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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.

RAM Dividers tested

Ram divider tests are up next. As the Intel board refused to post with any imaginable ram setting for my GTX2 Hyper kit, I had to opt for another approach. Only option was taking the G.Skills RipjawsZ and let them do a run at I know ridicilous timings of 9-11-9-27 for each ram divider. From 1333 up to 2133Mhz. It would have been marvellous if the Corsair GTX2 Hyper kit could have been tested at CL8-8-8-24 from 1333Mhz up to 2133Mhz, but no go... no matter what I tried, the Siler board didn't allow me to boot the setup...

SuperPi is not unknown to love high bandwith. So no surpises at all to see it scale drastically with increased ram speeds. As with the Bulldozer the scaling becomes less from 1866Mhz. Maybe AIDA64 can enlighten us.

AIDA64 showing us Read and Copy taking drastic leaps in bandwith when we up the ram speed. Especially the Copy takes over at 2133Mhz. The scaling of the Read test is a bit less from 1866Mhz on.

The Deep Fritz Chess test gaining some nice calculating power with increased ram speed.

Very light scaling in the Cinebench Release 10 64 bit edition. I wonder if we could have tightened the timings if the scores wouldn't have been similar...

The X264HD encoding test at 1866Mhz is boosting away from the lower dividers. Upping the ram speed to 2133Mhz jields a lower gain.

As with all previous tested platforms, increased ram speeds only give a hardly noticeable gain in 3D. For gamers even 1333Mhz ram would do just fine. The below game tests were executed at 1920 x 1080 resolution, high detail preset but with no filtering or such.

Comment from Gamer @ 2011/11/14

Nice one Leeghoofd !!!

Comment from Teemto @ 2011/11/15

Indeed, where does he find the time

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