Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Pro Reviews

The Intel Core i7-3970X is no doubt the fastest desktop processor out on the market, but is it a big leap from the i7-3960X? Our testing has shown only a small increase in performance, which is expected with the 200 MHz performance boost that we get with the 3970X. With AMD lagging behind and shifting their focus from the performance desktop CPU market, Intel doesn’t necessarily feel the need push forward with newer architectures. The i7-3970X does not come with a 22nm manufacturing process, so we’re still looking at the same 32nm chip as we saw on the original i7-3960X way back in November 2011, with a slight so called “manufacturer-overclocking”. Ivy Bridge entered the market with the first 22nm chip, which was of course more energy efficient, and with Haswell coming in as the 2nd generation optimized 22nm process microprocessors, we’re not seeing anything new on the enthusiast side that would blow us away. As we know, Haswell won’t be the next enthusiast platform, which makes us worry as to when will we actually see Ivy Bridge-E, which should be the next replacement for the Sandy Bridge-E processor family. On the other hand, the Intel Core i7-3970X did impress us in performance. While the i7-3970X Extreme Edition processor might not be for those already running the i7-3960X, it would be an excellent processor for those thinking about upgrading to a X79 chipset system running the LGA 2011 socket processors. The i7-3960X and i7-3970X will always be a great option for users that need quick processing of resource-demanding tasks, but the i7-3970X should definitely be on your list over the older i7-3960X model. With only a $10 difference in price, the i7-3970X would provide better performance that would save you time and money in the long run, while it also seems to provide a slightly better overclocking and stability over the previous i7-3960X chip. It is important to understand that a powerful cooling solution will be needed to keep this beast cool, as we have seen in our testing; a small overclock can easily heat up the processor to high temperatures which in the end would result in poor performance due to down-throttling.

Intel's new top model bids a lot of power with six processor cores and a gigantic last level cache. This allows the CPU to score significantly in optimized software and fares very well compared to the Core i7-2700K quad core. Nevertheless, we have to remember that most up to date programs and games don't need more than 4 cores. Therefore, the quad core i7-2700K is a much lower priced and energy efficient alternative for most power users. However, users who can fully exploit the 6 cores (rendering, scientific calculations, etc.) and don't have to look at the price can unhesitatingly buy the Core i7-3960X. The Core i7-2700K is still recommendable for high-end gamers and the price-performance winners are still the inexpensive Core i5-2500K and 2400.

I am not sure who is supposed to buy a 3960X. I really do not see it benefiting gamers. I do not see it being a boon too overclocking enthusiasts due to price, power usage, and subsequently heat output. I guess if I sat around all day ripping Blu-ray disks and encoding those for torrent sites, it would be awesome. Maybe that could be Intel's new 3960X motto, "Sandy Bridge E, maximizing BitTorrent ratios, one desktop at a time." Meh. Let's see what the K series brings before we totally turn our noses up at this beast of a processor...that none of us really need, or I think even want. I think we have enough cores for now. Get your noses back on the grindstone and give us stellar IPC gains or even better, 5GHz stock clocks.

There are two aspects of today's launch that bother me: the lack of Quick Sync and the chipset. The former is easy to understand. Sandy Bridge E is supposed to be a no-compromise, ultra high-end desktop solution. The lack of an on-die GPU with Quick Sync support means you have to inherently compromise in adopting the platform. I'm not sure what sort of a solution Intel could've come to (I wouldn't want to give up a pair of cores for a GPU+QuickSync) but I don't like performance/functionality tradeoffs with this class of product. Secondly, while I'm not a SAS user, I would've at least appreciated some more 6Gbps SATA ports on the chipset. Native USB 3.0 support would've been nice as well. Instead what we got was effectively a 6-series chipset with a new name. As Intel's flagship chipset, the X79 falls short.

The fastest consumer CPU this side of Intel's research labs, created by giving mainstream Sandy Bridge performance steroids. It's not cheap, but it was never going to be, was it?

Overall the Core i7-3960X delivered as we expected, the letdown comes from the Intel X79 chipset which offers nothing over the Z68. This is going to be a real problem for LGA2011 motherboards, as we expect them to fetch a price premium over their LGA1155 counterparts, yet most will likely be equipped with the same features. This is going to be the Achilles' heel of Intel’s flagship platform regardless of the added benefits that are found here and there.

