Tom’s Hardware are at it once again with their Intel Core i7 4960X preview coming out way before the Intel NDA. While media publications line up to complain to Intel over this blatant violation of industry rules, for our readers this is still a great opportunity to check out the performance of Intel’s upcoming flagship CPU of the flagship LGA 2011 consumer platform.
The battery of tests they have put the Core i7 4960X through are mainly productivity and work focused so there isn’t much to show you in the way of gaming. Though that said the first test is of 3DMark11 and you can see a greatly improved physics score from the Core i7 4960X showing the generational performance boost. Note however that the Core i7 4960X does have an extra 0.1GHz over the Core i7 3970X which accounts for some of the performance boost.
Memory bandwidth is marginally improved over the previous generation of Sandy Bridge-E CPUs.
Most other traditional synthetic benchmarks show marginal increases for the Core i7 4960X over the previous generation.
The main design win of the Ivy Bridge-E Core i7 4960X is power consumption. As you can see it is significantly more power efficient that its predecessor the Core i7 3970X. 
Average power consumption gives this CPU more resemblance to a Core i7 2700K. Power effiency really is excellent and leaves competing solutions trailing in the distance.
Intel have not officially commented on the review though Intel staff have done so off the record. As usual most Intel staff are saying the review has lots of inaccuracies and inconsistencies so take these results with a pinch of salt.
Images and information courtesy of Tom’s Hardware
Only for the well heeled or people with more money than common sense.
What about thoughts for a new rig for future proofing? I envision mobo, cpu, memory pretty much staying the same with new GPUs in 3 years or so.
To clarify, as a 5-6 year platform… vs going Haswell. Oh and to clarify thinking 4930k (not 4960k).