Synthetic Performance
The first test from the SPECviewperf v11 benchmark that we looked at was SolidWorks and here you can see that the Core i7-3960X provided a solid performance gain over the Core i7-2600K as well as the AMD FX processors.
The Core i7-3960X was even more dominant in the SPECviewperf v11 Maya test, delivering 14fps making it 30% faster than the AMD FX-4170 and 41% faster than the Core i7-2600K.
In CINEBENCH R11.5 the Core i7-3960X provides the same impressive OpenGL performance as the Sandy Bridge processors when paired with the GeForce GTX 580. The CPU performance on the other hand was amazing, blowing the older Sandy Bridge processors out of the water. Here the Core i7-3960X was 55% faster than the Core i7-2600K, while it was 75% faster than the AMD FX-8150.
The AMD FX-8150 recently delivered our highest result in the WinRAR test with a throughput of 4287KB/s. The Core i7-3960X was able to beat this by a small 4% margin, while it was 51% faster when measuring single core performance. Against the Core i7-2600K, the Core i7-3960X was ~23% faster in both the multithreading and single thread tests.