In short, just like the Intel Core i7-980X, this new Core i7-3960X processor is ideal for a select target group of users who spend a lot of time creating intense multimedia content and individuals with very deep pockets to power their passion like indulging in an extreme gaming rig or are keen overclocking enthusiasts toying around with the latest and greatest. For early adopters of the Nehalem or Westmere microprocessor architectures, the Intel Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge-E processor may be the upgrade your system is sorely missing. To save half the cost of the processor, you do have another option - get the Intel Core i7-3930K as it's not much different.

Throughout the entire test session we had a hard time getting rid of the feeling that we are getting acquainted not with a new enthusiast platform, but with a new server and workstation solution. The server roots of the LGA 2011 platform show themselves way too obviously. The server origin is noticeable in the design of the semiconductor die with eight computational cores, in the processor characteristics including enormous l3 cache, in the support of quad-channel but relatively slow memory controller. The results of the performance tests can also be interpreted accordingly. LGA 2011 processors have more computational cores than their LGA 1155 counterparts, but they work at lower clock speeds. Therefore the ideal application for the Sandy Bridge-E based newcomers will be multi-threaded tasks, such as digital content creation and processing, for example. In other words, these are the tasks typical of high-performance workstations in the first place. As for the role of a general-purpose platform, LGA 2011 doesn’t fit in too seamlessly. Mainboards and processors that are part of the platform are very expensive, but in reality they don’t deliver too many advantages. Moreover, the flagship platform doesn’t really do better than LGA 1155 in a number of usage models that could be of interest to regular users, such as gaming, for example. Also the new platform doesn’t support Quick Sync technology. Moreover, its power consumption is through the roof and overclocking poses additional challenges and requires super-efficient cooling. In other words, there are not so many real advantages that could make the new LGA 2011 platform a dream come true for advanced users. In fact, there can be only two significant arguments in favor of this platform. They are unprecedented multi-threaded performance and support of the fastest implementation of multi-GPU configurations. However, these arguments will be convincing enough only for a small number of enthusiasts, while the majority of users will still prefer LGA 1155 processors and mainboards. Especially since Core i7 family in LGA 1155 form-factor has recently been refreshed again and its performance rose to a higher level.

This should not be a huge surprise, but the Intel Core i7 3960X "Sandy Bridge" Extreme Edition processor is one hell of a fast processor for desktops and workstations. For computationally-intense tests, the i7-3960X is a measurable upgrade over even the previous-generation Core i7 990X "Gulftown" that is still selling for over $900 USD. The Core i7 3960X can also be easily overclocked to 4.5GHz in order to squeeze out even more performance. The Intel Core i7 3960X also easily smashes the AMD FX-8150 "Bulldozer" octal-core processor across nearly all of the benchmarks, but again, no surprise.

We're duly impressed by the overall potential of the Sandy Bridge-E platform, which is unlike anything else that's come before; it's as if Intel crammed a dual-socket workstation into a single socket. For the PC enthusiast, this is truly lust-worthy computer hardware. However, there are still some negatives to the platform that we can't overlook, mostly related to the fact that this product introduction feels strangely rushed in some ways. The state of the motherboards is unusually messy for a notable Intel platform launch, with major-brand boards and fairly critical firmware fixes still trickling into our labs at the eleventh hour. The X79 chipset's relatively modest SATA capabilities and initial lack of SSD caching only add to that impression. Although it's not really Intel's fault, the PCIe 3.0 situation also feels unfortunate. Finally, as we've noted, we wonder whether the typical buyer of a thousand-dollar CPU and a $300-plus motherboard will welcome the fact that his CPU has two of its cores and 25% of its last-level cache lobotomized. There's a certain psychology involved in buying the best, and we're not sure it's compatible with Intel's decision to nix those bits of the chip.

Put simply, the Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition is the most powerful desktop processor available on the market. Period. When paired to its companion X79 Express chipset, the two make for the most potent foundation of a desktop system yet, whether it be for gaming, content creation or productivity. Even so, there are still a couple of execution cores lying dormant in the processor which will likely be unleashed at some point in the future, when / if Intel re-spins the chip to tame its power requirements. Considering how powerful the platform is now, we shudder to think what the next version of SBE will do, if Intel takes that route, of course. And why wouldn't they?

LGA1366 Core i7 reached the end of the road when Intel launched Core i5/i7 Sandy Bridge. While there is no denying that Sandy Bridge Extreme is a superb update it is, to a certain extent, rather pointless. Intel rules the roost in the desktop PC market with Sandy Bridge and we struggle to think of a scenario where Core i7-3960X Extreme is a legitimate upgrade for the man in the street, especially at such a high price.

