After three long years of going hungry with quad-cores, red meat is
finally back on the menu for enthusiasts. And not just any gamey slab
full of gristle with shared cores, either. With its new eight-core
Haswell-E CPU, Intel may have served up the most mouth-watering,
beautifully seared piece of red meat in a long time.
And it’s a good thing, too, because enthusiast’s stomachs have been
growling. Devil’s Canyon? That puny quad-core was just an appetizer. And
that dual-core highly overclockable Pentium K CPU? It’s the mint you
grab on your way out of the steak house.
No, what enthusiasts have craved and wanted ever since Intel’s original
clock-blocking job on the original Sandy Bridge-E was a true,
overclockable enthusiast chip with eight cores. So if you’re ready for a
belt loosening, belly full of enthusiast-level prime rib, pass the
horse radish, get that damned salad off our table, and read on to see if
Intel’s Haswell-E is everything we hoped it would be.
Meet the Haswell-E parts
Despite its name, the LGA2011-v3 socket is not same as the older
LGA2011 socket. Fortunately, the cooling offsets are exactly the same,
so almost all older coolers and accessories should work just fine.
Though they look the same, LGA2011’s socket has arms that are
actually arranged differently than the new LGA2011-v3 that replaces it.
And no, you can’t drop a newer Haswell-E into this socket and make it
work.
Haswell-E
The first consumer Intel eight-core arrives at last
Being a card-carrying member of the PC enthusiast class is not an easy
path to follow. Sure, you get the most cores and priciest parts, but it
also means you get to wait a hell of a long time in between CPU
upgrades. And with Intel’s cadence the last few years, it also means you
get the leftovers. It’s been that way ever since Intel went with its
two-socket strategy with the original LGA1366/LGA1156. Those who picked
the big-boy socket and stuck to their guns on Pure PC performance always
got the shaft.
The original Ivy Bridge in LGA1156 socket, for example, hit the streets
in April of 2012. As a reward for having the more efficient and faster
CPU, Intel rewarded the small-socket crowd with its Haswell in June of
2013. It wasn’t until September of 2013 that big-boy socket users
finally got Ivy Bridge-E for their LGA2011s. But with Haswell already
out and tearing up the benchmarks, who the hell cared?
Well, that time has come with Haswell-E, Intel’s first replacement for
the aging LGA2011 platform since 2011. This time though, Intel isn’t
just shuffling new parts into its old stack. For the first since the
original Pentium 4 Extreme Edition, paying the price premium actually
nets you more: namely, the company’s first consumer eight-core CPU.
Meet the T-Rex of consumer CPUs: The Core i7-5960X
We were actually a little leery of Haswell when it first launched last
year. It was, after all, a chip seemingly tuned for the increasingly
mobile/laptoppy world we were told was our post PC-apocalyptic future.
Despite this, we recognized the chip as the CPU to have for new system
builders. Clock for clock, its 22nm process, tri-gate transistors put
everything else to shame—even the six-core Core i7-3930K chip in many
tasks. So it’s no surprise that when Intel took a quad-core Haswell, put
it in the Xerox machine, and hit the copy x2 button , we’d be ecstatic.
Eight cores are decidedly better than six cores or four cores when you
need them.
The cores don’t come without a cost though, and we don’t mean the usual
painful price Intel asks for its highest-end CPUs. It’s no secret that
more cores means more heat, which means lower clock speeds. That’s one
of the rationales Intel used with the original six-core Core i7-3960X.
Although sold as a six-core, the original Sandy Bridge-E was built using
an eight-core die on which Intel had permanently switched off two
cores. Intel said it wanted to balance the needs of the many versus the
needs of the few—that is, by turning off two of the cores, the part
could hit higher clock speeds. Indeed, the Core i7-3960X had a base
clock of 3.3GHz and Turbo Boost of 3.9GHz, and most could overclock it
to 5GHz. The same chip packaged as a Xeon with all eight cores
working—the Xeon E5-2687W—was locked down at 3.1GHz and mostly buzzed
along at 3.4GHz.
With the new Core i7-5960X—the only eight-core of the bunch—the chip
starts at a seemingly pedestrian 3GHz with a Turbo Boost of one core up
to 3.5GHz. Those subsonic clock speeds won’t impress against the Core
i7-4790K, which starts at 4GHz. You’ll find more on how well Haswell-E
performs against Haswell in our performance section, but that’s the
price to be paid, apparently, to get a chip with this many cores under
the heat spreader. Regarding thermals, in fact, Intel has increased the
TDP rating to 140 watts versus 130 watts of Ivy Bridge-E and Sandy
Bridge-E.
If the low clocks annoy you, the good news is the part is fully
unlocked, so the use of overclocking has been approved. For our test
units, we had very early hardware and tight deadlines, so we didn’t get
very far with our overclocking efforts. Talking with vendors, however,
most seem very pleased with the clock speeds they were seeing. One
vendor told us overclocks of all cores at 4.5GHz was already obtainable
and newer microcode updates were expected to improve that. With even the
vaunted Devil’s Canyon Core i7-4790K topping out at 4.7GHz to 4.8GHz, a
4.5GHz is actually a healthy overclock for an eight-core CPU.
When you dive down into the
actual cores though, much is the same, of course. It’s based on a 22nm
process. It has “3D” tri-gate transistors and integrated voltage
regulation. Oh, and it’s also the first CPU to feature an integrated
DDR4 memory controller.
~ Gordon Mah Ung
