Intel Core i7-3960X review

As expected, the processor overclocks well. We turned the multiplier up to 48 to give a 4.8GHz clock speed – about the same as the highest speeds we’ve seen on Intel’s Core i5-2500K. The stable overclock was helped by the RTS2011LC water cooler Intel supplied with the chip, which stayed cool and quiet even with our 1.5GHz overclock; we’re still waiting for a price on the cooler. At this speed, we saw 145 overall in our benchmarks, which is the fastest score we’ve ever seen. However, it’s only four points faster than the Palicomp Phoenix i5 Shinobi, which has a Core i5-2500K running at 4.8GHz – again, showing that applications struggle to take advantage of six cores.

There’s no doubt that the Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition is a hugely powerful processor. However, in real-world tasks it has the same problem as AMD’s eight-core FX-8150 Bulldozer processor, with many applications struggling to take advantage of the extra cores. This still doesn’t stop the Core i7-3960X being the fastest processor we’ve ever seen, but, unless you’re running several intensive applications alongside each other, it’s not drastically quicker than the £170 Intel Core i5-2500K, which is £670 cheaper and requires a far less expensive LGA1155 motherboard. The Sandy Bridge Extreme is the ultimate processor, but most people will rarely find situations where they need that much power.