Conclusion

In general it is particularly noticeable that on average there is almost no difference between the performance of these two CPUs. If there is a bottleneck in recent games, then it is the graphics card, even if it is a high end Radeon HD 7970 card. Looking at the numbers and figures we see that the in Far Cry 2 we measured the biggest difference between the two CPUs. In this case the performance gap is 5.21 percent. The next benchmarks which clearly show different results are 3D Mark 11 and 3D Mark Vantage concerning their physix test. In both cases you can see that the Core i7-3960X is roughly three percent faster than the Core i7-3930K. The difference can be explained by the fact the the Core  i7-3960X clocks 100 MHz faster and has three megabyte more L3 cache. Furhtermore the Physix test in 3D Mark 11 and 3D Mark Vantage doesn't scale with the GPU it only scales with the CPU. A closer look at Furmark, Stone Giant and Unigine Heaven once again shows that the CPU has almost no impact gaming performance. Especially in Furmark one can see that the benchmark really doesn't care about 100 MHz and three Megabyte more L3 cache, because there is no load going to the CPU, which needs to be processed very fast.

As concluding remarks we can say that for a gamer there is really no difference in buying a Core i7-3960X over a Core i7-3930K. What's important in this case is only the price and therefore the Core i7-3930K is a much more reasonable choice than Intels flagship CPU, the Core i7-3960X.

Page 1 - Introduction / Specs	Page 5 - Crysis / Resident Evil 5
Page 2 - Test setup	Page 6 - Call of Juarez / Far Cry 2
Page 3 - 3DMark 11 / 3DMark Vantage	Page 7 - Street Fighter 4 / World in Conflict
Page 4 - Unigine Heaven / Stone Giant	Page 8 - Conclusion

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