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Sandy Bridge-E: Core i7-3960X Is Fast, But Is It Any More Efficient?

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  • Performance
  • Sandy Bridge
  • Power Consumption
  • Intel i7
Last response: in Reviews comments
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November 17, 2011 3:24:10 AM

Aand yet more evidence that most people looking for a high-end processor will be perfectly fine with the i5-2500K or the 2600K
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November 17, 2011 3:38:40 AM

fstrthnuAand yet more evidence that most people looking for a high-end processor will be perfectly fine with the i5-2500K or the 2600K


I guess it just depends on what you're doing. If you have a high end workstation and are using programs that are going to utilise all 12 threads, quad channel memory and 40 lanes of PCIe, and you need that processing power then it's probably not a bad investment. Whereas for most users the 2500K or the 2600K will do fine.
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November 17, 2011 3:40:34 AM

Quote:
Ironically, when it comes to performance, Intel’s Core i7-9360X is the real Bulldozer. Since its power consumption levels are lower than the Gulftown-based Core i7, it should also deliver amazing performance per watt as well. Is that really the case?


It's i7-3960x, not i7-9360x
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November 17, 2011 3:48:53 AM

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the 6850 a Barts card? Unless I am wrong but I own a 6850.
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November 17, 2011 3:59:51 AM

There is a small typo on Page 9

"Total power used drops again relative to Cor ei7-3960X's predecessor, the Core i7-980X (Gulftown)."
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November 17, 2011 4:08:33 AM

Quote:
Ironically, when it comes to performance, Intel’s Core i7-9360X is the real Bulldozer.



ROFL!!! Very well said!

Nice!
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November 17, 2011 5:05:47 AM

another informative, in-depth article about efficiency. great work guys!
3960x might very well be the $1k cpu that's worth the (over)price unlike the older 980x.
sb-e shows that both single threaded and multi threaded performance as well as efficient power use can be ahcieved by a 32nm, 6 core, 130 tdp cpu (but you gotta pay a lot for that).
when you bring price into the equation, quad core sb i5 and i7(95w tdp) are the best way to go (i wonder how an i7 2700k fare if it was tested alongside these cpus).
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November 17, 2011 5:18:04 AM

And I was so hoping Visual C++ had made it into the regular benchmark set. Sadly, it's missing here...
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November 17, 2011 5:38:06 AM

Looking forward to seeing what type of Air/liquid cooled Overclocks can be achieved with these newly released processors.
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Anonymous
November 17, 2011 7:09:05 AM

I wanna know how it performs on DAW apps. I hope it will be included in future benchmarks.
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November 17, 2011 9:47:08 AM

Excellent review but has anyone else noticed of good looking the LGA 2011 Platform setup is? I really like to see it.
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November 17, 2011 10:11:29 AM

Great article! I loved that mobo with 4 dimms at each side of the processor.
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November 17, 2011 10:16:06 AM

I am still very pleased with my i5 2500 after reading this article. Sandy Bridge-E's efficiency might be impressive for a high end CPU ... but it still cannot beat the practicality of the Standard Sandy Bridge.

I can't wait until Ivy Bridge!
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November 17, 2011 11:57:57 AM

by no means am i replacing my 2600k @ 5ghz w/ HT ON and GSkill 2200Mhz Cas7 anytime soon.
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November 17, 2011 12:08:28 PM

fstrthnuAand yet more evidence that most people looking for a high-end processor will be perfectly fine with the i5-2500K or the 2600K

Agreed, 2500k is still the sweet spot in the triple trade-off performance/power/cost. This is what I will choose if i needed a replacement, considering the applications I run.
sam_fisherI guess it just depends on what you're doing. If you have a high end workstation and are using programs that are going to utilise all 12 threads, quad channel memory and 40 lanes of PCIe, and you need that processing power then it's probably not a bad investment. Whereas for most users the 2500K or the 2600K will do fine.

Right, but if i have a truly highly parallel application, then, a server with several interconnected nodes offers more bang for the buck. I would consider 4 nodes based on 2500k that probably are cheaper than a single 3960X and offer me much more computing power. It all depends on your appliccation.
But clearly the 3960X is for a niche market, either because it really fits your needs or the "bragging rights" niche market.
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November 17, 2011 12:31:23 PM

aldaiaAgreed, 2500k is still the sweet spot in the triple trade-off performance/power/cost. This is what I will choose if i needed a replacement, considering the applications I run.Right, but if i have a truly highly parallel application, then, a server with several interconnected nodes offers more bang for the buck. I would consider 4 nodes based on 2500k that probably are cheaper than a single 3960X and offer me much more computing power. It all depends on your appliccation.But clearly the 3960X is for a niche market, either because it really fits your needs or the "bragging rights" niche market.


