When I first learned about the three processors Intel planned to launch, I petitioned the company at its own Developer Forum in San Francisco to sample the Core i7-3930K either in addition to or instead of the Core i7-3960X. “There is no way,” I argued, “that the thousand-dollar model can come close to the value of a $550 SKU during a serious buying decision.”
That didn’t happen, though, and as such, I can’t see any reason to recommend paying $990, plus the price of a cooling solution, plus a new motherboard, plus a quad-channel memory kit for Intel’s Core i7-3960X. Stepping down to the $555 Core i7-3930K really only costs you 3 MB of shared L3 cache—at a savings that’d cover a really nice motherboard and water cooler. That’s the processor enthusiasts with money (and an SSD full of threaded workloads) should be lusting over.
What about the Core i7-3820? I wouldn’t hold my breath. Expected in the first quarter of next year, Intel won’t yet comment on its price, though we assume it’ll be high $200s/low $300s. The savings is nice, but it involves losing 2 MB of shared L3 cache, two cores, and the unlocked multiplier. Although six additional 100 MHz bins, plus some BCLK flexibility, will be available, you also have to remember that Ivy Bridge won’t be far off at that point.
Also slated to sell in quad-core configurations, Ivy Bridge-based CPUs will work in existing LGA 1155-equipped motherboards, they won’t necessitate new memory kits or coolers, and, depending on the IPC improvements Intel’s engineers extract, could wind up being faster than Sandy Bridge-E in software limited to eight threads or less.
If it’s value you seek, Sandy Bridge-E isn’t the platform for you. Ivy Bridge stands a much better chance of satisfying that niche. However, for the folks who bought into Bloomfield/Gulftown and skipped Sandy Bridge altogether in anticipation of today’s introduction, a marriage of the Sandy Bridge design, more cores, more cache, and more bandwidth yields impressive double-digit performance gains, on average.
Should we see PCI Express 3.0-capable hardware in the next couple of months, Sandy Bridge-E will have yet another opportunity to set itself apart. No other chipset includes this feature, and we expect graphics cards and RAID controllers to exploit it within the first half of 2012.
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.
- 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



The funny thing is that cores don't scale well. They do, but it's far from ideal as the percentages from the 2600K show (and the FX-8150 but that's a different story).
But the takeaway:
-If you're playing games the i5-2500K is the best purchase you can make and it's enough for Tri-580 SLI. Only WoW shows any difference, but most games ignore it.
-X79 is Intel being just plain lazy. No matter how you slice it- the X79 should have been called X67 and left like that. It's also a wildcat platform that will only support at most 6 CPUs that aren't terribly crippled.
-A Phenom II 955BE (or unlocked 960T, or a 1090T/1100T) is still a fine CPU to have unless you're gaming with dual graphics cards or doing time-intensive tasks.
What we have today is simply a platform for bragging rights not a serious contender to the X38, X48, X58 family.
I would LOVE to see them pick up their game and provide me with a worthy upgrade over my 4GHz i7 2600 (Non-K). I would swoop it up.
Look, BD had 4 modules with two "cores" each, each module is equivalent to a Sandy Bridge core.
They should just combine both of those cores or make them a single core, so we get 4 threads.
Then create 4-6-8 core versions of those CPU's..
Think about it.. the FX8150 is more of a 4-core CPU where the resources are halved pretty much so you get two threads per core, it would have been MUCH MUCH better if they just kept 4 strong cores.
Not sure why either but I always seem to start an AMD related comment :\
The labels are wrong on the graphs on this page the last ones should read DDR2-2133 on the last two shouldn't it?
JeanLuc
The only use for the 3820 really seems to be a cheap placeholder processor if you need a new PC now, but want to wait for a likely full 8c/16t version to come out around the time Ivy Bridge is released. The 3930k should prove to be a very good high end gaming/ mid range workstation part though for people who invest close to $1k in graphics cards.
The funny thing is that cores don't scale well. They do, but it's far from ideal as the percentages from the 2600K show (and the FX-8150 but that's a different story).
But the takeaway:
-If you're playing games the i5-2500K is the best purchase you can make and it's enough for Tri-580 SLI. Only WoW shows any difference, but most games ignore it.
-X79 is Intel being just plain lazy. No matter how you slice it- the X79 should have been called X67 and left like that. It's also a wildcat platform that will only support at most 6 CPUs that aren't terribly crippled.
-A Phenom II 955BE (or unlocked 960T, or a 1090T/1100T) is still a fine CPU to have unless you're gaming with dual graphics cards or doing time-intensive tasks.
Yessir! Working on it now!
Yes. Its expensive. In other news the Earth orbits the Sun. I wish I had enough $$$ that the costs of this CPU was inconsequential to me.