Review: Intel Haswell-E processor (Core i7 5960X and 5820K)

Introduction

With the launch of Haswell-E, Intel has introduced three new desktop processors and an updated chipset to support them, called X99. Although the new chips are based on a similar 2011-pin layout to the previous Ivy Bridge-E enthusiast processors, these processors are not backwards compatible with older generation motherboards. If you want one of these chips, you'll need to buy a new motherboard as well.

The new flagship model is the Core i7 5960X, which has eight physical processor cores, capable of running 16 threads simultaneously. Its standard clock frequency is 3 GHz, which goes up to 3.5 GHz when Turbo Mode kicks in. Shared between its eight cores is 20MB of level 3 cache, and support for 40 PCI-Express lanes. The chip retails for around £770 (around $1049, or AUS$1259).

Joining it is the £450 (around $675, or AUS$865) Core i7 5930K, a six-core processor that runs at 3.5 GHz, and 3.7 GHz in Turbo. It too supports 40 PCI-Express lanes, but only has 15MB of level 3 cache.

The most affordable of the new range is the £300 (around $450, or AUS$577) Core i7 5820K. It's another six-core model, running at 3.2 GHz, and up to 3.6 GHz in Turbo mode. It again has 15MB of cache, but only 28 PCI-Express lanes are supported.

The Core i7 5820K is the most affordable six-core processor Intel has ever made and in the last generation, Intel's lowest-price six-core Core i7 4930K cost over 25% more.

Having only 28 PCI-Express lanes in the 5820K will be a limitation if you're considering a multiple GPU setup or perhaps PCI-Express storage. But arguably if you're buying three graphics cards, then you can probably afford to splash out on a more expensive processor.

All three use Intel's hyper-threading technology, so the Core i7 5960X shows up as a 16-core processor in Windows.

It's of particular note that all three chips have a 140W TDP (Thermal Design Power), the highest thermal footprint of any desktop Intel processor to date. Processors in the Xeon E5 range, such as the formidable E5-2687W, are 10W higher.

No part of the Haswell-E processor is allocated to on-board graphics, so you'll need a separate card just to turn on and test the chip, or when employed in a non-graphics-focused environment (such as a server). Similarly, the processors ship without heat sinks, so you'll need to add a third-party cooler to your order.

The three new chips sit alongside Intel's Devils Canyon processors, a refresh of the Socket 1150 Haswell architecture with slightly increased clock speeds, which were released earlier this year.

The fastest Devils Canyon processor is the Core i7 4790K, a quad-core processor with a standard clock speed of 4 GHz, which can hit 4.4 GHz in Turbo Mode. This is considerably higher than any of the Haswell-E processors and, depending on the software you use, it may have a bigger effect on how well a particular software application runs than the increased number of cores you get with a Haswell-E chip.

The X99 chipset and DDR 4 memory

With the new processors comes the new X99 chipset. Intel has christened the new socket LGA2011-v3 to differentiate it from previous generations. With X99, there's been an overall bump to the standard specification, but also the introduction of some new technologies.

Intel now supports up to ten 6 Gb/sec native SATA ports, with RAID modes 0, 1, 5 and 10. Motherboard manufacturers can include up to 14 USB ports, six of which are USB 3, and they are directly connected to the chipset rather than by using a third-party controller.

Thunderbolt 2.0 is supported by the chipset as well, but only via add-on cards, since its inclusion adds a lot to the cost of the platform, so it makes sense for it to be optional.

As on Intel's Z97 platform, two new storage types are supported - SATA Express and M.2, which hook up to the chipset's PCI-Express lanes for faster SSD performance than you get from traditional SATA drives.

The biggest new addition with X99 is the use of 288-pin DDR4 memory, finally introducing a new memory standard to replace DDR3, which has been around for the best part of a decade. Speeds start at 2,133 MHz, but faster modules are available, right up to 3,000 MHz. As is usual with a new memory technology, latencies such as CAS and RAS have increased over DDR3, but overall memory bandwidth is still a lot higher, thanks to the faster speeds.

Memory can be arranged in a quad-channel setup, and will be sold in packs of two or four sticks, with support for 16 lanes in high-end motherboards. The Asus X99-Deluxe, which I was kindly loaned for my testing, can support eight DIMMs, four slots each side of the CPU, with the full quota of 10 SATA ports and 12 on-board USB ports, with a swish looking white cover over the back and lower sections.