The i7-3930K is pretty decent for the price, though. At the same clocks as the 3960X it's the same speed, and all reviews featuring both have it achieving the same overclocks, sometimes at lower voltage. Unless it's for bragging rights or epeen the 3930K is clearly a better choice since the extra cache seems to be useless for desktops and it isn't even better binned.


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November 17, 2011 12:32:24 PM

The more benchmarks I read the happier I am with my i7 2600 :)  It is right behind the new big boy, and only cost $250 at my local computer hardware store compared to $1000 to get a few extra seconds off.

What will be really interesting to see is what happens with the IB release. Last time the mainstream SB could meet or beat the old high end chips, for 1/3 the price. I wonder if the IB release will do the same thing, or if Intel will downplay the performance so as not to piss off their high-end buyers again.
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November 17, 2011 12:46:54 PM

CaedenVThe more benchmarks I read the happier I am with my i7 2600 It is right behind the new big boy, and only cost $250 at my local computer hardware store compared to $1000 to get a few extra seconds off.What will be really interesting to see is what happens with the IB release. Last time the mainstream SB could meet or beat the old high end chips, for 1/3 the price. I wonder if the IB release will do the same thing, or if Intel will downplay the performance so as not to piss off their high-end buyers again.


Ivy Bridge is a die shrink that is based mostly on lowering power consumption and getting higher IGP performance. CPU performance improvements will be few: according to Anandtech 4-6% higher IPC than Sandy Bridge, and since Intel is focusing on power consumption clock speeds won't be much higher than SB, so about a 5% improvement there too. About 10% more CPU performance max, so don't expect too much. Sandy Bridge-E will still be significantly faster in multi-threaded.
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November 17, 2011 1:39:13 PM

Based on the results for some of the multi-threaded tests, it appears as if the turbo boost on SB-E is getting modulated more often than the turbo boost on 2600K. It would be very interesting to see a multi-threaded test in which turbo boost was turned off, and the clocks of both were set at the same rate, e.g. 3.6 or 3.9 GHz, whatever the cooler will bear. Also supporting this idea is that several of the configurations appear to max out at right around 200-210 watts peak power. So if the thermal limiter threshold is kicking in for SB-E to keep it within its power budget, that could explain the "better, but not way better" performance between SB-E and 2600K. Would such a test be feasible, Toms?
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November 17, 2011 3:56:37 PM

I work in engineering and many of our employees have heavily multithreaded applications running at their personal machines sometimes for days on end. This is obviously the kind of place SB-E chips will thrive unless IB blows them out of the water. Obviously these $1K chips are not the right choice for enthusiast gaming PC's and they're arguably not the best choice for servers as they get outshined by cheaper chips over several nodes. However there are certainly applications where 6+ cores at 3.3ghz+ are worth $1K and SB-E steps in where Bulldozer failed.
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Anonymous
November 17, 2011 4:32:14 PM

@danraies

actually no, even with this mass of seething power, if it's taking all day to finish one of their runs then this thing is only really going shave off an hour or 2, it wont make a drastic impact, and you might want to go back and revisit those bulldozer benchies cause if i recall correctly, much to my surprise, bulldozer did quiet well in productivity apps department

if you really want to increase through put and money is no objective, look into a tesla setup or offload all the work to a grid setup
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November 17, 2011 5:10:16 PM

There are a lot more cost conscious people reading this forum that know there is no reason to gain ~10% performance increase for $1000. Intel knows there are people who have money to burn and will always buy the fastest CPU just because they can.
I have many friends who are speed junkies and want something just because it's the fastest, kind of like an addiction! Triple SLI or Crossfire with i7 990X water cooled etc.

I'm sure everyone remembers the Sandy Bridge launch and were amazed, just wait for Ivy Bridge because it will be the real "Bulldozer" IMO.
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November 17, 2011 5:18:43 PM

I made good choice of Bulldozer....
Ivy is great really good.
Price fail so hard...
Because looking for best for best cost more then 1k....
eeee not for me....
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November 17, 2011 9:03:59 PM

aldaia... Right, but if i have a truly highly parallel application, then, a server with several interconnected nodes offers more bang for the buck. ...


