Intel Core i7-3960X Review

PC Mark Vantage

Something strange is happening in PC Mark Vantage. Whilst the memory scores we’ve seen previously aren’t exactly where we’d hope that they would be, nonetheless there isn’t a particular reason why PC Mark is having such a difficult time in taking full advantage of the bandwidth available. This greatly affects the Memory score, which is as low as the shoddy score we saw from Bulldozer, and has ramifications in that low Memory performance hugely affects the Productivity score and final PC Mark score. We have other boards on hand and will find out if this is just part of the Intel board, or an issue with Vantage.

PC Mark 7

The much newer PC Mark 7 doesn’t seem to have the issue we saw in Vantage, with the i7-3960X pumping out an enormous score for a stock system. Heck it’s a big score for any system.