Ivy Bridge-E i7 4960X Roughly 10% Faster Than Sandy Bridge-E i7 3970X

We haven’t really seen much in the way of Ivy Bridge-E performance but given the roughly 5-10% leap in performance we saw between Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge we can probably expect to see something similar with the Sandy Bridge-E to Ivy Bridge-E transition. Indeed early engineering sample testing of a Ivy Bridge-E CPU shows that at stock i7 4960X specifications, the sample was able to out-pace the stock i7 3970X by approximately 5-10% across a variety of tests.

The two processors use a common socket design – LGA 2011 – and so were both chips were tested on an MSI X79A-GD45 Plus motherboard with v17.1 BIOS and 16GB of 1600MHz RAM. The early testing used SuperPi mod 1.6, CPU Mark ’99, WPrime 1.63, Cinebench 11.5, 3DMark Vantage CPU score and 3DMark 06 CPU score.

Here are the results:

Cinebench 11.5 – 3970X 10.16 and 4960X 10.94

SuperPi 32M Mod 1.6 – 3970X 595.4 seconds and 4960X 562.6 seconds

CPU Mark ’99 – 3970X 533 and 4960X 561

3DMark Vantage CPU – 3970X 35804 and 4960X 38644

3DMark 06 CPU – 3970X 8099 and 4960X 8586

WPrime 1.63 – 3970X 5.01 seconds and 4960X 4.601 seconds

So the results show about 5-10% higher performance depending on the application so there is nothing really out of the ordinary here. I think what most people will want to know about Ivy Bridge-E is how the overclocking is, hot high the temperatures are and what the power consumption is like.

Unfortunately we will have to wait a while yet to see that information. If you want to see the proof screenshots for the above results then please see the source.

What do you think of these results? Are they what you expected? Are the generational improvements enough to make you want to upgrade?

Source