Again, small differences in performance between Intel’s six-core offerings and its quad-core Sandy Bridge-based chips are just as likely to be tied to threading optimizations as PCI Express bandwidth. In fact, because the gaps get smaller as resolution increases, differences in processing performance again make the most sense.
DiRT 3 takes advantage of up to eight threads, though it’s not clear if it prioritizes physical cores over logical ones.
Core i7-3960X manages to score a more sizeable gain in three-way SLI at 1680x1050 and 1920x1080. The performance of all three platforms narrows at 2560x1600, though.
Summary
- Say Hello To The PC Hardware Trophy Wife
- Quad-Channel Memory And PCI Express 3.0
- X79 Express: P67, Is That You?
- Cooling And Overclocking Core i7-3960X
- Test Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: PCMark 7
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11
- Benchmark Results: Sandra 2011
- Benchmark Results: Content Creation
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Crysis 2
- Benchmark Results: DiRT 3
- Benchmark Results: World Of Warcraft
- Crysis 2 In SLI
- DiRT 3 In SLI
- World Of Warcraft In SLI
- Battlefield 3 In SLI
- Power Consumption
- Core i7-3960X Versus Core i7-990X
- Core i7-3960X Versus Core i7-2600K/Core i5-2500K
- Core i7-3960X Versus FX-8150
- A Symbolic King In A Crowd Full Of Value
