final two Cinebench tests use the R10 benchmark to enable a comparison to more/older data points:
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Oscarcharliezulu - Friday, September 6, 2013 - link
This reminds me, of years ago when I had access to the first DEC Alpha with its super fast clock speed and fast IPC, a IBM AIX RS6000, a HP9000 PA-RISC and a multi-socket Sparc. The alpha was the fastest by a long way versus multi core even on our SAP systems. I still use this as a rule of thumb that for most tasks a faster clocked processor is better most of the time, except for very specific situations - and in general you will know what they are. I'm battling with what to do with my next upgrade, I really wanted a top end ivy-e but it really doesn't seem worth it compared to a 4770, even with my need to run big VM's. he'll its not enough faster than my i2500s ivy imac to be worth it.DPOverLord - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
very interesting review coming from an i7-930 O/C to 4.3GHZ makes you debate if it makes sense to upgrade to the 4930K and a RIVE.For those considering there is also another benchmark review of the 3930K vs I7-930 on 2, 3, & 4 way TITAN SLI GK110 Scaling at 7680 x 1440 and 7680 x 1600. Worth a look.
DPOverLord - Tuesday, September 10, 2013 - link
very interesting review coming from an i7-930 O/C to 4.3GHZ makes you debate if it makes sense to upgrade to the 4930K and a RIVE.overclock.net/t/1415441/7680x1440-benchmarks-plus-2-3-4-way-sli-gk110-scaling/0_100
For those considering there is also another benchmark review of the 3930K vs I7-930 on 2, 3, & 4 way TITAN SLI GK110 Scaling at 7680 x 1440 and 7680 x 1600. Worth a look.
Remarius - Wednesday, September 11, 2013 - link
Really useful - I missed that thread somehow.Fierce Guppy - Saturday, September 14, 2013 - link
Should nVidia's shadowplay turn out to be rubbish then I could use that CPU for encoding recorded gameplay, otherwise there's no benefit in having a 4960X over a 4770K. It won't improve my gaming experience any. Two GTX 780s will do that.scorpyclone - Tuesday, September 24, 2013 - link
This is a great article for informing us about the latest and greatest architecture and chips, anyway I too have stuck with my powerhouse system since 2006, mine is the Q9550 and P35 mobo, DDR2 second generation SSD and so forth!It has been rock solid and frankly I don't think I remember the last time it crashed, come to think of it it has never crashed! (...and I am able to have all my progs running plus 30 plus instances of chrome, yeah I should do something about that!)
So there you have it, now i m looking at the LGA 2011 with X79 and maybe (If i can convince myself of the benefits of having a six core system) an i7 4920 or40, ...but will probably go with their 4 core 10 or 12 meg cache cpus...the difference in having 2 more cores is 200 bux! I don't have any problem spending 3 bills on a nice CPU, but when it comes to 2 more bills just to get 2 more cores, I really cant convince myself of that, since i can think of so many other ways to spend those two bills with more return so to speak!
So yeah building a powerhouse of a system that costs a little more but is rock solid and still faster than 90 percent of what is out there is worth it for me, and I am sure others will say the same!
Or maybe I can just get the better P45 chipset, and stick with this system for another two to three years!
Laphaswiff - Monday, December 9, 2013 - link
δοκοῦσι δέ μοι Λακεδαιμόνιοι μάλα δεινῶν ἔργον ἀνθρώπων ποιεῖν. νῦν γάρ φασιν ἐκεῖνοι δεῖν Ἠλείους μὲν τῆς Τριφυλίας τινὰ κομίσασθαι, Φλειασίους δὲ τὸ Τρικάρανον, ἄλλους δέ τινας τῶν Ἀρκάδων τὴν αὑτῶν, καὶ τὸν Ὠρωπὸν ἡμᾶς, οὐχ ἵν' ἑκάστους ἡμῶν ἴδωσιν ἔχοντας τὰ αὑτῶν, οὐδ' ὀλίγου δεῖ· (17) ὀψὲ γὰρ ἂν φιλάνθρωποι γεγονότες εἶεν· ἀλλ' ἵνα πᾶσι δοκῶσι συμπράττειν, ὅπως ἕκαστοι κομίσωνται ταῦθ', ἅ φασιν αὑτῶν εἶναι, ἐπειδὰν δ' ἴωσ' ἐπὶ Μεσσήνην αὐτοί, συστρατεύωνται πάντες αὐτοῖς οὗτοι καὶ βοηθῶσι προθύμως, ἢ δοκῶσ' ἀδικεῖν, περὶ ὧν ἔφασαν ἕκαστοι σφῶν αὐτῶν εἶναι συμψήφους λαβόντες ἐκείνους, μὴ τὴν ὁμοίαν αὐτοῖς χάριν ἀποδιδόντες.SeanFL - Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - link
I edit video from time to time and am currently using an i7-2600k system built in May of 2011. I've been looking at the 6 core i7-3930k, but not sure if it provides enough of an increase to build a new system. Are we closer to an 8 core solution coming out under $1000 in 2014? What's on the way?SeanFL - Wednesday, January 15, 2014 - link
typo, meant looking at the i7-4930k. Still wondering, is 8 core under $1k on the way this year?MordeaniisChaos - Thursday, April 17, 2014 - link
You guys should really, really include ArmA as a benchmark for CPU gaming performance, as it sees pretty much constant improvements as the CPU gets more potent. I do not understand why more sites don't use A3 for CPU benchmarking when they touch on gaming performance.