Core i7-6950X vs Core i7-5960X - 2D Performance
Published by Marc Büchel on 15.06.16Page:
Conclusion
Default
First of all we’re going to have a closer look at performance differences with standard clock speeds. From our overall performance rating we see that the Core i7-6950X is on average 16.55 % quicker than the Core i7-5960X.If we start searching for the benchmarks with best possible scaling on the i7-6950X, then we find that WinRAR runs 47.18% faster on this CPU and Frybench benefits by 40.37%. Apart from that it's interesting to see what happens when we have a look at a single threaded benchmark like Blackhole Single-Threaded. In this case the new Core i7-6950X is 3.84% slower because of a lower max Turbo clock compared to the i7-5960X.
We also had a closer look at power consumption and in idle we notice that our test setup with Core i7-6950X was burning 7.69% less power than the same system equipped with Core i7-5960X. In case of load power consumption the difference the new Core i7-6950X is simple in another league, being 27.23% more efficient.
4.2 GHz
Overclocking the Core i7-6950X increases the average performance by 14.84%, while the i7-5960X benefits by 18.28%.A closer look at power consumption reveals that overclocking these CPUs make for quite a difference. With the Core i7-6950X we see system power consumption rise by no less than 63.07% in idle and 61.11% under load, when comparing with the default power consumption values. In the case of the Core i7-5960X system power consumption goes up by 60.00% in idle and 16% under full load. This clearly shows that from an efficiency point of view, overclocking these processors is not attractive.
4.2 GHz DDR4-3000
Having arrived at this point we’re not going to go through every single benchmark anymore since the overall results are still very similar. What’s much more interesting now is checking what performance differences there are when running DDR4 memory at 3000MHz with both processors, while the stock clocks are DDR4-2133 for the i7-5960X and DDR-2400 in the case of the i7-6950X.Overclocking the system with the Core i7-6950X inside we notice that the performance goes up by 2.74%. In the case of the Core i7-5960X the difference is 2.82% on average.
Looking at idle power consumption, the system with Intel Core i7-6950X turns 16.03% more energy into heat, whereas with the i7-5960X consumption goes up by 11.51%. Under full load the differences are 4.09% in the case of the i7-5960X and 15.52% for the i7-6950X.
Recommendation
A quick look at the performance differences between these two CPUs shows, that only very few applications benefit from the additional two cores/four threads the Intel Core i7-6950X offers compared to the i7-5960X. Nevertheless it is interesting to see that Intel's new flagship performaned 21% faster in Photoshop, when we compared the two CPUs a default clock speeds. In terms of pricing we find the Core i7-6950X listet at 1679 Euro, while the i7-5960X costs 1037 Euro. In other words you'd have to pay almost 62% more for the Core i7-6950X while getting an additional 17% of average performance. Such a premium on a product can only be justified if the increased performance helps you reducing time needed for certain processes, while being able to get more work done by the end of the month in therefore increase revenue.Apart from all this you might have noticed that we've conducted our overclocking testing at 4.2GHz. Initially we wanted to compare the two CPUs at 4.5GHz. While our i7-5960X is well capable of this frequency the i7-6950X wasn't, meaning that the overclocking potential of the new flagship is highly limited. We were also surprised to see that power consumption almost "exploded" when overclocking the i7-6950X, while the i7-5960X is more gentle. If we were to guess, we'd say that there is increased leakage power with the 14nm transistors.
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