Intel X79 Core i7 4960X Review
Test Setup
Intel Core i7-4960X
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme
Club3D HD7970 Royal Ace
Corsair Dominator Platinum
Corsair AX1200i
Corsair Neutron GTX
Corsair H100i
Windows 7 x64 Â
Overclocking
Our of the box the i7-4960X runs happily at 3.7GHz at a reasonable 1.2v. With the new BCLK overclocking we can, should you desire to overclock that way, reach a very healthy 140MHz on the BCLK. Of course the benefits of clocking the BLCK rather than just using the multiplier and memory dividers are negligible, but it’s nice to have the option should you desire it.
Thanks to the 22nm process we can push more volts on the vCore without running into thermal limitations. At 1.4v the i7-4960X is fully stable at 4.5GHz, and with a slight tweak up to 1.424v we can achieve 4.6GHz. Hardly the 4.75GHz we saw from the i7-3960X but by no means a slovenly overclock. The 4.6GHz core speed will be the one we’ll use in our testing today.
Anyone who tried to extract high memory speeds from their Core i7-3960X will be glad to see that the improved memory controller on the i7-4960X allow us to not only hit the now common 2400MHz, but for those extreme memory kits you can push on to 2600MHz. We’ll stick with 2400MHz for our tests today.
Speaking of tests, let’s see how the i7-4960X compares to its predecessor.
