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Intel Sandy Bridge E 3930K CPU Review

CPU by leeghoofd @ 2011-12-13

On the 14th of November Intel has shown it's brand new high end platform baptized Sandy Bridge E to the world. Almost all of the press sample kits included only the Extreme version aka the 3960X CPU. Some lucky hardware sites got a 3930K version, with unlocked multiplier, from a 3rd party to test or review. Since this K skew CPU is retailing at only half the price it could become quite a steal. This if it performs alike it's bigger brother. Major difference between the Extreme and the K version is the reduced L3 cache from 15Mb down to 12Mb. Yet, as mentioned before, the multiplier remains fully unlocked, similar to the K skews of the little 2500K and 2600K socket 1155 models, the latter two being heavily popular, as speeds over 4.5Ghz are a breeze. Before continuing with the review : a big thanks to the guys from Tones webshop to supply us with a brand new retail 3930K CPU. Now let's get it on !

Possible Daily Overclocks

Overclocking time : let's squeeze a little bit more out of this brand new CPU architecture. We are still using the Intel 2011LCS and limited ourselves to a moderate 1.4Vcore for the hexacore CPUs (970-990X-3960X and the 3930K) We ended up by a respectfull 4.5Ghz OC on our retail CPU. Not bad, but there's more left in it with better cooling and a more user friendly motherboard. (FYI Asus Sabretooth does 4.8GHz dead easy with 1.43Vcore)

AMD 1090T OC'ed at 4ghz, NB speed 2600Mhz
FX 8150 OC'ed at 4.6Ghz NB speed 2400Mhz
2600K OC'ed at 4.5Ghz
970 OC'ed at 4.2Ghz, uncore at 3200Mhz
990X OC'ed at 4.5Ghz, uncore at 3200Mhz
3960X OC'ed at 4.5Ghz
3930K Oc'ed at 4.5Ghz

Reusing the Corsair rams at 1600Mhz C8-8-8-24 1T timings... the GTX480('s) running at 720Mhz core and 1848Mhz ram speed.

Little difference between the high end CPU's, all running at 4.5Ghz. The extra 2mb cache making the difference between the two SB-E CPUs.

In Cinebench the peformance gap, between the Gulftown 990X running at the same clock speed as the 3930K, is quite large.

A few extra secs are required to run the POVRay benchmark. The Multithreaded Y-Cruncher test even less. Worth an extra 500 dollars ? That's entirely up to you to decide...

Winrar seems to like the larger cache too. Though better test some games to see how this CPU can handle those. And to spot if there's any noticeable FPS difference versus the 3960X.

Both games were tested at 1920 x 1080 resolution with high detail preset for BF3. Dirt3 was maxed out on detail. Hardly any difference between the 15 and 12Mb cache CPUs...

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