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

By Patrick Schmid, Achim Roos
published

Ironically, when it comes to performance, Intel’s Core i7-3960X 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?

Benchmark Results: Archiving And Professional Applications

Archiving

One of the most popular archiving tools is WinZip, and while the 15.5 Pro version can take advantage of two CPU cores from the graphical user interface, running a command-line script is still single-threaded.

Zip is one of the key compression standards in use today, which is why we include WinZip, along with WinRAR and 7-Zip. The latter is the most efficient archiving standard, but it’s less common.

It doesn’t come as a surprise that Intel's Sandy Bridge-E-based Core i7-3960X leads the competition in all three metrics. The performance gain is substantial.

Professional Applications

3ds Max scales well with additional cores, and it responds well to the IPC improvements inherent to Sandy Bridge. Therefore, Sandy Bridge-E again takes a win.

The cross-platform 3D content creation tool Blender utilizes all available cores, receives an impressive speed-up from Sandy Bridge's IPC improvements over Nehalem, and consequently enjoys a nice performance jump.

Adobe’s Acrobat X is single-threaded, so it makes sense that the Core i7-3960X and Core i7-2600K would achieve similar performance.

Adobe’s Photoshop CS 5.1 benefits from threading and the Sandy Bridge design yet again, giving Intel's new flagship the top spot in our threaded benchmark.

Patrick Schmid
57 Comments Comment from the forums
  • fstrthnu
    Aand yet more evidence that most people looking for a high-end processor will be perfectly fine with the i5-2500K or the 2600K
    Reply
  • sam_fisher
    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.
    Reply
  • benikens
    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
    Reply
  • pwnorbpwnd
    Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the 6850 a Barts card? Unless I am wrong but I own a 6850.
    Reply
  • one-shot
    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)."
    Reply
  • Shape
    Ironically, when it comes to performance, Intel’s Core i7-9360X is the real Bulldozer.


    ROFL!!! Very well said!

    Nice!
    Reply
  • de5_Roy
    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).
    Reply
  • agnickolov
    And I was so hoping Visual C++ had made it into the regular benchmark set. Sadly, it's missing here...
    Reply
  • giovanni86
    Looking forward to seeing what type of Air/liquid cooled Overclocks can be achieved with these newly released processors.
    Reply
  • I wanna know how it performs on DAW apps. I hope it will be included in future benchmarks.
    Reply