i7-3970x is a 150 W TDP monster

[08993]

Tom's hardware have got their hands on a i7-3970x

Unfortunately, at least in our suite of tests, the extra infusion of performance isn?t significant enough to counteract higher power consumption. Efficiency suffers as a result. There?s a good chance you won?t care if more speed in a money-making application covers the difference.

[Phouchg]

Intel has gone stupid in the head. They could rake in pure gold from enthusiast and other crazy people's systems by renewing the whole LGA2011 line with Ivies. Instead they've pushed for the wretched SB-E with factory OC, for a lack of a better term.

[The King of GnG]

I'm confused: shouldn't this be an Ivy Bridge CPU? Shouldn't the "3D transistors" of the microarchitecture (and the 22 nm manufacturing process) guarantee higher performances at a lower energy consumption? Hum....

[08993]

My apologies, I was supposed to post a bit more but hit enter one too many times, ended up double posting and then got called away.

When I built this box back in April, the brief was to build a top of the range box, and the 3960X was the top of the range CPU, I was in the position at the time where I had ?3000 to throw at the machine. Maybe it was a mid life crisis, I dunno, but I'd saved for ages and I had always built mid range PC's since 1997 or so and having top spec was on the wish list, so I did it. I don't regret it, but I could have had the 3930k and went with the Geforce GTX 690 instead which would of helped run all the things at max (which I still can't do on games such as Metro 2033/Crysis 2), but it wasn't released and I didn't want to wait!

Apart from fulfilling aspirations, the 3960X in itself is deemed pretty much unnecessary when placed by the 3930K which is ?400 cheaper and only misses 100MHz off the stock clock and 3MB L3 cache. The 3970X doesn't do anything to solve the discrepancy with the 3930K, you can clock a 3930K to 4.5GHz easily, reports are showing that the 3970X is no closer to running stable @ 5GHz that the 3930K/3960X. There's a definite thermal limit there as Intel are very reluctant to enable the 2 disabled cores on an unlocked chip (the 8 core Xeons are locked).

You can't even be thankful that the 3960X will drop in price, it won't drop to less that the 3930K which is the wiser buy and for fools like me who want the best for whatever misguided reason, they will take the 3970X which leaves the 3960X is no mans land.

I'm really not sure what the 3970X has achieved, I can't see it making much more money for Intel as it's relegated the still uncontested 3960X and there's no reason at all for it's existence any more. If the 3970X didn't exist people would still buy the 3960X if they wanted the best, instead all we have is hotter chips and larger energy bills :/

This is why no competition is bad!