Intel Core i7 5960X “Haswell-E” Processor Review

Final Thoughts

Pricing

As we have mentioned Intel’s Core i7 5960X has an MSRP of $999 just like its predecessors. Intel provide a three year warranty for retail versions and a one year warranty for OEM tray versions. The Core i7 5930K has a MSRP of $583 and the Core i7 5820K sits at $389.

UPDATE: Pricing in the UK has been confirmed at £759.95 at retailer Overclockers UK.

Summary

Do two extra cores make any difference to Intel’s enthusiast platform? The answer is a yes, but with some caveats. For most PC users the story is still the same as with Ivy Bridge-E: if you don’t regularly use highly multi-threaded applications you’re better off with the mainstream equivalent, which in this case means the Core i7 4770K or 4790K. These mainstream platform parts perform nearly the same and cost just a third of the price, consume less power and offer cheaper motherboards and memory. If we compare to the last-generation HEDT platform the Core i7 5960X does bring clear improvements to the table, its more power efficient than the i7 4960X at stock under light to medium loads because it uses a more efficient architecture and is clocked lower. When you load up all its cores it becomes a power drinker rather than a sipper and consumes more than the i7 4960X, but considering you’ve got 8 fully loaded and hyper-threaded Haswell cores – the power usage is impressive. Not to mention the temperatures are impressive too: at stock this is one of the coolest running Intel CPUs we’ve seen for a while which is noteworthy given how hot the Core i7 4770K and 4790K parts ran. Once you crank things up with overclocking it can get toasty very quickly but remember the CPU die is now crowded out with 8 cores, not 6 like before, so more heat and higher temperatures were to be expected from this greater density. Talking of overclocking its fair to say there’s a case of diminishing returns. More cores means more silicon variance and a higher chance of overclocking being less in raw GHz terms than an equivalent part with less cores. We also know that Haswell isn’t the greatest overclocking part, 4.5GHz seems to be the sweet spot on the mainstream platform, on the HEDT platform it’s less. That said even with our modest 4.2GHz overclock the Core i7 5960X is a pure beast: nothing can match it.

It is also important to remember that the Core i7 5960X is more than just a CPU upgrade for Intel’s HEDT. It also brings with it an entire new platform founded around the X99 chipset and DDR4 memory. The X99 motherboards that are being released alongside this CPU, such as the Gigabyte X99 Gaming 5 we tested with, offer a bucket load of features compared to X79. More SATA ports, more USB 3 ports, M.2, SATA Express, DDR4, more PCIe lanes and not to mention the fact X79 boards were fairly old and in need of a revamp. All these new X99 boards have the advantage of being given feature and component makeovers with all the progress we’ve seen in motherboard design over the last 2 and a bit years. On that basis alone I think the Haswell-E platform makes a worthy upgrade for power users: it has lots to offer. The Core i7 5960X on the other hand is going to be a niche market, most people will opt for the Core i7 5820K and rightly so: 6 Intel cores for $389 is decent and most people won’t notice the drop from 40 to 28 PCIe lanes. The Core i7 5960X appeals to the user who really needs those two extra cores, for that user who thinks 6 cores aren’t enough but doesn’t need to make the jump to a Xeon platform that offers beyond 8 cores. Or for the consumer who has a well-lined wallet and wants the best of the best, our results pretty much show the Core i7 5960X does offer this for the consumer market. Whether you’re gaming, rendering, encoding, working or using your PC regularly for some other form of intensive activity you’ll find the Core i7 5960X does it the best, no questions asked. The one thing that always held me back about the Core i7 4960X was the dated X79 platform, now we’ve got more cores, exclusive DDR4 and a revamped platform: Today is a great day to be a performance enthusiast!

Pros

• Staggering performance
• Solid thermals
• Swanky new X99 platform – DDR4, more storage options
• No price increase over Ivy Bridge-E

Cons

• Limited overclocking headroom
• Hefty TDP

“Intel’s Core i7 5960X proudly leads the high end desktop into a new phase of high performance computing. 8 cores, DDR4 support and a revamped X99 platform make the Core i7 5960X the ultimate acquisition for any serious PC user.”

Thank you to Intel for providing this review sample.