Conclusion

Having a closer look at the results we gathered while testing eight different games and two different benchmarks with two different presets, we see that the Intel Core i7-4960X, with our "low-preset" is on average 15 percent faster than the Core i7-3960X. Switching to our "high-preset" makes the Intel Core i7-4960X become 12 percent quicker than the Core i7-3960X. Overclocking the Intel Core i7-4960X to 4.5 GHz makes the performance with our "low-preset" go up by 34 percent and when it comes to the high-preset the increase in performance is 30 percent. Regarding the Core i7-3960X the situation is a little bit different: 24 percent gain with "low-preset" and 18 percent with "high-preset". Other than that a quick look at power consumption is also interesting. In this case we see that overclocking the Core i7-4960X to 4.5 GHz makes power consumption of our system go up by 12 percent. With the Core i7-3960X we see there is an additional 16 percent needed.

In the past we've been testing the same system equipped with one as well as two high-end single GPU graphics cards. Especially with one GPU and in case of our high-preset the graphics card is then going to be the limiting factor, meaning changing the CPU or even overclocking processors doesn't make for a decent performance difference. As soon as we're adding a second or even a third high-end graphics card, the bottleneck regarding graphics cards is open and overclocking CPU architecture as well as CPU clocks will make a difference even with the high preset.

Should you be thinking about buying a Core i7-4960X processor for your gaming PC, in which you have three high-end graphics cards running in SLI, then the performance gain, when upgrading from a Core i7-3960X to a Core i7-4960X is going to be about 12 percent on average. Keeping in mind this CPU costs about 870 Euro we should be asking ourselves if this is really worth the additional money. If you put in perspective what difference a new graphics card can make regarding frames per second, then the answer is simply: no. But should you be one of the power users who always demands the best possible components, then the Core i7-4960X certainly is an upgrade.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 9 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2
Page 2 - Test Setup	Page 10 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 11 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 4 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 12 - Metro: Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 4	Page 13 - Power Consumption
Page 6 - BattleField 3	Page 14 - Performance Index
Page 7 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 15 - Conclusion
Page 8 - Crysis 3