Intel's Marketing Team Allow Loose

Earlier getting on with the conclusion I would just similar to bespeak out that we couldn't include whatsoever overclocking tests or info on the new Turbo Heave Max 3.0 feature. The reason for this is uncomplicated: we don't take a motherboard that supports the new Turbo Boost feature and that aforementioned motherboard doesn't desire to overclock the Core i7-6950X either.

Unfortunately, Intel didn't requite us a proper heads upwardly that Broadwell-Eastward was coming, so we weren't able to adapt the necessary hardware in time. This is besides why our review is a few days late. However as things stand, the 6950X isn't a particularly great overclocker based on others' findings. Quite a bit of extra voltage is required to hit a stable 4.3GHz. That's still a 43% heave over the base of operations clock and will no doubt effect in a skilful amount of extra performance.

Out of the box, the 6950X is twenty to 30% faster than the Core i7-5960X in applications that can utilise those extra cores. These kind of gains were seen in all of the application and encoding tests. Impressively, the 6950X gives this extra grunt while consuming less power, providing a strong advantage on all performance fronts.

Sadly, the chip's solid results are shattered by its horrible price. With an MSRP of $1,723, the Core i7-6950X is absurdly expensive, and while you could fence Intel tin ask for outrageous prices because information technology has no competition, that isn't entirely true.

As we noted earlier, Intel's own Xeon range makes the 6950X a bit pointless at this cost range. The 10-core Xeon E5-2640 v4 can be had for $939 and operates at a respectable three.4GHz -- you could fifty-fifty buy 2 for a beastly 20-cadre/40-thread system. For the same ~$1,700 you could also buy the xiv-core/28-threaded Xeon E5-2680 v4 which operates between 2.4GHz and 3.3GHz -- that'south a twoscore% increment in cores and comes with ECC support.

Another choice was seen with our budget-friendly dual-Xeon E5-2670 build. For just $700 we purchased a pair of viii-core E5-2670 processors along with a brand new dual-socket LGA2011 motherboard and 64GB of DDR3 memory. It was interesting to notice that in many of the application and encoding tests this older Sandy Bridge-EP build was able to put up a real fight and in terms of performance vs. toll, comes out well on top.

Given Intel'south pricing scheme for these new processors, we expect Broadwell to be virtually as well received on the LGA2011 platform every bit it was on the 1150 platform, though naturally for unlike reasons.

Pros: Consistently 20-30% more than application and encoding performance than the i7-5960X while using less power.

Cons: Ridiculously high pricing at over $i,700 -- essentially the same toll as the fourteen-core Xeon E5-2680 v4.