Benchmarks Put Intel’s Core i7-6950X Head-to-Head With i7-5960X

Intel’s upcoming flagship high-end desktop (HEDT) processor, the Core i7-6950X, promises to deliver improved performance when compared to the previous generation, but I’m sure that most of you are wondering just how much of a performance boost are we looking at. Well, it looks like Silicon Lottery has decided to pit the Core i7-6950X against the previous generation Core i7-5960X, and the results are definitely interesting, albeit somewhat predictable. That’s because the i7-6950X boasts a total of 10 cores complemented by HyperThreading, which means that we’re talking about 20 logical CPUs, not to mention the 25 MB L3 cache and the quad-channel DDR4 memory controller.

On the other hand, the Core i7-5960X offers just eight cores, which means that the newer CPU should surpass it in most cases. The rig used for the testing sessions included an ASUS Rampage V Extreme motherboard, 16 GB of quad-channel DDR4-3000 memory and a GeForce GTX 750 Ti graphics card. It’s worth noting that the i7-6950X was overclocked to 4.50 GHz, which is a substantial increase from its rumored stock frequency of 3.00 GHz. In Cinebench R15, the newer CPU achieved a score of 2327 points at 4.50 GHz, and a score of 1904 points at 4.0 GHz, which is a 19.5 percent increase when compared to the Core i7-5960X at the same clocks. In AIDA64, the memory read speeds were roughly the same, but the memory write speeds were no less than 37 percent higher on the i7-6950X. When it came to the memory copy speeds, however, the i7-6950X fell behind by 10.5 percent.

You can have a look at the benchmark results below.