Is Sandy Bridge E worth it? Even at $1000, the answer is a resounding yes--if you're using the right apps, are a dedicated overclocker, or have barrels of cash that you simply can't spend fast enough.

The expectation was that the Second Generation Core i7 3960X was going to be a game changer. And with very few exceptions, it was. The Sandy Bridge micro architecture, when combined with an X79 Express chipset motherboard, is just more efficient and offers a higher level of performance than the previous generation Nehalem or Gulftown processors paired with an Intel X58-based motherboard. And that's at stock speeds. The allure of the Sandy Bridge architecture is that the performance scales so well when the clock speeds are increased. To that end, overclocking was just as easy with the SNB Extreme as it was with the mainstream parts, the Intel Core i5 2500K and Core i7 2600K. Intel did add an additional wrinkle in the process with its use of "Gear Ratios" that bumps up the bclock to a 125MHz or 166MHz strap to offer an increase in bandwidth across the platform. Sure you can bump the multiplier straight up to 46-48 and play all day long with the right chip. You will see a massive boost in performance for very little effort. The sample I have was good for about 4730MHz any which way I cut the bclock/strap/multiplier. 127.8MHz x 37 and 102.9MHz x 46 were both solid, but took about 1.43v to run the numbers. Memory overclocking was just as easy — set the multiplier, set the voltage, set the timings, and then boot. Running 16GB of 2133MHz DDR3 memory at over 2200MHz seemed to be easy for this chip to do, using just 1.05v vccsa. Pushing the limits with voltage comes at a price and that price is the thermal load generated by the Core i7 3960X. Six cores at 4.5GHz or better is going to bring the heat. At above 4.5GHz, the Intel liquid cooling solution was just not robust enough to handle the thermal load and keep the temperatures under 80 degrees Celsius. Under the 4.2 to 4.3GHz point, tweaking the voltage and clock speeds resulted in temperatures more in line with what you would expect, with temperatures in the 60s to mid 60s degrees Celsius.

The Core i7-3960X is a worthy successor to last year's Extreme Edition processors, but the same caveats apply to it as to them. You'll see the greatest benefit in programs that are heavily threaded - computation-heavy spreadsheets, video encoding applications like Sony Vegas Pro, and 3D rendering applications like Maxon Cinema 4D, for example. On the gaming front, whether you use Intel's excellent overclocking assistant or muck about in the BIOS, you'll be able to cobble together a nauseatingly potent performance machine. And if a £900 CPU is within your gaming budget, you can't go wrong. This processor is poised to be the foundation of many of 2012's performance desktop juggernauts, and a few early efforts that have already trickled into the lab are sure to make waves. But if you aren't overclocking - or looking to get some gaming done - you don't need this much power. Ivy Bridge does throw a wrench into the works. At the moment, we know very little about the platform: It'll be shrunk down to the 22nm processor, which should cut power consumption a bit. Is Sandy Bridge E worth it? Even at this price, the answer is a resounding yes - if you're using the right apps, are a dedicated overclocker, or have barrels of cash that you simply can't spend fast enough.

So far this is the absolute best CPU I have yet to see for the desktop, and I really feel like the new i7 Sandy Bridge Extreme CPUs are the new Xeon’s for your desk as its really made for people who really use their PC for a workhorse. Many people use their system as their main workstation and for those individuals this is thee A’ Train platform they can get their hands on. If you are looking for a new platform to breath new life into your daily PC experience and have the funds to do so there is nothing better available for that user group for now, or the near future. Today at launch there are many motherboard manufactures out there with new board for the X79 Chipset with pricing ranging from the low $200.00s to the high $400.00s depending on make and model. The CPU we are looking at today is the Crème De La Crème of CPUs as the Sandy Bridge Extreme (or SBE as I like to call it), i7 39690X is the best in its class an untouchable by anything AMD could even hope to come up with in the CPU division. Priced at around $1050.00 US the CPU comes by itself without any cooling whatsoever, which is just fine as almost all enthusiasts, modders, overclockers and gamers usually just toss the included heatsink in a corner and move on. Also if you are going to try any serious overclocking you are going to need some hefty cooling to keep the CPU from frying. So lets just wrap this up in a neat little package, the new Intel SBE 3960X is the most amazing CPU for the desktop of all time, it overclocks very well, unlike the AMD 8120 or 8150 Bulldozers and the price is no different than anytime in Intel history for the top of the line CPU, at $1050.00 it is the same price as my Intel Pentium 100MHz CPU was when it first came out, so actually inflation has been kind in this regard. Intel has kicked the crap out of everyone and everything with this release completely takes the crown as the CPU king of the ring. I give this new CPU both a Hot Product and Editors Choice Award for both its ability to perform, overclock very easily and its ability to embrace future technologies such as PCI Express 3.0 coming 2nd quarter next year, A Win-Win for Intel.

