Gaming Performance

Testing with Dirt 3's realistic settings and anti-aliasing disabled, the Core i7-3960X was slightly slower than the Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K, which is not what we were expecting to see. Although this game is primarily GPU dependent we thought that the Core i7-3960X would be able to match the Core i7-2600K. Our educated guess is the slightly slower frame rates are caused by the average memory bandwidth performance.

The Core i7-3960X roughly matched the performance of the Sandy Bridge processors when testing with Just Cause 2, though this test is primarily GPU bound as is the case with most games when tested at standard (playing) resolutions.

Nothing too different when testing with The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings. The new Core i7 EE was a fraction slower than the original Sandy Bridge CPUs.

Interestingly the Core i7-3960X was able to pull through when testing with Crysis 2, though the margins were minimal.

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