A few points to ponder:

a) Many 'truly' parallel apps don't scale well when running across networked nodes, ie. clusters. It
depends on the granularity of the code. Some tasks just need as much compute power as possible
in a single system. This can be mitigated somewhat with Inifiniband and other low-latency network
connection technologies, but the latencies are still huge compared to local RAM access. If the code
on a particular chip doesn't need any or much access to the data held by a different node then
that's great and some codes are certainly like this, but others are definitely not, ie. a cluster setup
doesn't work at all. When 2-socket and the rarer 4-socket boards can't deliver the required
performance, companies use shared memory systems instead, which are already available with
up to 256 sockets (2560 cores max using the XEON E7 family), though often it's quite difficult to
get codes to scale that well beyond 64 CPUs (huge efforts underway in the cosmological community
atm to achieve good scaling up to 512 CPUs, eg. with the Cosmos machine).

b) Tasks that require massive processing often require a lot of RAM, way more than is supported
on any consumer board. Multi-socket XEON boards offer the required amount of RAM, at the expense
of more costly CPUs, but it does the deliver the required performance too if that is also important.
ANSYS is probably the most extreme example; one researcher told me his ideal workstation would
be a single-CPU machine with 1TB RAM (various shared memory systems can have this much RAM
and more, but more CPUs is also a given). X58 suffered from this somewhat, with consumer boards
only offering 24GB max RAM (not enough for many pro tasks) and the reliability of such configs was
pretty poor if you remember way back to when people first started trying to use non-ECC DIMMs
to max out X58 boards.

c) Many tasks are mission critical, ie. memory errors cannot be tolerated, so ECC RAM is essential,
something most consumer boards can't use (or consumer chips don't support). Indeed, some apps
are not certified to be used with anything other than ECC-based systems.

d) Some tasks also require enormous I/O potential (usually via huge FC arrays), something again
not possible with consumer boards (1GB/sec is far too low when a GIS dataset is 500GB+). Even
modern render farms have to cope with such quantities of data as this now for single frame renders.
It's often so much more than just the CPU muscle inside the workstation, or as John Mashey put it
years ago, "It's the bandwidth, stupid!", ie. sometimes it's not how fast one can process, it's how
much one can process (raw core performance less critical than I/O capability). Indeed, even
render farm management systems may deselect cores in order to allow the remaining cores to make
better use of the available memory I/O (depends on the job), though this was more of an issue for
the older FSB-based XEONs.

And then sometimes raw performance just rules, the cost be damned. Studio frame rendering is
certainly one such example; I've no doubt IB XEON will be very popular for this. Thousands of cores
is fairly typical for such places.

SB-E is great, but it's at the beginning of the true high performance ladder, not the end.

Ian.

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November 17, 2011 9:27:52 PM

soldier37Waiting on Ivy Bridge in the Spring to upgrade my 2600k which is already smoking along at 4.8 under 55C load with liquid cooling. No thanks.


I'll probably jump aboard the Ivy Bridge train as well, but if you have a 2600k already you're only going to see a 10-15% boost in stock performance. Overclocking might slightly cooler, but it seems a bit unnecessary... What do you need it clocked that high 24/7 for?

If only my workstation was upgraded to 3960's I could save milliseconds of my precious time :)  Seriously though, glad to see Matlab tests in there.
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November 17, 2011 10:42:02 PM

Soma42I'll probably jump aboard the Ivy Bridge train as well, but if you have a 2600k already you're only going to see a 10-15% boost in stock performance. Overclocking might slightly cooler, but it seems a bit unnecessary... What do you need it clocked that high 24/7 for? If only my workstation was upgraded to 3960's I could save milliseconds of my precious time Seriously though, glad to see Matlab tests in there.


I was gonna go with Ivy Bridge but 10 to 15 percent boost won't even be noticeable in real world usage.
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November 17, 2011 11:38:10 PM

great article but:
how about o/c speeds... on intel and amd side especially how does a $150 X6 1090T at 4.1ghz fair up?

