Intel Core i7 3960X Sandy Bridge-E Review - PAGE 1

Over the past year the consumer processor market has been extremely busy with the release of not one, or two, but four new architectures. The first new processors to hit the scene were the Intel second generation core architecture, dubbed Sandy Bridge. This new line of processors was designed to be a replacement for socket LGA-1156, which was Intel's mainstream platform at the time. The advancements in the architecture allowed Sandy Bridge to outperform even Nehalem-based processors clock for clock, thus making the Sandy Bridge platform the best choice in the consumer market.

AMD also released a few new architectures of their own which included the Llano, Bobcat and Bulldozer. Out of the three, Bulldozer is the high-end offering more comparable to what Neoseeker is reviewing today.

The Bulldozer architecture was built from the ground up to support improved resource sharing, prefetching and multi-threaded performance. In addition, the Bulldozer architecture also introduced the Turbo and Max Turbo mode, allowing the processor to increase the maximum frequency while running applications. When Turbo is active, the processors dynamically adjust the multiplier to give an extra performance boost when needed. AMD's Turbo mode works similarly to Intel's Turbo Boost 2.0 Technology, which also dynamically increases the processors clock speed during load.

In today's review we are continuing our examination of the latest consumer based processors with the new second generation Intel Core i7 LGA-2011 processor family. The chips in the series are dubbed "Sandy Bridge-E". The series includes three new SKUs that vary in core count, L3 shared cache and Turbo thresholds. The chip examined today is the flagship processor in the series, the Intel Core i7 3960X.

What sets the 3960X apart from the mainstream Sandy Bridge processors is that it runs six independent cores in one physical package, includes twelve threads via Hyper-Threading and has a maximum Turbo mode frequency of 3.9GHz. There is also no IGP integrated into the die, so unlike Sandy Bridge, SB-E processors require a discrete graphics card, but the trade off is more die space for additional cores. All of these features ensure the 3960X is going to be one hell of a processor, and according to Intel the 3960X is on average 52% and 42% faster than the 2600K at editing videos and running in-game physics, respectively.

Another benefit of the Sandy Bridge Extreme processor is its support for quad-channel memory architecture. The additional memory channels boost the total memory bandwidth and in comparison to Intel's previous generation processors, we are looking at over a 100% performance increase in memory bandwidth. Additionally, the 3960X and all processors in the series include a massive 40 PCI-E lanes through the processor. This is going to give the SB-E platform a boost when it comes to gaming, as it doesn't have the 16-lane limitation of the original Sandy Bridge processors.

All in all there are three new processors hitting the market, but as of this review only the Core i7 3960X and 3930K are being launched, while the 3820 will be held off until Q1 2012. As you can see from the table below, the SB-E processors don't come cheap. In fact, the 3960X that we are examining has an MSRP of $990 dollars, and that is the price without a heatsink.