Intel Core i7 Haswell-E i7-5960X BOX

No overpayment for novelty

The sixteen-thread Intel Core i7-5960X belongs to the penultimate generation of LGA2011 (Haswell-E) processors, which is why its technical process is relatively large and hot — 22 nm. But it costs as much as a quarter cheaper than the 14nm Core i7-6900K with the same number of threads. However the maximum amount of supported RAM is only 64 GB, unlike Broadwell-E with 128 GB.

Overclocking potential

The suffix "X" in the name of Haswell-E chips means the same as "K" — an unlocked multiplier, that is, the possibility of manual overclocking. But the old technical process does not allow the 5960X to reach the 4.5 GHz overclocking bar, it will have to be limited to 4.2 GHz. However, even this is much better than the initial frequency of 3 GHz. And the large area of the crystal and the contact cover make it appropriate to use not only an air cooler, but also a dropsy.

At the intersection of play and work

As a result, we can advise the Intel Core i7-5960X for two cases. The first one is building an uncompromising multi-graphics card gaming PC for 4K and even 8K resolution with a guaranteed performance margin of five years. The second is for professional software that needs to strike a balance between numerous cores and a high processor frequency (first of all, these are applications for three-dimensional modeling).