Intel Sandy Bridge-E Debuts: Core i7-3960X Reviewed

Memory Bandwidth Performance

The memory bandwidth of the Core i7-3960X is surprisingly low given it was tested with quad-channel DDR3-1866 memory. The read throughput reached just 18.1GB/s, while the write performance was limited to 15.1GB/s. This made the Core i7-3960X roughly 9% slower than the Core i5-2500K when measuring read performance and 18% slower for the write performance.

Despite the weaker than expected memory bandwidth performance, we were happy to find that the L2 cache performance of the Core i7-3960X was greater than that or the original Sandy Bridge processors.