Intel Core i7-3960X Review

If you’re one of those people who skips straight to the results, then shame on you, and it’s worth reiterating, these are STOCK settings in our testing.

AIDA64

CPU Benchmarks

When looking at your current setup and wondering if an upgrade is necessary it’s easy to forget how much technology advances. A perfect example of it is right here with the i7-3960X when compared against its 32nm brother the i7-990X. Or indeed anything else in the graph. This is ridiculously quick in the AIDA testing. So much so that neither the Hexcore power of the i7-990X nor the huge clockspeed of the 5GHz 2600K come anywhere near it.

Memory Benchmarks

From the sublime to the ridiculous. We know that the Triple Channel of the X58, here demonstrated by another Westmere CPU the i7-970, was never quite as fast as we all hoped, and equally that the dual-channel capabilities of the Sandy Bridge was very fast indeed. So theoretically the speed of Sandy Bridge dual-channel doubled with the Quad Channel available to the X79 should have given us incredible bandwidth. Certainly here it doesn’t.