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Intel Octacore i7-5960X Haswell-E Review Part I

CPU by leeghoofd @ 2014-08-29

August 29, 2014 the launch date of another of Intel's finest desktop processors. This time the enthusiast range gets a complete overhaul! Bye bye Ivy Bridge-E, welcome 22nm successor Haswell-E and it is more than a new processor architecture; DDR4 memory support is finally here. Now in contradiction to other launch articles and due to time constraints the exploring of Intel's latest marvel will be spread out over a few parts. Having just received the sample from Intel a few days back it was nearly impossible to properly explore the new architecture. First of all our official Intel sample was lost for over a week in the Benelux Bermuda Triangle; secondly the main motherboard manufacturer which promised us a board for this article had hardly any sample stock. This Haswell-E launch seemed a bit doomed from the start. So in Part 1 we will just provide you with a quick comparison versus the previous generations we have in the MadShrimps Lab. Enlighten you with some insights on how the brand new DDR4 memory behaves versus the high end Quad Channel DDR3 counterparts. More testing is in progress and results will be covered in upcoming updates.

Stock 2D Results

We ran the Corsair Vengeance PLX at the stock rated Intel specs at 2133MHz C15-15-15-35 2T. Secondly no optimized Turbo or other bios optimizations were selected, the Intel Octacore i7-5960X CPU was ran at the default Intel Turbo settings.

Time to start off our 2D test suite with the single threaded SuperPI 32M benchmark. Even though the brand new flagship is a bit crippled in raw MHz it still holds up quite nicely. Partly due to the Haswell optimizations and most of all thanks to the massive bandwidth of the quad channel DDR4 setup.

Once we fire up the WPrime multi-threaded benchmark the i7-5960X can show its true colors, this processor is designed to make mince meat out of any multi-core optimized application. Imagine if this processor ran at the same clock speeds as the other LGA 2011 processors in the test suite.

Maxon's Cinebench R10 tells the same tale. Single threaded even with the lack of frequency, the new Haswell-E can outperform the Sandy-bridge i7-3960X processor. It even manages to come close to one of the Ivy-Bridge predecessors, the i7-4930K. Once all 8 cores are tasked, the i7-5960X just pulls away with such ease.

Cinebench version 11.5 also sheds another light on the new enthusiast platform. Where the older LGA versions were struggling to keep up with the quad core counterparts of the mainstream segment in the OpenGL tests, the new Haswell-E positions itself in the midfield. This output can be partly explained by the enhanced speeds of the DDR4 running at 2133MHz C15 versus the DDR3 running at 1600C9. Raw calculating power is where this octa-core crunching monster is at its best.

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