Intel Ivy Bridge-E Core i7-4960X Pitted Against Core i7-3970X At 4.5 GHz Clock Speeds and DDR3-3000 MHz

Intel's flagship Core i7-4960X and the rest of the Ivy Bridge-E processors arrive on 11th September with the new 22nm design process featuring tri-gate architecture. We have already seen the performance preview of the Core i7-4930K which proves to be a mere 5% improvement over Core i7-3930K. Today, thanks to Coolaler Forums, we will be looking at the overclocked performance of the flagship Core i7-4960X processor against the previous flag-ship Core i7-3970X.

Intel Ivy Bridge-E Core i7-4960X Pitted Against Core i7-3970X At 4.5 GHz

Going into specifications, the Core i7-4960X features 6 cores and 12 threads with 12 MB of L3 cache and a 130W TDP package. The Core i7-4960X is clocked at 3.60 GHz base and 4.00 GHz with Turbo boost 2.0. The processor that was tested by Coolaler is an engineering sample but considering the time left in the launch, this is almost representative of the final performance which the Core i7-4960X would feature. A few ups and downs might show up with the retail chips aside from which the overall performance would remain the same. You can check out the complete specifications of Intel’s Ivy Bridge-E lineup below:

Model	Core i7-4960X	Core i7-4930K	Core i7-4820K
Cores	6	6	4
Threads	12	12	8
Base Clock (GHz)	3.6 GHz	3.4 GHz	3.7 GHz
Turbo Clock (GHz)	4.0 GHz	3.9 GHz	3.9 GHz
L3 Cache	15 MB	12 MB	10 MB
Memory	DDR3-1866	DDR3-1866	DDR3-1866
TDP	130W	130W	130W
Price	$990	$555	$310

Both processors (Core i7-4960X vs Core i7-3970X) were tested at 4.5 GHz, it looks like 4.5 GHz would be the stable frequency for the Core i7-4960X and Core i7-4930K processors on air-cooling and would be possible with a voltage of under 1.3V. The motherboard used for the testing was ASUS's Rampage IV Formula powered by the X79 chipset and was equipped with 16 GB of Quad channel memory operating at 3000 MHz. Let's take a look at the performance numbers acquired by Coolaler during their performance evaluation:

Note - Both processors were running at 4.5 GHz clock speed and used DDR3-3000 MHz memory.

Fritz Chess Benchmark:

• Core i7-4960X @ 4.5 GHz - 705 Marks
• Core i7-3970X @ 4.5 GHz - 686 Marks

WPrime 1024M:

• Core i7-4960X @ 4.5 GHz - 125.179 Seconds
• Core i7-3970X @ 4.5 GHz - 129.139 Seconds

x264 FHD Benchmark:

• Core i7-4960X @ 4.5 GHz - 37.90 FPS / 22397.57 KB/s
• Core i7-3970X @ 4.5 GHz - 35.60 FPS

CineBench R11.5:

• Core i7-4960X @ 4.5 GHz - 13.40 Points
• Core i7-3970X @ 4.5 GHz - 13.22 Points

3DMark Vantage (W/ 4x GeForce GTX 770 SLI):

• Core i7-4960X @ 4.5 GHz CPU Score - 47975 Points
• Core i7-3970X @ 4.5 GHz CPU Score - 46179 Points

• Core i7-4960X @ 4.5 GHz Overall Score - 61961 Points
• Core i7-3970X @ 4.5 GHz Overall Score - 60070 Points

3DMark 11 (W/ 4x GeForce GTX 770 SLI):

• Core i7-4960X @ 4.5 GHz Overall Score - X12212 Points
• Core i7-3970X @ 4.5 GHz Overall Score - X12096 Points

3DMark FireStrike Extreme (W/ 4x GeForce GTX 770 SLI):

• Core i7-4960X @ 4.5 GHz Overall Score - 17498 Points
• Core i7-3970X @ 4.5 GHz Overall Score - 17693 Points

Intel Core i7-4960X Benchmarks Screenshots: