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There was never a question of whether or not Sandy Bridge-E was going to be fast. Rather the question was how much faster would it be? Intel’s press information was quick to point out that the Core i7-3960X is 52% faster than the Core i7-2600K in content creation applications, while it provided 114% better memory performance and 46% better game physics performance.
The content creation claim was only based on the performance seen in Premiere Pro CS5, while the bandwidth was measured in SiSoft Sandra 2001b and the game physics in 3Dmark 11. Our own testing certainly showed that the Core i7-3960X was faster than the Core i7-2600K, though not by quite as much. Still, when it came to our application and encoding performance tests, the Core i7-3960X was a monster. The Excel and Photoshop gains over the Core i7-2600K were impressive, both programs were around 20% faster. Meanwhile when encoding, impressive gains were also seen and overall the Core i7-3960X was 28% faster than the Core i7-2600K. Unfortunately while these are impressive gains over an already very fast processor, they are not nearly great enough to justify investing in the LGA2011 platform. Assuming for a moment that the $555 Core i7-3930K delivers almost the same performance as the Core i7-3960X, it still costs 73% more than the Core i7-2600K, and in our application/encoding tests we saw just a 20–30% performance gain. Still, we are not surprised by this, as the LGA2011 platform was always going to be for extreme users and professionals that require maximum performance regardless of the cost. It was the same situation with the LGA1366 platform when it was first released, the LGA1156 platform made much more sense from a value perspective, especially for gamers. Furthermore we are not suggesting that the Core i7-3960X or Core i7-3930K are just 20–30% faster than the Core i7-2600K, as in some tests it was much faster. For example in the x264 HD Benchmark 4.0 the Core i7-3960X was 46% faster than the Core i7-2600K for the second pass test, while it was 45% faster in Fritz Chess 13, and 41% faster in the Maya test.
For gamers there is really very little to see here, the Core i7-3960X for example is no faster than the Core i7-2600K or even the Core i5-2500K processors, and in fact for the most part we found it to be a little slower. For us the Core i7-3960X delivered as we expected it would, the letdown was the Intel X79 chipset which offers nothing over the Z68. This is going to be a real problem for LGA2011 motherboards, as we expect they will fetch quite a price premium over their LGA1155 counterparts, yet will most likely be equipped with the same features. This is the Achilles' heel of Intel’s flagship platform and it is hard to believe how featureless so many of the LGA2011 motherboards are considering they are designed to be coupled with processors in excess of $500. |
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ProX |
Posted on: 11/14/2011 09:09 PM
$990, yeah okay Intel. Why didn't they at least prove the more affordable version at launch. Anyway thanks for the review. |