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 6.86 percent faster than the Core i7-3960X. Switching to our "high-preset" makes the Intel Core i7-4960X's become 2.37 percent quicker than the Core i7-3960X. 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 i7-3960X the situation is similar: 10 percent gain with "low-preset" and 1.6 percent with "high-preset". Other than that a quick look at power consumption is also interesting. In this case we see that in case of overclocking the Core i7-4960X to 4.5 GHz make power consumption to go up by 29 percent. With the Core i7-3960X we see a similar situation, where power comsumption rises by 25 percent.

Should you be one of the really happy gamers out there, who can afford buying the latest and greatest CPU, no matter what it costs, then you now know, that frame rate at high resolutions increases by about 2.3 percent in case of the two CPU's we've tested here. Should you be worried about your budget at least a tiny little bit, then we have to say, that it definitely doesn't make sense at all to switch from an Intel Core i7-3960X to an Intel Core i7-4960X. Even if you get quite good money for selling an "old" i7-3960X you still have to spend a few hundred bucks to get an i7-4960X. If it's really frame rates you want you're better of thinking about adding a second GPU to your gaming rig for the money you didn't spend on that new CPU. A 2.5 percent performance increase for a few hundred bucks is really rather out of proportion.

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