Of course If i was buying new mobo and new system intel is the clear winner (2500/2600k)
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November 18, 2011 1:03:53 AM

I want it but I'm informed enough to know I don't need it. Cheers to those who make use of this fine piece of silicon.
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Anonymous
November 18, 2011 7:12:25 AM

poor amd! they are getting smacked around hard on the benchmarks lately. i still dont understand why people would want a closed loop system. they are at best slightly worse then high end air coolers which can be cheaper and usually are. its just a gimmick imo
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November 18, 2011 2:51:00 PM

Nice article, i just wait more for the mathematics capabilities of this processor but is not that amazing. Let's wait for the IB and check the surprises that have for us.
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November 18, 2011 3:19:20 PM

I really think AMD should of pulled Bulldozer and just concentrated where their strengths lie i.e. the APU market and graphics market. I just can't see who would buy the Bulldozer. It can't compete in the high performance market and gets beaten up in the middle range market by the 2600K and the 2500K, the later which is not only more powerful but also cheaper. I was waiting for the bulldozer before upgrading, but wouldn't touch it now. The 2600K looks like the best bang for buck processor out there at the moment.
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November 18, 2011 4:40:04 PM

oIOIiiopoor amd! they are getting smacked around hard on the benchmarks lately. i still dont understand why people would want a closed loop system. they are at best slightly worse then high end air coolers which can be cheaper and usually are. its just a gimmick imo


I disagree about the closed loop coolers. They have a much smaller footprint than the enthusiast coolers that match or beat them. If you want excellent cpu cooling, and a descent side panel fan cooling the chipset and graphics, you pretty much have to go with the closed loop to ensure it all fits nice in the budget cases on up. I use a H50 in push/pull and nowadays those are pretty cheap though not performing at the top or close, until you swap out fans. That of course adds to the overall costs, but if you are in the position to have a nice looking build and need everything to fit with room to spare, they are a good buy.

jasoncrussellI really think AMD should of pulled Bulldozer and just concentrated where their strengths lie i.e. the APU market and graphics market. I just can't see who would buy the Bulldozer. It can't compete in the high performance market and gets beaten up in the middle range market by the 2600K and the 2500K, the later which is not only more powerful but also cheaper. I was waiting for the bulldozer before upgrading, but wouldn't touch it now. The 2600K looks like the best bang for buck processor out there at the moment.


Bulldozer owners or prospective purchasers need to do their homework, and make sure their particular workload / applications, benefit most from bulldozer, or bulldozer is at least neck and neck with intel's comparably priced products. A bulldozer set up may also be king if you need the most sata III connectors for onboard raid. I'm considering a bulldozer quad core due to the plethora of pcie lanes, and sata III connectors. Right now, you can jump into a quad and mobo combo for $200ish with the sales lately.
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November 18, 2011 11:06:10 PM

It stuns me how efficient this top-of-the-line chip is especially compared to previous and competing architectures. The FX-8150 isn't exactly impressive when it comes to efficiency but what about the other Bulldozer CPU's? I'm particularly interested in the FX-4100; the 95 watt quad-core CPU. I wonder if it will perform better or be more efficient than older Phenom II X4's.
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November 19, 2011 1:12:55 AM

"Intel’s Core i7-3960X is the real Bulldozer"

Kick'em while they're down, that's what I say.
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November 19, 2011 4:21:35 AM

clonazepam said:

Bulldozer owners or prospective purchasers need to do their homework, and make sure their particular workload / applications, benefit most from bulldozer, or bulldozer is at least neck and neck with intel's comparably priced products. A bulldozer set up may also be king if you need the most sata III connectors for onboard raid. I'm considering a bulldozer quad core due to the plethora of pcie lanes, and sata III connectors. Right now, you can jump into a quad and mobo combo for $200ish with the sales lately.


not trying to turn you away from buying fx or anything like that, but weren't the 9xx chipsets the ones that gave sata connectors and 42 pcie 2.0 lanes? one can save some money by buying/recycling ph ii deneb or thuban cpus. i could be wrong about this though.
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November 19, 2011 5:03:38 AM


weatherdude said:
It stuns me how efficient this top-of-the-line chip is especially compared to previous and competing architectures. The FX-8150 isn't exactly impressive when it comes to efficiency but what about the other Bulldozer CPU's? I'm particularly interested in the FX-4100; the 95 watt quad-core CPU. I wonder if it will perform better or be more efficient than older Phenom II X4's.


