Conclusion

In fact, we were quite surprised that none of the benchmarks scaled with the 16 threads the Xeon CPU has to offer. Not even 3D Mark 11, which should support up to 16 Threads showed a substantial increase in performance, although this benchmark supports up to 16 threadas. We even tried reinstalling the benchmark several times and we also reinstalled Windows to make sure there were no mistakes we could have caused. Running Task Manager in the background showed that in 3D Mark 11 and 3D Mark Vantage CPU Benchmarks all threads get load, but the load is only between 80 to 90 percent. Anyway, it looks like 3D Mark 11 and 3D Mark Vantage really don't make use of the full potential of an 8 core, 16 thread CPU. Therefore the advantage compared to a hexa core Core i7-3960X is roughly five percent. Compared to a quad core Core i7-2600K the difference is bigger by quite a margin. In this case it is well more than 35 percent. But never the less, twice as many cores for a third more performance is quite a bad result.

Concerning gaming benchmarks one can see that the number of cores doesn't matter. Most games these days support no more than eight threads. Therefore when a CPU has eight threads it mainly scales with clock frequency or additional L3 cache or even faster memory. Especially older titles will show this kind of behaviour because in this case the graphics card wont be the only limiting factor anymore.

Our concluding remark is that instead of buying an extremely expensive CPU, better go for a high-end GPU. Sure, this applies for a gaming system and not for a rendering machine. Let's finish this article with a small calcualtion. A Core i7-3960X costs roughly three times as much as a Core i7-2600K. If we're generous there is an overall performance advantage of ten percent concerning the Core i7-3960X. Paying three times as much for ten percent more gaming performance really is nonsense.

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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