Intel Core i7 5930K

The leap from £460 to £760 when this article was published from the Core i7-5930K to the Core i7-5960X is a big one, and we'd much rather put the difference towards an awesome X99 motherboard or additional GPU or both. However, if you're a heavy renderer, or using other programs that regularly make upwards of 90 per cent use of 16 threads, then this is one seriously fast CPU that's quite simply crazy fast once overclocked.

This time around, Intel’s stack is organized differently. Stepping down to the -5930K means losing two cores right off the bat. There is no intermediate eight-core option. So, if the rest of the Haswell-E line-up consists of six-core CPUs, why not drop another notch to the Core i7-5820K? Some enthusiasts will thumb their noses at Intel for cutting 12 lanes of third-gen PCI Express from its 40-lane controller, but as differentiators go, that one’s pretty tame.

The 5930K will be the tough one to sell, at 583 USD it is mereley a notch faster to the 5820K (and that one has an unlocked multiplier so you easily tweak that out). This biggest difference would be 40 PCIe lanes and we somehow doubt that warrants a 194 USD price difference.

Intel's first generation High-End Desktop platform, the Nehalem (X58 Tylersburg) was launch back in November 2008 which ushered in a new era of high performance computing for desktop users. In 2011, Intel released the second generation update based on...