Intel Core i7 4960X Extreme Edition Processor Review

Conclusion

Pricing

Intel’s Core i7 4960X will have an MSRP of $990. It’s slightly cut down younger brother the Core i7 4930K will cost $555 and the only quad core the Core i7 4820K costs $310. Currently the Core i7 3960X has a tray price of $999, the Core i7 3930K has a tray price of $583 and the Core i7 3820K has a tray price of $294. So with the exception of the Core i7 4820K we can see all Ivy Bridge-E CPUs come in priced lower than the Sandy Bridge-E predecessors. Clearly Intel understands that with Haswell becoming such a potent platform it needs to drop the prices of Ivy Bridge-E to encourage uptake. Expect retail availability of Intel’s Ivy Bridge-E CPUs to come properly within the next 1-2 weeks at all major retailers.

Conclusion

Intel’s Core i7 4960X is a modest evolutionary step forward for Intel’s High End Desktop (HEDT) platform. With the exceptional single-threaded performance of Intel’s Haswell Core i7 4770K it has never become more apparent to stress that the Core i7 4960X and the Core i7 4930K are not the best CPUs for gamers, in the same way the Core i7 3960X wasn’t either. In fact that title of best gaming CPU arguably goes to Intel’s mid-range consumer platform LGA 1150 and the Core i7 4770K. When most games and applications are not capable of using more than four real cores the value for money of the Core i7 4960X is certainly called into question.

As a step forward the Core i7 4960X is not as impressive relative to the Core i7 3960X as the Core i7 3960X was relative to the Core i7 990X. In fact if you’re a Sandy Bridge-E owner then there is absolutely no incentive for you to change platforms, unless having lower power consumption and about 5-10% extra CPU grunt is important to you – which it likely isn’t and certainly isn’t for the money the upgrade will cost you. There is an important reason Intel is gearing the Core i7 4960X to compute intensive tasks, video encoding, rendering and the like. The main reason is that in anything else the Core i7 4770K can do it better and the Core i7 3770K can do it equally as good. When the application is only capable of using 4 real cores then the key indicator of performance is the IPC of those four cores and obviously a i7 3770K uses the same architecture so is equivalent while the Haswell Core i7 4770K uses a better microarchitecture so has better IPC. This is reflected in how the Core i7 4770K often did better in real world tasks like PCMark7 and 3DMark 11.

Intel’s Core i7 4960X delivers exceptional performance in multi-threaded tasks and brings LGA 2011 forward to the Ivy Bridge generation. It continues to offer the most amount of computational power to consumers and businesses who don’t need Intel Xeon features (or simply cannot afford them). The Core i7 4960X delivers no surprises – it is about 5-10% better than the Core i7 3960X depending on the application, it consumes less power than its predecessor and it runs slightly hotter than its predecessor (though the implementation of fluxless solder under the IHS has meant the different isn’t as large as it was on LGA 1155). With it being cheaper than its predecessor it certainly makes an attractive upgrade for LGA 1366 users or someone who genuinely needs six cores and the computational advantages they bring over quad core CPUs.

People might call out the overclocking as being poor but ultimately it isn’t really that different to what we saw in terms of the Sandy Bridge LGA 1155 to Ivy Bridge LGA 1155 transition. The maximum attainable overclock drops from the 5GHz region down to the 4.8GHz region while the sweet spot falls similarly from 4.7GHz to 4.5GHz. Of course with the higher IPC this means the Core i7 4960X at 4.5GHz is better than the Core i7 3960X at 4.7GHz for example, but let’s face it the difference is pretty small and certainly not enough to make the upgrade.

Pros

• Exceptional multi-threaded performance
• Decent generational increase in performance
• Significant power consumption reductions
• Backward compatibility with current X79 motherboards
• Slightly cheaper than Sandy Bridge-E was at launch

Cons

• Runs hotter but only by a small margin
• Still an expensive and therefore exclusive platform
• Overclocking potential in raw GHz terms has been reduced
• Haswell’s 4770K trumps it in applications requiring 4 cores or less

“The Core i7 4960X retakes the performance crown from the Core i7 3960X making it the best consumer processor for raw computational power. In reality it is still a very close race and Sandy Bridge-E owners will see very little benefit from making an upgrade, while people who don’t use highly multi-threaded applications, notably gamers and power-users/everyday users, will see no benefit over Ivy Bridge or Haswell LGA 115X platforms. At the top end of the market Intel continues to push AMD out of the market segment and have re-affirmed their position as the makers of the world’s most extreme consumer desktop platform. There’s immense computational power on offer with the Core i7 4960X, if you’ve got the wallet and need or desire for it.”

Thank you to Intel for providing this review sample.