Intel Core i7-3690X-EE

There is a review of the Intel Core i7-3690X-EE processor posted today at Lost Circuits that is definitely worth checking out. For comparison purposes, you can see our review here.

The biggest problem with Sandy Bridge Extreme is that it was predictable, it was expected to be a killer processor and in so far, we have read a number of reviews that lukewarmly acknowledged this. Let’s now just put this into a different perspective. Had AMD come out with a Bulldozer that rivaled the performance of SNBe, the entire online community would have stood on their heads, including any and all of the analysts. It would have been the biggest success that AMD’s design team had scored ever. But, SNBe is an Intel product and in so far we cannot drum up all the fanboys. Too bad.

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Problem being that the 3690X isn't a massive performance boost compared to other high end intel offerings. It would have been a huge game-changer if their competitor was able to offer a competitive offering, and would have changed the hardware landscape. But that didn't happen, and so we mull along.

SonicTron said:

Problem being that the 3690X isn't a massive performance boost compared to other high end intel offerings. It would have been a huge game-changer if their competitor was able to offer a competitive offering, and would have changed the hardware landscape. But that didn't happen, and so we mull along.

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Especially when that incremental improvement comes at over triple the cost of the mainstream 2600K. Benchmarks of the slightly more affordable 3930K are conspicuously absent, making me think it will lose to the 2600K on most of the non-heavily-threaded benchmarks. So I'd have a hard time calling this a killer processor architecture.

Most of the features over the 2600k come from the chipset, like more ram channels and PCIe 3.0/more lanes etc. But the usefulness of these depends on what you are going to use it for.

There probably was something about problems with unmature silicone too (kind of like apparently whats going to cure the problems with bulldozer). Hopefully a 3790x/3890x/3990x will be a big and more mature improvement.

The only thing I can see SB-E having over SB besides the obvious chipset differences is the overclocking capabilities. From what I gather, Intel wanted SB-E to be able to overclock higher than SB, and though it does seem like it can, it doesn't overclock high enough. Hopefully we can see 5.5+ ghz overclocks on water now that would make these chips worth it to more people.

As for clock per clock performance differences... I don't see how people could have expected any different. It's the exact same architecture, of course performance would be similar in 1-4 thread programs. The difference would be in highly multi-threaded applications, applications that can use more than 16gb of RAM, and applications that can take advantage of the larger L3 cache.

i took my 3960x back and got the 2700k, the 3960x was so hott @ 5ghz high 80'sc, i didnt care for it at all, now have 2700k @ 5.2 stable at mid 60's, much better choice for me