Intel reserves extreme branding for its fastest chips, but its Ivy Bridge-e range has been a long time coming – sandy Bridge-e emerged in 2011 and, four months ago, Intel released Haswell. The three new chips use 2012’s Ivy Bridge architecture rather than Haswell. That’s because they’re based on workstation Xeon parts, which are released behind the curve of Intel’s consumer chips for reasons of longevity and reliability.
The new chips use a 22nm manufacturing process. This an improvement on sandy Bridge-e’s 28nm, and makes for a die that’s smaller, cooler and more efficient. The flagship core i7-4960X has a fearsome specification: six Hyper-Threaded cores clocked to 3.6GHz, a top Turbo Boost speed of 4GHz, and 15MB of L3 cache.
Ivy Bridge improves on its sandy Bridge predecessor with better branch prediction, improved out-of-order execution and more cache bandwidth. And the extreme-edition of these chips have their own enhancements too: support for 40 PcI-express 3.0 lanes and quad-channel 1866MHz DDR3 memory both improve over sandy Bridge-e.
The core i7-4960X isn’t the only Ivy Bridge-e chip. The i7-4930K also has six cores, but they’re clocked to 3.4GHz with a Turbo speed of 3.9GHz, and it’s got 12MB of cache. The i7-4820K is a quad-core 3.7GHz chip that maxes out at 3.9GHz and has a 10MB cache.
The LGA 2011 socket and X79 chipset remain from sandy Bridge-e, so you won’t need to buy a new motherboard, old heatsinks will work, and so will the vast majority of motherboards – although most need a BIosupdate.
The older chipset has its down sides, especially if you’re building a fresh machine. There’s no native UsB 3.0 support, and support for only two SATA 6Gb/s sockets. Both of these are rectified by third-party chips on motherboards, but these increase the price and the potential for instability.
The core i7-4960X returned great benchmark results, but don’t expect this chip, made from an older architecture, to always outpace Haswell. Its overall PcMark 7 score of 6099 points beats the 5246 points scored by the sandy Bridge-e based i7-3960X, but it’s a little slower than the Haswell-based i7-4770K. That’s disappointing, but not surprising – Haswell is newer, and PcMark 7 doesn’t necessarily make the best use of the i7-4960X’s six cores.
other tests show off the i7-4960X’s multithreaded advantage. The i7-4960X’s score of 11.85 points in the cinebench video rendering benchmark is excellent: the core i7-4770K managed just 8.12 in the same test, and the sandy Bridge-e based i7-3960X scored 11.01.
We were easily able to overclock the i7-4960X to a stable 4.4GHz. In PcMark 7, the tweaked chip returned a lower overall score of 5851 points, but that was caused by just one test: in the Productivity benchmark – which measures basic system tasks – the i7-4960X’s score nearly halved from a superb 5648 to a still quick 2733.
In every other PcMark 7 test, the overclocked chip improved: its entertainment score rose from 4915 to 5109 points, the creativity test leaped from 7811 to 8042, and the i7-4960X’s computation result jumped from 8879 to 9604. The overclocked i7-4960X also scored 13.3 points in the cinebench test – a stunning result that demonstrates the part’s multicore abilities.
Our final test, wPrime, calculates prime numbers using every available thread to evaluate multicore performance. The i7-4960X finished the 1024MB test in 132 seconds – the i7-3960X needed 151 seconds.
Intel has upped its extreme-edition chip’s multithreaded performance levels without compromising on heat or power draw. The i7-4960X’s top temperature of 63°c is fine, and the peak power draw of 247W during the cinebench test is only 4W more than sandy Bridge-e managed, while providing a hefty performance leap.
Verdict
Benchmarks show that the i7-4960X is the most powerful processor around in multithreaded tasks and when running intensive apps because of its six cores, but it’s marginally slower than Haswell in less demanding single-threaded tasks. Its mixed performance, ageing ancillary hardware and stratospheric price means this is only worth buying if you need the extra power its six cores provide.
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