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Intel i7-4960X Extreme Edition – Ivy Bridge Goes Extreme to Save the Day?

By Wong Chung Wee - 3 Sep 2013

Gaming Benchmarks and Power Consumption

Gaming Benchmarks

The first gaming benchmark is 3DMark 2013 and we ran both Fire Strike and Fire Strike Extreme. The next benchmark used was the internal one provided by the game Tomb Raider where it measured the average frame rates at different settings.

 

 

The gaming scores didn't show any differences that point to the advantages of using the new Ivy Bridge-E processor in a gaming rig. This means, if you're looking to improve your game performance, you'll need to invest in a newer and more powerful graphics card or graphics card(s). What this test here proves is that upgrading processors doesn't net you direct performance gains as was seen in the older days. Where the new processor and the Intel X79 platform comes in is to to provide you the necessary overhead so that your 3-way NVIDIA Titan or 4-way AMD Radeon HD-7970 setup has adequate data fed to it with the widest pipe possible. We would love to show you if there are gains to be had in such a setup, but acquiring such firepower in short notice is tough and we'll have to save that for another time.

 

Power Consumption

For power consumption matters, we were actually expecting to see substantial power savings for the Intel Core i7-4960X processor; however, it appeared that its power usage profile was similar to the Sandy Bridge-E Core i7-3960X CPU. Evidently, with its 150W TDP, the Intel Core i7-3970X consumed the most power during load. Even so, there is an improvement in performance-per-watt, but far from our expectations given the new manufacturing process and vastly reduced die-size. Power optimization might not be the main priority Intel had for the Extreme processors since they were designed to be overclocked to one's best abilities with no restrictions.

On a side note, one thing we can infer is that Intel's probably making more profit by selling the new Extreme processors over the old one, just by virtue of the amount of new dies they can churn out on a single silicon wafer.

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7.0
  • Performance 7
  • Features 7.5
  • Value 6
The Good
Fastest 6-core processor
Updated overclocking architecture
The Bad
Limited gains over Sandy Bridge-E CPUs
Little improvement in power consumption
Expensive
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