Conclusion

Meanwhile we've done quite a few of these tests. Basically, what we do is, we take two CPUs and a high-end graphics card. Afterwards we run several benchmarks and write down the individual results. In most cases we see that the CPU doesn't really make a difference. Usually it is the graphics card which is the bottleneck in a gaming system.

Never the less, this time we let a six core CPU compete against a quad core CPU and the results we got were quite surprising, because there are quite big performance gaps in some tests. Ok, honestly, regarding Futuremark CPU - 3D Mark 11 and 3D Mark Vantage - tests it's no wonder that the Core i7-3930K is substantially faster than the Core i7-3820. In this case the additional two cores (four threads) as well as the two megabyte L3 cache make quite a difference - almost 40 percent in 3D Mark 11 and almost 60 percent in 3D Mark Vantage. In fact the 400 MHz the Core i7-3820 clocks higher don't weigh heavy in the equation.

Testing Unigine Heaven, Furmark and Stone Giant is quite boring. In this case you can clearly see that the graphics card is the bottleneck in the system. The performance differences are either very small or not measurable at all.

Last but not least we went to check performance in real world games. At this point there are two different categories. There are some games that scale with the number of cores and others that do not. In this case we have the two benchmarks from Capcom - Resident Evil 5 and Street Fighter 4 - which show a 20 percent difference, whereas the Core i7-3930K is the one in the lead.

Last but not least we can say, that in case of a gaming PC, it doesn't matter wheter you buy a quad core Core i7-3820 or a hexa core Core i7-3930K - from a performance point of view. If you should want to put this kind of money into your gaming rig, then we recommend to buy a more powerful graphics card.

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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