according to amd, fx 4100 is a dual module, quad core cpu. modules are similar to intel's cores, so that'd make fx 4100 similar to a core i3 or core i5 2390t or core i5 2410m. here's a review:
http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1766/
i just skimmed through it and noticed that in some test it got beaten by sb pentium, core i3 and llano respectively. it's power consumption (may be because it has 95w tdp) is higher than core i5, core i3 and even llano. but it doesn't perform well enough to justify its price, power draw. another thing, legitreviews didn't list oc power consumption.

bin1127 said:
"Intel’s Core i7-3960X is the real Bulldozer"

Kick'em while they're down, that's what I say.

and kick 'em harder till they get it right.
eagerly waiting for trinity and piledriver.
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November 19, 2011 7:11:01 AM

pschmid said:
Ironically, when it comes to performance, Intel’s Core i7-9360X is the real Bulldozer. Since its power consumption levels are lower than the Gulftown-based Core i7, it should also deliver amazing performance per watt as well. Is that really the case?

Sandy Bridge-E: Core i7-3960X Is Fast, But Is It Any More Efficient? : Read more


As much as I would like to agree, I think this is not true.
Yes, the new i7 3960X is a pretty small improvement over previous generation high-end CPU, and yes, this is a sloppy CPU that Intel was/is able to launch only because it has no competition.
But look at the graphs: AMD Bulldozer came years after the Phenom II X4, yet it is only marginally faster, and it is even less efficient. The BD is -basically- no improvement, whatsoever, in terms of efficiency over the previous generation, and performance-wise, while it obviously depends on the actual use, in general, is only a very modest improvement over previous generation X4 and X6 Phenoms. Intel, after the 3960X, is even further away than it ever was.
It's a pity. Actually no, it is a disaster: one month after BD is announced and Intel already releases sloppy, insanely priced CPU. Where will we be one year from now? AMD, please do something.
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November 19, 2011 9:58:03 AM

It's an improvement, but not a big one that I expected. Granted, given its not-much-of-an-increase from Gulftown I probably expeted too much.
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November 19, 2011 2:14:01 PM

As I said in a post at abxzone "The Core i7-3960X looks like a hot potato that anybody in their right mind would avoid. The worst part is that this potato seems to have come out of the oven half baked. There are too many issues that stem from what looks like a "hurry up" on Intel's part to stick with their "tic-tock" cycles. I have some advice for Intel - - Slow it down and get it right, especially for your "Extremely Expensive" line."

This new CPU has set a new standard for expensive by not only having a top of the line price but also in having the highest prices for motherboards using not so top of the line features. To make matters worse it comes without a heat sink or cooler so you have to add that to the price paid. I will either wait for something better or see if I can't come up with more intelligent choices for my system hardware spending.
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November 20, 2011 11:12:39 AM

I am not sure what to think. For me, I remember my last single core system and how trying to surf the net and run windows update would cripple the system. Add to that, burning a dvd and an anti virus scan and the system ran slower than my 386dx.

Then I upgraded to a Q6600 and wow, I can do all these things at once and not take a big performance hit. So while the 2600k might be at the sweet spot. I could care less about the 3+ ghz.... I want more cores to balance the workload, and 6 is the least I want. I really think they need to release 8 and 16 core versions of this chip to the consumer markets. I will use every single one.

Not to mention editing large raw files and un compressed HD video.
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November 21, 2011 7:30:02 PM

"when it comes to performance, Intel’s Core i7-3960X is the real Bulldozer"...ahh....yeah, for a Zillion Dollars!!!

I'd love a 2600/2700K (i5 not enough cores/threads for my needs, even at high clocks), but even they are pretty pricey. I Still say that for $150 bucks you can't beat a 1055t at 4ghz+. AMD may not have the best single thread performance so go with the 2500 for a little more if that's a major concern and you don't want to OC, but if your looking for a good deal on some highly threaded horse power, that aint bad.

Don't get me wrong, if grew money instead of hair and nails...I'd buy the $1000+ CPU any day :D 
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November 21, 2011 7:34:28 PM

BTW, bulldozer IS AMD's answer to Hyper Threading; as they've been saying all along. Will another integer core consume more power than adding HT?? YES. Will a four floating point/eight integer core CPU perform better and worse in certain scenarios than a comparable Intel chip and still be a decent value proposition?? YES.

