It's always interesting to get hands-on time with unreleased hardware. We were recently able to benchmark Intel's upcoming Core i7-3960X CPU, comparing it to Core i7-990X, Core i7-2600K, and AMD's Phenom II X6. Will you be in line for Sandy Bridge-E?
There was a lot to like about Intel’s Sandy Bridge launch earlier this year. Single-threaded performance increased significantly at any given frequency. Quick Sync demonstrated commanding dominance over GPU-based transcoding from AMD and Nvidia. And, although I wasn’t over-enthused about paying extra for a K-series SKU, a mature 32 nm process easily facilitated clock rates approaching 5 GHz on air cooling.
Combined, all of those attributes took the spotlight off of Intel’s old (but still flagship) LGA 1366 interface. Even the subsequent Core i7-990X refresh, which threw six cores and a higher clock rate into the ring, wasn’t able to outperform the Core i7-2600K in enough test scenarios to warrant its £800 price tag. The very fastest (and most expensive) Sandy Bridge-based chip could satisfy 95% of enthusiasts at less than half of the cost.
The Gulftown design’s real redeeming quality was its core count advantage, which shone most brightly in well-threaded workstation apps. But really, that was pretty much it. We even went to great lengths to show the X58’s 36 lanes of PCI Express 2.0 weren’t a real advantage over Sandy Bridge’s 16 lanes in multi-GPU configurations through an exhaustive three-part series.
At the end of the day, we had to scratch our heads and wonder how many folks would be willing to spend almost over £550 more on Core i7-990X when Core i7-2600K was already so fast, and priced at £240.
But what if it was possible to cram what originally made Gulftown sexy into the Sandy Bridge mold? That’s exactly the premise behind Sandy Bridge-E, set to become the next enthusiast-oriented platform, replacing Gulftown and its LGA 1366 infrastructure.
More important than what Sandy Bridge-E is going to do on the desktop is what it’ll become in the server space. Truly, this is a design destined to drive Intel’s Xeon E5 family, comprised of 1P-, 2P-, and 4P-capable parts.
A Naming Convention, Revised
For the time being, Sandy Bridge-E is expected to reach enthusiasts in three different trims: the Core i7-3960X, the Core i7-3930K, and the Core i7-3820.
| Second-Gen Core i7 Processor Family | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Processor | Base Clock | Max. Turbo Clock | Cores / Threads | L3 Cache | Memory | Interface | TDP |
| Core i7-3960X *Unlocked | 3.3 GHz | 3.9 GHz | 6/12 | 15 MB | 4-channel DDR3-1600 | LGA 2011 | 130 W |
| Core i7-3930K *Unlocked | 3.2 GHz | 3.8 GHz | 6/12 | 12 MB | 4-channel DDR3-1600 | LGA 2011 | 130 W |
| Core i7-3820 *Partially Unlocked | 3.6 GHz | 3.9 GHz | 4/8 | 10 MB | 4-channel DDR3-1600 | LGA 2011 | 130 W |
| Core i7-2600K *Unlocked | 3.4 GHz | 3.8 GHz | 4/8 | 8 MB | 2-channel DDR3-1333 | LGA 1155 | 95 W |
| Core i7-2600 | 3.4 GHz | 3.8 GHz | 4/8 | 8 MB | 2-channel DDR3-1333 | LGA 1155 | 95 W |
| Core i7-2600S | 2.8 GHz | 3.8 GHz | 4/8 | 8 MB | 2-channel DDR3-1333 | LGA 1155 | 95 W |
Although the model names suggest that Intel might consider this a third iteration of its Core micro-architecture, the press decks I’ve seen clearly list the three new Sandy Bridge-E parts as “second-generation Core i7s.”
By now, we’ve had increasingly confusing names beaten over our heads by so many companies that the inelegance of “Core i7-3960X” bounces right off. Intel Core i7—OK, that part’s easy enough. The “3” is a generational reference, and the “960” is the actual model number. Incidentally, 960 doesn’t seem to compare favourably to the outgoing Gulftown-based 990. But Intel didn’t really give itself much room to manoeuvre there.
Even the letter suffixes are familiar by now. The “X” at the end of -3960X represents Intel’s Extreme Edition family—a designation generally reserved for one SKU at any given time at the top of the desktop stack. The “K” at the end of -3930K denotes lower-end, but still multiplier-unlocked models, also geared to enthusiasts. And the fact that the -3820 bears no modifier suggests it’ll follow in the footsteps of Core i7-2600 and i5-2500, offering limited overclockability (a handful of 100 MHz bins over and above the top Turbo Boost frequency, if history is any indication).
- Sandy Bridge-E And X79 Are Almost Ready
- Sandy Bridge-E: Combining Two Pretty Popular Worlds
- X79 Express And Another New Processor Interface
- Overclocking Sandy Bridge-E
- Hardware Setup And Benchmarks
- Benchmark Results: PCMark 7
- Benchmark Results: 3DMark 11
- Benchmark Results: Sandra 2011
- Benchmark Results: Content Creation
- Benchmark Results: Productivity
- Benchmark Results: Media Encoding
- Benchmark Results: Metro 2033
- Benchmark Results: F1 2010
- Benchmark Results: Aliens Vs. Predator
- Sandy Bridge-E: More Speed On The Desktop, But A Bigger Deal To Servers

You forgot about the additional 2 chanels of RAM. Consider 4 identical modules. With LGA1155, the additional 2 modules (3 and 4) offer only additional RAM, but do not affect performance. On LGA2011, the additional 2 modules also increase memory access speed (think about a 4-lane highway vs 2-lane).
That's cool, except I have 2 sticks of 4gb's, I still can't see a need to go beyond 8gb (at home at least). Despite this though, looking at the benchmarks is incredibly disappointing, clock for clock it's generally the same as the 2600k, the only improvement is if something requires 6 cores... For gaming, we all know the additional pci express lanes even in crossfire makes very little difference, maybe a bit more in quadfire, but still, not sure if it's worth it
From my POV, the 2600k is still the best upgrade right now.
Hey dude,
Hate to break it to you but if you don't need all that memory bandwidth then it's like buying a Ferrari to pootle about town - at 30mph.
Don't forget that for regular Desktop CPU stuff (web browsing, gaming, etc.) it's memory latency that counts - not bandwidth...
CPU Architecture #101
It would be great if all future CPU benchmarks included the DAWbench benchmark. Especially those that feature products not targeted at gamers but at creative people.
Hate to break it to you but if you don't need all that memory bandwidth then it's like buying a Ferrari to pootle about town - at 30mph.
Don't forget that for regular Desktop CPU stuff (web browsing, gaming, etc.) it's memory latency that counts - not bandwidth...
CPU Architecture #101
Except that the examples you gave, even memory latency does not affect it much. It's hidden pretty good behing cache.
But turn to compiling a big project on an SSD(like Android 4 which they say requires 16GB or RAM), and the additional 2 channels give a nice boost. Also video compression scales good with bandwidth.
And those that have the money and go for "Extreme", those would drive a Ferrary in town at 30mph (ok, maybe 60 if traffic is light).