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Star Swarm, Thief, Tomb Raider, And WoW

Intel Core i7-5960X, -5930K, And -5820K CPU Review: Haswell-E Rises
By , Igor Wallossek

Star Swarm Stress Test

Given AMD’s use of the Star Swarm demo to show how Mantle alleviates CPU dependency, we hoped to use the DirectX-based build for the opposite purpose. But our frame rate over time graph is downright frenetic. It’s hard to know whether a 300-second sample accurately pits these platforms against each other.

To be fair, Oxide Games concedes to the non-deterministic nature of its stress test. It’s the same issue we face trying to benchmark Arma 3 and Battlefield 4’s multi-player components—as soon as you involve the AI calculations needed to tax a processor, variability starts affecting the results. Removing this would shift the bottleneck back over to graphics.

Thief

The Core i7-5820K shows up at the top of another gaming chart, again followed by Core i7-4790K. Not that the results in Thief are particularly telling. All of these CPUs are fast enough to keep up with a single GeForce GTX Titan.

Tomb Raider

Tomb Raider has the -4790K on top of the -5820K, though both CPUs trail Intel’s Core i7-3970X. In reality, there’s just no way you’d be able to distinguish between any of these platforms, particularly considering their low frame time variance numbers.

World of Warcraft

WoW is another game known for exaggerating platform characteristics. And you can add it to the list of titles particularly fond of Intel’s Core i7-5820K, with the -4790K not far behind. Flip through to the frame rate over time chart, and you’ll see a tight grouping through our benchmark run.

If anything, the Core i7-5960X’s lower clock rate negatively affects its frame time variance result. The same holds true in almost every other game benchmark, too.

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  • 1 Hide
    wireframed , 29 August 2014 18:24
    Well, that's a bit of a mixed bag. The review was nice, though.

    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... :o 
  • 0 Hide
    haider95 , 30 August 2014 17:56
    sweepstakes only for US users?
  • 0 Hide
    Robi_g , 30 August 2014 22:06
    Text on the competition PC says EVGA motherboard, but the picture has an ASrock one.
  • -1 Hide
    Robi_g , 30 August 2014 22:06
    Text on the competition PC says EVGA motherboard, but the picture has an ASrock one.
  • -1 Hide
    Robi_g , 30 August 2014 22:07
    Text on the competition PC says EVGA motherboard, but the picture has an ASrock one.
  • -1 Hide
    BigBadBeef , 2 September 2014 05:45
    I am an enthusiast and even I say "NO" to this marketet prototype. I will not participate as Intel's guinea pig.
  • 0 Hide
    LePhuronn , 4 September 2014 14:59
    Although I agree with the logic behind the "smart choice" at the end of this article, in the real world the PCI-E lane count for gaming is a moot point. X99 is NOT a gaming platform. It is a workstation and productivity platform. Regardless of how much you hobble your CPU, you're still paying £300 for the motherboard and £400 for comparatively paultry amounts of RAM, so the price of overall Haswell-E adoption is very high.

    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.
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