Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition Review

With the launch of its Sandy Bridge microarchitecture earlier this year, Intel accomplished something unusual. It managed to deliver such a strong product, that it had effectively dampened the greatness that was the six-core Gulftown. That being the $999 Core i7-980X, of course.
It's not unusual to see a new processor outperform an old one, but this was different. Intel didn't launch Sandy Bridge with the intent of replacing its top-end offerings - proven by the fact that the most expensive chip at the time was the Core i7-2600K, at $317. Instead, it was the company's goal to deliver the best budget to mainstream processors we've ever seen. As we discovered in our launch article, the company certainly managed that.

Here, we had the new hotness in one hand, and the lagging-behind six-core in the other. Sandy Bridge didn't only offer a higher-performing architecture, it improved greatly upon power efficiency and at the same time packed in the AVX instruction set. There's also the fact that in most tests, the i7-2600K didn't even lag that far behind Intel's beefier and much more expensive six-core offering.
With its Sandy Bridge-E launch however, all of this becomes moot. To create this "new" microarchitecture, Intel compiled the best of both worlds into a single offering. That means we have both the highly-efficient architecture of Sandy Bridge, along with the six-core likeness of Gulftown. Together, these ingredients produce the fastest desktop processor ever.

Game benchmarks stand to see the least amount of gain in comparison to our other tests, but they're necessary for the sake of completeness. Also, while we benchmark hands-on for our graphics card content, we opt for synthetic testing here, as we're utilizing the same GPU across each setup.
First up is the ever-popular 3DMark benchmark, which we run using the "Performance" (1280x720) profile. A major benefit of this benchmark is that it stresses not only the GPU, but the CPU as well, thanks to its heavy-duty physics tests.by techgage.com

As expected, the i7-3960X proved its dominance with the physics test, but overall, gaming stands to see almost no improvement as long as a decent processor is used - if 3DMark is to be believed.

Sid Meier's Civilization V

Real-time and turn-based strategy games tend to be the most stressful on both the GPU and CPU, and Civilization V does well to live up to that stereotype. The game is so stressful on a PC, in fact, that the developers included built-in benchmarks that are meant to test a PC in a worst-case scenario sort of way. For our testing here, we use what's referred to as a "Units" benchmark, which as you can see by the screenshot below, is rather complex.
This benchmark doesn't spit out an average FPS rating, but rather an overall score (which we believe are accumulated frames but we're not certain). Because the game and this benchmark do stress the CPU quite a bit, it makes for a great overall motherboard benchmark. The "No Render" result refers to just the performance from the CPU, while the "Full Render" is CPU+GPU.

Furthering for the most part what we saw with 3DMark 11, our GPU performance was only marginally improved based on the processor used, while raw AI computation does stand to see some nice gains on better processors.