Introduction

Core i7 4960X Review - Six Core Processor Sweetness

G'day Sir and welcome to our Intel Core i7-4960X (Ivy Bridge-E / IBE) processor review. Intel last year launched the Series 7 chipsets and accompanying quad-core Ivy Bridge processors like with Core i5 Core i7 as mainstream and for example the Core i7 3770 as high-end products. Though the new generation Haswell processors already launched, Intel has delayed the IBE products you are about to see today as much as they could. The factual release and timing of Ivy Bridge-E is somewhat peculiar to market even. But sure, today we review the all new Core i7 4960X (Ivy Bridge-E) processor and smack it on a X79 based motherboard. Intel's most high-end processors just got updated with a high-end six-core processor series aimed at consumers. The Intel Core i7-4960X processors and other Ivy Bridge-E chips are released on the market this September, these CPUs are drop-in compatible with the well known X79 - LGA2011 infrastructure.

Amongst the bigger competitors for Ivy Bridge-E, believe it or not still is is the aging X58 platform released in 2008, pop a nice six-core Core i7 980X/990X on there and the raw performance is still competitive. In retrospect as such one could say that X58 / Core i7 980X (Gulftown) have been products that might have been a little too good. After Gulftown came the six-core Sandy Bridge-E processors like the Core i7 3960X, roughly offering equal performance to that of Gulftown but offering much better overclock potential.

Today however, we have an article covering the Intel Core i7-4960X (Ivy Bridge-E) and X79 based motherboard. An update to the true high-end six-core processor series aimed at consumers. A processor that is now smaller, based on 22nm technology that comes with most of the bells and whistles we have learned to like and love of the initial Ivy Bridge processor generation.

Three processors will be released today (4960X / 4930K and 4820K); two Ivy Bridge-E CPUs will have six cores, one model has four cores, hyper-threaded to either eight or twelve threads, the AVX instruction set is here and all processors have a high yet fair 130W TDP.  Impressive yes, but sure there are there is an advantage, the processor does not need a new motherboard as it comes on socket LGA 2011 thus upgrade the system BIOS of your X79 platform and boom, you should be ready to rock and roll. To proof just that we took the MSI X79A-GD65 8D and merely updated its BIOS. Next to that we pair this processor with a nice quad channel memory that is rocking it steady bringing serious levels of bandwidth to the overall platform.

Anyway, head on over to the next page where we'll discuss Ivy Bridge-E processors with the respective models being released. We'll also have a chat about the MSI X79 motherboard used as well as the chipset and then will throw a decent photo-shoot and a benchmark suite at the products and get an indication what performance is like with the Intel Core i7-4960X (Ivy Bridge-E) and X79 Platform.

Next page please, oh and please do enjoy the processor sweetness.