Am I going to buy an one of the first runs of what I consider to be non-optimized FX series CPU's?? No

Do I still think Intel needs someone to compete with in the high end space to bring down their lubricious prices?? Yes...yes, I do
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Anonymous
November 22, 2011 5:04:51 AM

the problem with benchmarks is that they tag along on same page a 250 $ cpu a 150$ cpu and a 1000$ cpu ... SB-R 3960X alreday lost in terms of price ... to be fair we should compare a motherboard with 4 or 5 amd cpu to the sb-e the I bet the perfs will be quite in favore of amd 5 cpu motherboard... but then the energy cost will be in the defavor of amd ...

one way or the other there will be people puting 3000$ in there computers and ones puting 400$ and both of them will be able to play the lastest game with overall same perf... since you eye best percive 30 images per second as fluid motion past 60 fps ( 1 frame is half an image :p ) you don't notice the difference... after yes on the "loading sreen you will notice some changes but if your game is in ssd you will yet notice that part improved even with the worst amd on this test compared to the sb-e with a regular 7200 rpm hard drive with 8MB of cache ...
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November 22, 2011 2:20:00 PM

wow what a product man thanks to intel
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Anonymous
November 22, 2011 4:48:10 PM

With the prices almost tyhe same for the 6 core edition as before I just wish they could make my 17 980x 6-core work on some kind of board that has quad channel memory thats is too what I like about sandy bridge-e
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November 23, 2011 8:51:07 AM

can amd beats intel on performance
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November 23, 2011 1:37:49 PM

Anyone else checked their benchmarks yet? I have!

Intel Core i7-3930K -> $600 @ 13,877 points (1st best desktop CPU).
http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i...

Intel Core i7-3960X -> $1,050 @ 14,720 points (2nd best desktop CPU).
http://cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i...

If you get the i7-3930X instead of the 3960X, you save yourself $450 for only 843 points less, & still have the 2nd best desktop CPU in terms of performance. The same thing goes for 2600K, 100Mhz less for This is how I see it:

Entry-level enthusiast CPU: AMD FX-8150 is better = $270, 8,544 points.
AMD FX-8120 is worse = $210, 7,241 points.

Mainstream-level enthusiast CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K is better = $320, 10,046 points,
Intel Core i7-2700k is stupid = $370, 10,679 points.

Extreme-level enthusiast CPU: Intel Core i7-3930X is better = $600, 13,877 points,
Intel Core i7-3960X is stupid = $1050, 14,720 points.

But then again, that's just my opinion... :p 
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November 23, 2011 2:43:26 PM


Choosing a CPU based on a single benchmark of that kind is a really bad idea.
The choice should be made based on the applications one intends to use, or at
least on benchmarks which more closely reflect one's intended task, eg. HandBrake
for video encoding.

There are numerous tasks/workloads for which your summary is completely wrong.
It depends on the individual needs of each user. Extreme example: if all you want to
do is run Lame, then just get an i3 550 and overclock the heck out of it; I built a 550
system @ 4.7GHz from used parts, it does the Lame test (see page 6) in 1 min 17 secs,
significantly quicker than a stock 3960X (total CPU, RAM, mbd, PSU and HSF cost was
225 UKP btw). For video encoding though, it's a completely different scenario; my oc'd
550 only manages 3 mins 20 secs (awful), though amusingly that's not far off the
speed of a stock Ph2 X4 980 or i5 750 (compare to my i7 870 @ 4.27 which does the
Handbrake test in 1m 51s, much better, matches a stock 980X).

In every CPU lineup, there are always top-end expensive enthusiast parts because
there has always been a strong market for those who can afford the best. This will
never change. In some parts of the world, this market is surprisingly large. How such
parts are priced has little to do with performance; it's entirely down to what the
market will tolerate, supply & demand, etc. For highly threaded tasks, the 3960X may
be expensive, but it'll also be seriously quick especially once oc'd. The 3960X is aimed
at those with money to burn; for those who buy it, I'm sure they'll say it's worth every
cent. :D 

Ian.

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November 23, 2011 3:46:40 PM

mapesdhsFor highly threaded tasks, the 3960X maybe expensive, but it'll also be seriously quick especially once oc'd. The 3960X is aimed at those with money to burn; for those who buy it, I'm sure they'll say it's worth every cent.


I get what you're saying, BUT, all I was doing was comparing the "best" desktop CPUs (hence me labeling the CPUs for enthusiasts), scecs-wise, with their prices, to show how much of a better deal the listed CPUs were, in each class of enthusiast CPUs.

___
"Most people like apples, although I prefer oranges" :p  -secretxax
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