
This page represented one of the best showings for AMD’s FX processor in AMD Bulldozer Review: FX-8150 Gets Tested. Adding the Core i7-990X and Core i7-3960X, however, pushes AMD's flagship down the stack.
3ds Max easily leverages the 12 logical processors presented by both six-core CPUs, additionally putting Sandy Bridge’s architectural benefits to good use as the -3960X ducks in under two minutes.
Really, this is a good example of how heavier-duty apps stand to benefit from more workstation-oriented hardware. Neither the Core i7-920 or Phenom II X4 980 processors are very old. However, Intel’s new flagship finishes this workload in almost half the time of those two quad-core models.

Photoshop CS 5.1 was another application that let AMD’s FX shine last month (it still does well, with a third-place finish). However, Intel’s previous and current flagships displace it.
Parallelism takes precedence over architecture, as Sandy Bridge-E and Gulftown perform pretty similarly (though Phenom II X6 isn’t able to get through the workload as effortlessly as the two Intel chips and AMD’s own FX).

Premiere Pro is an interesting test, particularly because it leverages our GeForce GTX 580 to turn what used to be an almost hour-long workload into a sub-one-minute walk in the park using Intel’s Core i7-3960X.
The Sandy Bridge architecture is partially responsible for this, evidenced by a comparison to the Core i7-990X. But so are extra cores, demonstrated by a side-by-side with the Core i7-2600K.
The FX-8150 doesn’t do too badly here, given AMD’s $249 MSRP. It’s unfortunate that the chip is still selling for closer to $280 online more than a month after its launch.

Sandy Bridge-E, Gulftown, and Sandy Bridge (-2600K) all fall within five seconds of each other in our After Effects render job. That’s hardly a compelling reason to spend $1000 on an upgrade. However, if you’re coming from something older than a Core i7-920 or Phenom II X4 980, the speed-up is more palpable.

Another first-place finish for the Core i7-3960X in Blender represents a five-second victory over Intel’s Core i7-990X and an eight-second win over the Core i7-2600K.
Those narrow advantages are far less impressive than the near halving of the Phenom II X6 1100T’s showing.

The six-core Intel processors score a big win in SolidWorks, though the Core i7-3960X’s design allows it to outpace the Core i7-990X easily. Again, if you’re a workstation user, the gains attributable to Sandy Bridge-E compared to an older Core i7 or Phenom II X4—both of which we still consider very capable CPUs—are sizeable.
- 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.