The new Core i7-3960X does live up to its expectation of being the fastest desktop processor released to date. Costing the same as the previous top-of-the-line desktop CPU, the Core i7-990X, it provides a performance improvement of up to 30%, but you should get a typical 10-15% performance increase on most programs.

Just don’t feel compelled to splurge on the $1000 Core i7-3960X. We’re trying to get our hands on a Core i7-3930K—there’s a good chance that’s the Sandy Bridge-E-based chip for savvy enthusiasts looking to overclock.

Ultimately, the reason why the Core i7-3960X looks like it does comes down as much to the performance of Intel's main competitor, AMD, as it does anything else. Had AMD's new Bulldozer architecture been the game changer we had been hoping for, it's hard to imagine Intel would have released the Core i7-3960X with a pair of hidden cores. It would have run the full eight cores. We feared AMD's ongoing inability to challenge at the top of the performance tables would eventually lead to Intel sand bagging. With the Core i7-3960X, it's finally happened. And that's a shame.

We have longed for a new series of processors from Intel that would replace the aging X58 chipset and Nehalem combination and the Sandy Bridge-E delivers well on that wish. Even though the architecture is something we are very familiar with- having been in love with it since its release last year- the new Core i7-3xxx series offers up to 6-cores and 12 threads of processing power with an increase to 15MB of L3 cache. The additional cores help the new CPUs push past the current generation Sandy Bridge parts in highly-threaded applications while maintaining the power efficiency that has, in part, made Sandy Bridge so popular. The X79 chipset left us wanting more in terms of feature growth, but with 40 lanes of PCI Express from the processor, this platform will likely remain king for enthusiasts for quite some time.

At an MSRP of $990 (you'll doubtless pay more the first few months it's available) , the top-end Sandy Bridge Extreme CPU is the most expensive consumer CPU (high end Xeon server processors can cost thousands of dollars each). Add the $300+ cost of an X79 motherboard to put it in, as well as a new cooler (remember that Intel doesn't package a cooler with this CPU) and probably some more memory, and the cost of upgrading your existing X58 system could easily run to $1500 or more. That's a lot of money, especially in this economy, but as I mentioned before, for some segments of the market, it's a no-brainer. Assume that 29% average performance increase over a 980X holds true in a production environment: suddenly, rendering work that took, say, four hours now takes less than three hours. That's a huge win.

The Intel Core i7-3960X 6-core processor is menacing and it's a shame that AMD's Bulldozer 8-core processor couldn't compete at the same in many of the benchmarks!

Even at its stock speeds, this super-fast (and super-expensive) processor delivers on its Extreme Edition branding. If you’re editing and rendering lots of video, doing professional 3D modeling or graphics work, or performing other processor-intensive tasks in an environment where time is money, the Core i7-3960X is worth its high price because it's the fastest consumer CPU you can get. Plus, unlike its predecessor, it doesn’t get shown up on some tests by its much-less-expensive midrange siblings.

Overall, what you have here is the platform with the best multi-threading performance, top-notch single-threaded performance, the most numbers of PCI-E lanes, future-proof PCI-Express 3.0 support, overclocking capabilities that should please even the most ardent enthusiast, and more than reasonable power consumption numbers. Let's be honest here though, the i7-3960X that we tested today might be fantastic, but it is not going to make or break this platform. It's the i7-3820 and i7-3930K that we are really excited about, and at least on paper they look like good deals. Yes, you are going to pay more for this platform, largely for the motherboard since as we demonstrated earlier you can simply re-use your current dual-channel kit without much of a performance hit, but if you want the best this is it. If class-leading multi-threaded performance and multi-GPU capabilities aren’t your priorities, and you have more down to earth requirements, then wait for Ivy Bridge.

Hugely fast, but very few people regularly run enough applications at once to need a processor with this many cores