Intel Core i7 980X Extreme Review: An Overall Look at the Core i7 Family

Synthetic Performance

SPECviewperf v10 doesn't seem to take any advantage of the extra pair of cores, as the 980X Extreme Edition performed pretty much on par with the other Core i7 processors in both Maya and 3dsMax tests.

The new CINEBENCH R11.5 benchmark on the other hand is able to make use of all six cores and as a result the 980X provides our best CPU score yet with 8.88pts. This is a 54% performance increase over the Core i7 975 EE. OpenGL performance remains much the same on both chips as the Core i7 980X EE and Core i7 975 EE delivered 34fps.

WinRAR is another application that doesn't appear to support more than four cores. The Intel Core i7 980X was only slightly faster than the Core i7 975 EE when multi-threading. Single thread performance was also a bit faster with the Core i7 980X, which was a nice surprise considering we expected it to be a little slower than the Core i7 975 EE.