REVIEW: Intel Core i7-3960X and Intel X79 DX79SI

LinX Linpack Benchmark
In LinX we ran the processor in both hyperthreaded and non-hyperthreaded modes in order to show the Linpack performance difference with the Core i7-3960X when hyperthreading is enabled or disabled and what some may be able to expect from this processor in the server world.

With the Core i7-3960X having Hyper-Threading on it scored a peak of 64.9275 GFLOPS. When running with Hyper-Threading off, there is a small gain to 69.1810 GFLOPS. This is still significantly better than what we tested with our last CPU review in the FX-8150 which only scored 30GFLOPS meaning that the Core i7-3960X is more than twice as poweful as the FX-8150 in terms of Linpack performance.

Passmark

We ran two test suites in Passmark, the CPU and Memory marks. In the CPU Mark, we end up re-hashing a lot of the same benchmarks that we ran in the past.

In the CPU Mark, you can see that overall, the 3960X effectively is about 20% faster than the 2600K and 30% faster than the 990X. In the prim numbers test we can see that the Core i7 3960X struggles a bit compared to the other Intel processors and especially against the FX-8150 where it takes the cake. The same story can be said for floating point math where the FX-8150 is 26%. Otherwise, in almost every single test the Core i7 3960X pretty much wins by quite a bit.

In the Passmark Memory Mark test we were interested to see that the Core i7-3960X scored far ahead of all the other processors including the 990FX which it beats by about 20%. Interestingly enough, though, the i7-3960X doesn't bode as well against the i7-990X and i7-2600K in the rest of the tests, similar to what we saw in AIDA64, so we can be sure that our results both tests are not erroneous.

Video Encoding
For video encoding, we ran two different tests. One being a benchmark and the other being a real-world test of handbrake.



In the x264 HD benchmark, we saw that the Core i7 3960X performs quite well over the 2600K in the second pass where it gets an almost 20% improvement. In the first pass, though it does only 4% better than the 2600K. meanwhile, in handbrake we managed to take a 1080P file and convert it into an iPhone resolution in 20 minutes, this was achieved at an average frame rate of 97.843 with zero errors and zero drops. This is in contrast to the FX-8150 we just tested which got an average frame rate of 95.5 and took a little over 21 minutes to accomplish.