As we discovered in the Haswell-E launch article, sadly only featuring the 1000 dollar eight-core i7-5960X, the Haswell-E platform is a decent performance upgrade over its LGA2011 predecessors. However this only for those that use on a daily basis multi-core enhanced software, otherwise the mainstream LGA1150 platform will do nicely. For the new LGA2011-v3 socket three different processor models are available to suit your needs and budget.

This time there will be no more quad core entry model; the i7-4820K has to give way for an unlocked hexa-core model in the shape of the Core i7-5820K. A logic choice by Intel as nobody ever understood why the i7-4820K ever saw the daylight; this as it had close to no advantage over Intel's mainstream quad core processor line up. On top of that the requirement of quad channel memory and cashing out for a more expensive LGA 2011 motherboard made this entry Quad core LGA2011 model a not so hot selling product. The new i7-5820K might be a viable and interesting option for a multi-GPU crunching/gaming setup as this hexacore model retails only a bit higher than the mainstream quad core Devils Canyon i7-4970K. Featuring 15MB of level 3 cache, a TDP of 140W and official Intel quad channel DDR4-2133 support it could become one of Intel's best sellers for the Hasswel-E platform.

The mid-range Core i7-5930K is also a hexa-core model, however the biggest difference versus the i7-5820K is the added support for 40 PCIe 3.0 Lanes instead off the 28 ones for the lower end 5820K model. This implies that the i7-5820K can only run Tri-SLi (3 x PCIe at x8/x8/x8), while the i7-5930K and i7-5960X are fully quad-SLi/Crossfire compatible; since the days of AGP 4X versus 8X the gains on paper hardly reflect real life performance. Tri SLi with three times x8 is in most cases more than plenty. The slightly higher stock speed (3.5 GHz versus 3.3GHz) and idem ditto higher turbo speeds can easily be circumvented by an easy manual overclock. Quickly comparing the i7-5930K versus its predecessor the i7-4930K: the latter had a lower base clock of 3400MHz, however a higher Turbo up to 3900MHz (vs. 3.7 GHz for the 5930K). The slightly higher amount of L3 cache (15MB vs. 12MB) and the architectural improvements of the Haswell-E series together with the usage of DDR4 memory has to provide the needed performance boost over its predecessor in an out of the box configuration.