Intel’s new high end platform lands and Bennett Ring opens up his wallet.
Got a wallet bulging with $100 notes just burning a hole in your pocket? Have we got the CPU for you! Intel has just released the latest version of its Extreme Edition processor, along with another two Haswell-E chips aimed at the jet-setting, high-falutin’, cashed-up crowd. Along with the new processors comes a new motherboard chipset, the X99, ensuring you have to spend even more to whack the new Extreme Edition sticker on the outside of your case. And just in case that didn’t destroy your bank account, it even comes with a new type of memory, DDR4. Yep, those who want the best are going to have to wipe the slate clean, upgrading most of their system. The question is whether the performance gains are worth the high upgrade cost. The answer depends entirely on what you use your system for.
The holy trifecta of credit-crunching chips starts with the most affordable i7-5820K, a six-cored processor with a base frequency of just 3.3GHz, ramping up to 3.6GHz under load, and priced at $449. Next up is the i7-5930K, another six cored chip that runs slightly faster, with a base speed of 3.5GHz boosting to 3.7GHz when the going gets tough, for the measly sum of just $679. Finally we have the cream of the crop, the $1199 i7-5960X, Intel’s first consumer octa-cored CPU, but all those cores results in the slowest frequency of all, with a lowly base of just 3GHz, topping out at 3.5GHz whilst gaming. The X on the end of the product name denotes this as the Extreme Edition, the only chip in Intel’s range deemed worthy of such a moniker. The cheapest two chips both come with 15MB of cache, while the uber-chip increases this to a whopping 20MB. There’s no denying that the increase in core counts is impressive, but the trade off in lower speeds means that they’ll only shine in heavily threaded applications, where every core spins up to handle workload across six or eight threads.
The other major improvement in these products is a huge increase in the number of PCIe 3.0 lanes. The top two chips both support 40 PCI Express 3.0 lanes, a massive increase over the 16 found in our favourite gaming CPU, the i7-4790K. However, the most affordable chip *only* supports 28 lanes; still impressive, but ruling out 4-way SLI systems. This increase in PCIe 3.0 lanes is most applicable to multi-GPU systems, but also allows more storage, as we’ll see when we take a look at the new motherboard chipset.
All three chips are built on Intel’s cuttingedge 22nm process, allowing them to keep temperatures within reason despite the massive number of transistors in each chip. For example, the Extreme Edition has a crazy 2.6 billion transistors spread over a huge 356 square millimetre chip, yet has a TDP of just 140W. Intel suggests the use of its TS13X water cooling system to keep temps down, but doesn’t include the cooler with the CPU. Obviously.
All aboard the X99
With these three new CPUs comes a new motherboard chipset, in the form of the X99. This is a crucial upgrade for anybody considering the new CPUs, as it includes the new LGA2011-v3 socket that is necessary to house these chips. Unfortunately the new CPUs are not backwards compatible with the X79 chipset used for the previous Extreme Edition and Ivy Bridge-E processors, as the socket design uses a different notch placement inside, making it physically impossible to mount the new chips in the older boards.
The new X99 chipset also supports the maximum of 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes offered by the top-end Extreme Edition. Knowing exactly which PCIe slots and SATA ports can be filled to make the most of the 40 lanes isn’t easy though, with all X99 boards including rather confusing tables showing the limitations. For example, if you use all four PCIe lanes, it’ll probably knock out certain SATA ports, and vice versa.
The final major improvement that X99 offers over the prior X79 is a huge increase in the number of SATA 3 ports, up from just two in the X79 to ten. However, only six of these can be used for RAID duties. X99 also finally includes native USB 3.0 support, only four or so years after the standard was introduced.
Thanks for the memories.
Rounding out the expensive trinity of upgrades is the use of shiny new DDR4 memory. All three chips officially support DDR4-2133MHz memory, running with a timing of 15-15-15, and once again we see a new standard that isn’t backwards compatible. This makes the X99 the only consumer platform to currently support DDR4, so it’s no surprise that module prices are around 75% higher than identical speed DDR3 modules. Thankfully several memory manufacturers have already launched DDR4-3200MHz memory modules, though you’ll pay an arm and a leg for the faster frequencies.
Money for nothing
If you’ve been reading PC PowerPlay for a while, you’ll know that four cores is more than enough for every game on the market, which suggests these new chips are going to be a waste of money for gamers. In fact, there’s only a single game currently available with a recommended system requirement of eightcores – the performance-plagued Watch Dogs. For everything else, frequency and Instructions Per Cycle (IPC) are paramount. Given that the frequencies of these chips are so low, especially on the Extreme Edition, which tops out at 3.5GHz, we weren’t expecting mindblowing game performance. Turns out we were right, as we’ve seen so many times before with Intel’s top-end chips.
We only had the Extreme Edition to benchmark, and put it head to head against the i7-4770K. We tested this using Corsair’s new Vengeance LPX DDR4 memory kit, which includes four 4GB sticks, which were housed in the ASUS Rampage V Extreme. A GeForce GTX 780 Ti was used to push the polies. Tomb Raider was the first benchmark off the racks, and we ran it at the standard resolution of 1080p with Ultra detail, to see how the new chip faired in a GPU limited benchmark. As expected, it performed identically to the i7-4770K, peaking out at 58fps. Our other two tests dropped the resolution down to a lowly 1680 x 1050, to ensure the CPU was the limiting factor. It was here that the Extreme Edition showed the limitation of its low frequency, scoring around 14% slower across both tests. Considering we’re talking about a $1700 upgrade, gamers simply have no reason to consider the Extreme Edition.
Pedal to the medal
If there’s a silver lining to the Extreme Edition story, it’s that the CPU comes fully multiplier unlocked, making overclocking a two minute affair. We nudged the Vcore up by 10% and then slowly increased the multiplier, reaching a top speed of 4.4GHz – anything faster resulted in benchmarks crashing at start up. At this speed we can expect the Extreme Edition to keep pace with the 4770K.
It’s obvious that the Extreme Edition isn’t targeted at gamers, despite what the marketeers might say. Instead, it’s really only of use to those who make use of highly threaded applications, such as video and image manipulation software, as well as scientific applications. It’s also a demon when it comes to Handbrake performance, which is great if you spend all day converting video files. Even with the move to eight-cored consoles we’re seeing PC ports that are more than happy to run on four cores, so we doubt it’ll prove to be of much benefit with future titles. While it’s disappointing that the Extreme Edition really isn’t for gamers, at least we can all rest assured that we don’t need to spend the mega-bucks to have the cutting edge in game performance.