- Back to homepage
- Related articles
  Related articles

Intel Sandy Bridge E 3960X CPU Reviewed

CPU by leeghoofd @ 2011-11-14

It's getting close to Christmas, new hardware is coming right at ya at the speed of light. Only a few weeks back Intels main rival AMD, launched it's brand new Bulldozer CPU. Targeted at the entry and mainstream audience and should have been a rival for Intels 2500K and 2600K. Sadly for AMD, depending on the program it would be either close to or miles behind the competitors processors. But you can read more on that story in the previous articles. Today the big silicon firm launches it's brand new X79 chipset, sporting a big 2011 pin socket and SB-E CPU. This is Intel's replacement for the aging X58 socket 1366 CPUs. No more triple channel rams, but we go one step beyond, meaning the socket 2011 is optimized for quad channel configurations. Big thanks to Intel to send the Shrimps one of the rare press kits. Time to see what this new technology brings to it's end users.

Possible Daily Overclocks

So let's try to squeeze a little bit more out of this brand new CPU architecture. We are still using the Intel 2011LCS and limited ourselves to a moderate 1.4Vcore for the hexacore CPUs (970-990x and the 3960X) We ended up by a respectfull 4.5Ghz OC on our C1 stepping CPU. Not bad, but there's more left in it with better cooling and a more user friendly motherboard.

AMD 1090T OC'ed at 4ghz, NB speed 2600Mhz
FX 8150 OC'ed at 4.6Ghz NB speed 2400Mhz
2600K OC'ed at 4.5Ghz
970 OC'ed at 4.2Ghz, uncore at 3200Mhz
990X OC'ed at 4.5Ghz, uncore at 3200Mhz
3960X OC'ed at 4.5Ghz

Rams remain at 1600Mhz C8-8-8-24 1T

In the Deep Fritz 12 Chess benchmark the 3960X at 4.5ghz stays nicely in front.

More profound outcome in Cinebench where the new technology hammers the rest of the tested CPUs

POVRay 3.62 manages to beat the little socket 1155 SB CPU when running at the same clocks.

Encoding the movie with the X264 codec is blistering fast on the brand new SB-E CPU.

Multithreaded SuperPi is litterally devoured by the AVX instructions. And before we indulge ourselves in some SLI gaming, winrarring ahead, way ahead of any other CPU...

A quick spin in BF3 Operation Swordbreaker gave us these results. The 3960X neck to neck with the 2600K CPU for the highest FPS output. Limiting factor, even at the high preset is the GTX480 GPU.

In Dirt 3, the little 2600K SB is not throwing in the towel at all. Intel has to fear no competition, besides the CPUs in it's own ranks

Comment from Gamer @ 2011/11/14

Nice one Leeghoofd !!!

Comment from Teemto @ 2011/11/15

Indeed, where does he find the time

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.