Intel Core i7-3930K Review

Introduction

When we reviewed the i7-3960X it was clearly an absolute behemoth of a thing. In nearly every test we threw at it we saw numbers far beyond anything we'd previously attained. In fact it's so good that we now use it as the foundation for our stock test rig for GPUs.

Of course the problem with it was the same problem that we see in all high-end Intel CPUs, and that's the eye-watering price-tag that it comes with. One of the big downsides to a high price-tag is that we can all dream about owning one, but very few can actually afford it.

Being very aware of this Intel always release a few more affordable processors that are based upon the big daddy and that's what we have here today in the guise of the Intel Core i7-3930K. It goes without saying that "affordable" is a relative term with the i7-3930K being a pretty big £450, but does the performance match the 40% price reduction when compared to its i7-3960X brother?

Technical Specifications

Certainly looking at the specifications table we're only losing a tiny bit of speed and a little bit of cache when compared to the i7-3960X, so the i7-3930K shouldn't be too badly hindered.