Ever since it had hit the market earlier this year in January, Intel’s new Sandy Bridge LGA1155 platform has managed to bag some rather warm reception from the worldwide market. Though the discovery of a minor chipset issue did actually cause a bit of concern amongst fan boys as well as experts, Intel was quick to address the issue without letting the matter go out of hands. It was, after all not quite unexpected to see Sandy Bridge doing exceptionally well in the market. Owing to its top of the shelf features such as amazingly low power consumption, high clock per clock performance, a massive overclocking headroom etc., combined with a fairly reasonable price, this new family line of processors is truly a deserving candidate to be termed as a market leader.
However, Sandy Bridge arrived in the market at a crucial juncture when the consumer processor market witnessed the introduction of not one or two but four different cutting edge processor architectures including AMD’s massively popular Bulldozer. Amidst such high competitions coming from rivals, Intel was obviously forced to consistently come up with newer and more sophisticated offerings to cater to the ever increasing demand from the market. This is when the new Intel Core i7 Sandy Bridge E processor was introduced by the company in order to sustain its impressive performance regardless of the tough competitions coming from the rival outfits such as AMD.
Today we are going to review the new 2nd generation member to the Intel Core i7 LGA 2011 line up, dubbed Sandy Bridge E. For the purpose, we have the Intel core i7 3960x on our testing-table.
The first and foremost aspect that distinguishes the 3960x from all the other available Sandy Bridge processors is that it features 6 independent cores in a single physical package. Other than that, it also boasts off having 12 threads through Hyper Threading, as well as a Turbo mode frequency as high as 3.9 GHz.
Also, there is no Integrated Graphic Processor in the 3960X unlike the other mainstream Sandy Bridge family members. Like it or not, but this aspect eventually makes sure that the end-offering comes equipped with additional cores. Also the absence of IGP means that the product would require a discrete graphic card. However, according to Intel itself, the 3960X is approximately 52 percent and 42 percent faster than the 2600k when it comes to editing videos or running games. And as per our observation, that claim by the chip giant is fairly accurate. Another major advantage that 3960x is that it is compatible with the quad channel memory architecture. A comparison with the older generation Intel processors will give an overview how the additional memory channels beef up the overall memory bandwidth in the product. In fact the memory bandwidth can go up as much as twice as what we usually have in most of the previous generation products.
And then, in addition the 3960x along with the other processors in the series also includes an enormous 40 PCI Express lanes. Needless to say, this features gives the Sandy Bridge E processors an edge over all other existing Sandy Bridge products (those that have the 16-lane maximum limitation) when it comes to high memory requiring activities such as gaming.
Now, let’s have a quick look at the specifications of the product:
The total number of threads featured by the 3960x is 12, whereas the Cache size stands at 15MB (Intel Smart Cache). The processor base frequency and memory frequency can go as high as 3.3 GHz and 1600 MHz. Overclocking is enabled and the maximum number of DDR3 memory channels stands at four. The memory controller speed can vary up to 2.2 GHz with the help of the DDPM (Dual Dynamic Power Management). The chipset belongs to the Intel Express X79 family line.
The power consumption per watt of the 3960x is also fairly on the positive side as according to our own observation, the product stood out exceptionally well in that compared to the previous generation architecture. However, when under load, the chip does tend to draw a rather substantial amount of power. The power rating, as told by various test results conducted by quite a few of labs all across the world, is 96 watt when idle (at the default setting), and near about 118 watt when overclocked.
And as far as activities such as video rendering, image editing, 3D modeling etc. are concerned, there is hardly any comparison of this monster of a processor with the other models from the previous generations.
To support the 3960x and other members of the Sandy Bridge E family line, Intel really left no stones unturned and went on to release the hugely anticipated X79 based motherboards. As compared to the previous X58 based counterparts, the X79 series comes up with built-in support for seven pairs of USB 2.0 ports, 6 Serial ATA ports and 8 PCI Express 2.0 slots. Another major difference between the X58 and X70 lines up is the absence of a South Bridge in the latter. As an overwhelming majority of the functions were integrated right into the Sandy Bridge E itself, it leaves no need for the product to have a South Bridge.
But then, a number of highly anticipated functions that fan boys as well as critics were almost sort of certain to be coming across in the x79 family line, did not make it to the final build of the product for some reason. Amongst them, the most crucial aspect that we missed was the lack of native support for more than a couple of Serial ATA 6 Gbps ports as well as USB 3.0 ports.
The Intel Core i7 3960X has a lot of strengths and very few factors that go against it. Yet the price of about R11, 000 could prove to be daunting to many unless they are serious gamers or in a specific industry such as video editing that will benefit considerably from the performance boost this chip provides. However, there has been a steady increase in the number of multithreaded applications that are being offered. There is no doubt that as multi-core processors and more importantly applications optimized for multi-core processors become popular, the extreme computing power of the Intel Core i7 3960X will be fully appreciated and put to good use.
If you are an extreme gamer that is looking for the ultimate gaming PC with the Intel Core i7 3960X Processor or want a PC with the best performance, visit Evetech’s
Extreme Gaming PC’s Section to configure a top-end PC for yourself.
List Below some Extreme Gaming PC's Based on Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme CPU.
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