Intel Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition CPU Processor Review

We have to try and stay impartial at eTeknix when it comes to competative brands. We give a fair share to everyone and let their products do the talking and this is the key point with a couple of major brands on the market. The first is with the graphics card market, and the fight between AMD and Nvidia, and with each company, they both have their good and their bad points and we award them on their merits when we take a look at their products in our labs.

The major one however is the battle between AMD and Intel in the hope of being crowned the Processor King and for a while that crown has been held by Intel and though we don’t tend to do favoritism, Intel pretty much have the higher-end desktop market sown up with Sandy Bridge on the 1155 platform.

Whilst socket 1155 was booming and to this date still is, we saw the release of Bulldozer which was said to rival Intel, but sadly in certain aspects was a bit of a flop. The only area that it excelled in was gaming as it offered up the same performance, but for a fraction of the cost. There was however, a few consumers still running the old and trusty X58 platform with the first generation i7 processors which originally cost an arm and a leg to buy. Though they were expensive, their users seemed to stick by and branded them as the best still.

With Sandy Bridge offering a cheaper alternative, Intel decided that a refresh was needed and the idea of a new chipset and range of processors to take over the first generation i7 CPU’s and their X58 chipset was born. It was going to be called X79 and will offer the best product and best performance to date, and that’s why we’re here today. We want to find out if that is true and what the new flagship i7 3960X Extreme Edition CPU can offer over the competition.

There’s only one way to find out, but before we look at the benchmarks, we want to take a brief look at what these new range of CPUs will offer to the market.