Battlefield 4
I knew the content creation, productivity, and media encoding benchmarks would make the Core i7-5960X look good. After all, a great many of those tests were selected months and years ago for their ability to isolate host processor performance. But I’m counting on the games to show value in the six- and even four-core processors, since they often favor architecture and clock rate over core count.
Battlefield 4 gives us an early taste of that hypothesis in practice; the Core i7-5820K and -5930K take first and second place. More surprising is that the Core i7-4790K falls to last. It centers on Haswell and sports the highest clock rate in our comparison. Big L3 caches have to be giving the eight- and other six-core CPUs their advantage.
Grid 2
Known for its host processor and memory dependency, Grid 2 might have been expected to exhibit a wider delta between first and last place. But all of these CPUs feed a single GeForce GTX Titan quickly. The Core i7-5820K notably claims its second first-place finish, followed by Intel’s Core i7-4790K. It’s good to know you don’t need to drop disgusting amounts of cash on your next platform to get great frame rates, right? Invest in your graphics subsystem instead.
Metro: Last Light
Even though Metro is a GPU showcase, we can’t help but notice the Core i7-5820K in first place again. The -4790K and -5930K following it are just slightly faster than three generations of Extreme Edition processors, plus a £1500 Xeon.
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- Three New CPUs For Enthusiasts
- X99, LGA 2011-3 and DDR4: Get Ready For A Big Upgrade
- How We Tested Core i7-5960X, -5930K, And -5820K
- Synthetic Benchmarks
- Real-World Benchmarks
- Battlefield 4, Grid 2, And Metro: Last Light
- Star Swarm, Thief, Tomb Raider, And WoW
- Power, In Depth: Stock Clock Rates
- Power, In Depth: Eight and Six Cores at 3.5 GHz
- Power, In Depth: Eight and Six Cores at 4 GHz
- Power, In Depth: Eight and Six Cores at 4.5 GHz
- Power, In Depth: CPU Health at 4.8 GHz
- Measuring DDR4 Power Consumption
- Power Consumption Through Our Benchmark Suite
- Intel Keeps Enthusiasts On Its Most Modern Design With Haswell-E
Personally, the 3DS and After Effects benchmarks were of most interest, since they are what I spend most of the CPU time on. (3DS in particular, right now I'm logging dozens of CPU hours a day on 3DS alone). It's pretty clear that unless the platform costs of Haswell-E are much higher than IB-E, going with the old won't make sense. The 5930k beats the 4960X. which is at least 50% more expensive.
I've been waiting forever for an upgrade to my i7 930 based workstation, and I didn't feel like jumping on an IB-E a couple months before a brand-new HEDT platform is released.
I had hoped Haswell-E would be a bit more impressive, but OTOH, investing in a DDR4 platform now might be a good idea, given my workstations typically have 3-4 years in them. At the very least, a drop-in upgrade to Broadwell-E would be nice to have as an option.
Now to see how big a pounding I'll take in Denmark for X99/DDR4/Haswell-E...
Therefore anybody who's going to load up on GPUs enough to worry about PCI-E lanes will have sufficient money to drop in a 5960X on principle. Anybody who's adopting X99 for productivity purposes will not skimp on core count and also go 5960X, especially considering they're likely to go at least 32GB RAM and therefore shelling out a lot of money. Those producing on CUDA cards may not even go X99 at all because 1150 Haswell has more than enough power to run the software. Folders and CUDA Miners similarly will want all GPUs running at full tilt so will likely invest in the 5960X to get all the PCI-E lanes.
So really, the only "smart choice" is 5960X or don't go X99 at all.