Haswell-E Debuts: Intel Core i7-5960X Processor Review

by Marco Chiappetta — Friday, August 29, 2014, 12:00 PM EDT

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Test Setup and SiSoft SANDRA

Test System Configuration Notes: When configuring our test systems for this article, we first entered their respective system BIOSes / UEFI and set each board to its "Optimized" or "High performance Defaults". We then saved the settings, re-entered the BIOS and set the memory frequency to the maximum officially supported speed for the given platform. The SSDs were then formatted, and Windows was installed.

The Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition Installed In The MSI X99S Gaming 7 Motherboard

When the Windows installation was complete, we fully updated the OS, and installed the drivers necessary for our components. Auto-Updating and Windows Defender were then disabled and we installed all of our benchmarking software, performed a disk clean-up, cleared temp and prefetch data, and ran the tests.

HotHardware's Test Systems

Intel and AMD - Head To Head

System 1:
Intel Core i7-5690X
(3GHz - Octo-Core)

Asus X99 Deluxe
MSI X99S Gaming 7
EVGA X99 Micro
Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5
(X99 Chipset)

4x4GB Corsair DDR4-2666
(@ 2133MHz)

GeForce GTX 280
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

System 2:
Intel Core i7-3690X
(3.33GHz - Hex-Core)
Intel Core i7-4690X
(3.33GHz - Hex-Core)

Asus P9X79 Deluxe
(X79 Express Chipset)

4x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866
(@ 1600MHz)

GeForce GTX 280
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

System 3:
Intel Core i7-990X
(3.43GHz Hex-Core)

Gigabyte EX58-UD4
(X58 Express Chipset)

3x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866
(@ 1333MHz)

GeForce GTX 280
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

System 4:
AMD FX-8150/8350
(3.6GHz Octo-Core)

Asus CrossHair V Formula
(AMD 990FX Chipset)

2x4GB G.SKILL DDR3-1866
(@ 1866MHz)

GeForce GTX 280
On-Board Ethernet
On-board Audio

OCZ Vertex 3 MaxIOPS

Preliminary Testing with SiSoft SANDRA 2014

Synthetic Benchmarks

We began our testing with SiSoftware's SANDRA 2014, the System ANalyzer, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant. We ran four of the built-in subsystem tests that partially comprise the SANDRA 2014 suite with Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition processor (CPU Arithmetic, Multimedia, Cache and Memory, and Memory Bandwidth). All of the scores reported below were taken with the CPU running at its default settings, with Turbo enabled, and with 16GB of DDR4-2133 RAM running in quad-channel mode on the ASUS X99 Deluxe X99-based motherboard.

Processor Arithmetic	Processor Multimedia
Memory Bandwidth	Cache and Memory

The new Intel Core i7-5960X led the pack in the various SiSoft SANDRA benchmark modules we ran. In the processor arithmetic test, the CPU put up an aggregate score of 183 GOPS. In the multi-media test it managed a relatively high aggregate score of 366.5MPix/s. The memory bandwidth tests is where the platform really shines though, where it offered up over 46GB/s of total bandwidth. And despite the relatively loose timings of the initial DDR4 memory available for the platform, cache and memory latency looks pretty good.