Conclusion

Last summer we published a similar series of articles, where we were analyzing gaming performance on the basis of two different processors. Back in the days it became very clear that performance differences between two CPU's at high resolutions are close to zero. The reason for this can be found within the fact, that the processor isn't the bottleneck of a system, when you're playing games at high resolutions. In this case it's the graphics card, which has to work overtime. In case of lower resolutions the influence of the processor becomes clearly visible, since the graphics card isn't the limiting factor anymore.

Having a closer look at the results we gathered while testing seven different games and two different benchmarks with two different presets, we see that the Intel Core i7-4960X, with our "low-preset" is on average 5.98 percent faster than the Core i7-4930K. Switching to our "high-preset" makes the Intel Core i7-4960X's become 1.22 percent quicker than the Core i7-4930K. Overclocking the Intel Core i7-4960X to 4.5 GHz makes the performance with our "low-preset" go up by almost 7 percent but when it comes to the high-preset the increase in performance is only 0.5 percent. Regarding the Core i7-4930K the situation is similar: 4 percent gain with "low-preset" and 0.5 percent with "high-preset".

At this point we certainly have to have a look at prices. In this case we always head over to Geizhals and these days a Core i7-4960X goes for no less than 849 Euro, whereas 488.69 Euro are enough for a Core i7-4930K. It's nothing new that Intel's Extreme Edition processors are rather pricy, which, considering the results gathered here, translates into the following conclusion. If you care about frames per second in a game, then definitely save these almost 400 additional bucks and spend them on a high-end VGA or even a second VGA, if it's insane performance you need. Everything else is a waste of money in our opinion.

Page 1 - Introduction	Page 8 - Call of Duty Black Ops 2
Page 2 - Test Setup	Page 9 - Sleeping Dogs
Page 3 - 3DMark Fire Strike	Page 10 - The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Page 4 - Unigine Heaven 4.0	Page 11 - Metro: Last Light
Page 5 - BattleField 3	Page 12 - Power Consumption
Page 6 - Bioshock Infinite	Page 13 - Performance Index
Page 7 - Crysis 3	Page 14 - Conclusion