Hardware Award
INTEL Core i7 3970X
RRP: $999.99 | Website: www.intel.com
Test Machine
Intel DX79SR
Corsair Dominator Platinum
2,666MHz C10
MSI NGTX680 Lightning
Cooler Master M2 Silent Pro
1500W PSU
Windows 7 64-Bit SP1
B
y today’s standards
SNB-E CPUs are slow.
If you look at HWBOT
all you see is Ivy-Bridge CPUs
dominating pretty much every
single benchmark there is. No
surprise there as there’s no
beating the IPC of that family
of CPUs. Despite being limited
to eight threads at most, the
performance advantage over
last generation Core CPUs is
enough to make up for that in
many of the benchmarks.
There are some benchmarks
however where this is not
24 The OverClocker Issue 22 | 2012
possible and this is where
the 3970X comes in. The X79
platform in fact exists for us
enthusiast s and overclockers
for the sole purpose of
pursuing even higher
benchmark results and multiGPU 3D benchmark records.
For the gamers, there’s
little incentive to buy into the
platform over what Z77 offers,
as this CPU would actually be a
step backwards in performance.
Fortunately, though, if you do
more with your system than
play games and use heavily
threaded programs, this CPU is
worth its high price tag. $1,000
is a lot of money to ask for
what isn’t the fastest CPU on
the block at everything, but for
that you do get the maximum
amount of threads available
in a single desktop CPU, quad
channel memory support, the
most amount of PCI Express
lanes and in general enough
horsepower to drive quad GPU
systems properly.
Quad SLI on Z77 if you’re not
aware doesn’t work as well
as it should, despite several
board vendors resorting to a
3rd party PCI-Express “switch”
to maximize PCIe lanes. The
performance just isn’t there to
power for instance a four way
GTX680 configuration. If the
ultimate gaming experience if
what you want across several
displays, you may want to
consider the X79 platform as.
You’ll most certainly spend
more (once you commit to a
$1,000 CPU pricing shouldn’t be
at the top of your priorities list
–Ed), but you’ll also get better
performance from it.
As you may already know,
there’s not much to this CPU
over the 3960X other than a
200MHz frequency boost and
with that a similarly higher
TDP at a whooping 150W. That
may seem excessive, but we
found that you can pretty much
expect the same overclocking
headroom when using air
cooling. With liquid nitrogen or
dry ice, the CPU clocks higher
than the previous 3960X we had
and better than all the 3930K
CPUs we’ve ever had. It’s not
by a large margin as it’s just