Equally kindly, I was also loaned 16GB of Corsair 2400 MHz (PC4-19200) DDR4 memory. This pack of four unbuffered 4GB DIMMs costs £229 (around $299, or AUS$359) on the company's site. It carries a CAS latency of 16.

Currently, the maximum amount of memory you can squeeze into an X99 motherboard is 64GB, limited by the availability of higher-capacity DDR4 DIMMs, but in the future 128GB and beyond should be possible.

At the time of writing there are no options for budget, cut-down X99 motherboards, which is expected for an enthusiast platform. The Asus X99 Pro I used for testing costs about £200 (around $300, or AUS$384), which is the rough approximation for most competitors too.

A few Micro-ATX boards are cropping up now, if you're keen to build a smaller PC. But the majority of X99 motherboards are ATX models designed for larger cases.

Haswell-E or Xeon?

Intel's Xeon processors, aimed at workstation and server use, have offered eight cores for a while now. Xeon processors are an expensive prospect though, since they include additional functions that even the Haswell-E chips don't offer. Xeons are the only processors that can be used in multi-socket motherboards, with two or four chips used together. This requires additional circuitry, and is restricted to certain models of E5 or E7-series Xeons.

They also support ECC memory, unlike the Core i7 chips. The nature of electronic devices means memory errors can happen when a bit is accidentally flipped from a 0 to a 1. The chance is tiny, but real. ECC memory introduces checking to guarantee the integrity of data and ECC memory matters greatly in some mission-critical professional environments. When software is being designed where errors can have grave consequences, such as the design of jet engines, health care devices, or banking software, even the remotest chance of an error needs to be avoided. It matters a lot less in a gaming or media-focused desktop PCs.

Performance

Not every application will see a linear performance boost by using a Haswell-E processor over a quad-core chip. Software tasks will see a real advantage only if they're multi-threaded, which means they can be easily broken up into smaller jobs, then shared out between the cores. Video encoding, image processing and 3D rendering jobs such as raytracing fall into this category.

Other applications cannot be divided so easily. Gaming in particular, with rasterised real-time 3D environments, needs a graphics card that's fed with as much data as possible and, in the majority of cases, processor clock speed has a greater effect on graphics card performance than core count.

However, the faster DDR4 memory provides an extra boost to every aspect of software performance. This interesting mix of technology makes this set of benchmarks one of the most interesting I've ever run.

What's it like to use? Blisteringly quick is the short answer. In conjunction with a SanDisk Extreme Pro SSD, Windows booted in seconds, application performance was incredibly snappy and the system felt amazing.

But really, the system felt just as fast with a quad-core processor. Indeed, it's pretty much impossible to notice the difference in day-to-day Windows use. Typical desktop applications will see little or no benefit from additional cores. It's when applying complex filter effects in programs such as Photoshop that you'll notice any difference at all.

That said, using a Core i7 5960X, I was quite happily playing a game, with no noticeable slowdown, while encoding a video in background, which was assigned to half of the eight processor cores.

However, for some real quantifiable results I had to run some standard benchmarks to see where the performance gains were coming from. I tested three chips: an Intel Core i7-4790K, running at 4GHz, with 16GB of Corsair DDR3 memory and an Asus Z87 Pro motherboard, the Core i7-5820K and Core i7 5960X Haswell-E processors.

To drill down in detail, I ran a combination of SiSoft Sandra 2014, which tests multiple aspects of hardware performance, including processor, multimedia and memory. I also ran Cinebench 15, which comprises a CPU and GPU test. While the GPU test is a straight OpenGL scene, the CPU test does take advantage of multiple CPU cores.

The processors were paired with a high-end Nvidia Quadro K5200 GPU with 8GB of graphics memory.

Benchmarks

SiSoft Sandra 2014 Processor Arithmetic (GOPS)

• Core i7 4790K (4 cores, 4.0GHz) - 129.04


• Core i7 5820K (6 cores, 3.2GHz) - 162.55


• Core i7 5960X (8 cores, 3 GHz) - 209.88

SiSoft Sandra 2014 Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec)

• Core i7 4790K (4 cores, 4.0GHz) - 23.693


• Core i7 5820K (6 cores, 3.2GHz) - 29.481


• Core i7 5960X (8 cores, 3 GHz) - 29.374

Cinebench 15 CPU test

• Core i7 4790K (4 cores, 4.0GHz) - 819


• Core i7 5820K (6 cores, 3.2GHz) - 1024


• Core i7 5960X (8 cores, 3 GHz) - 1329

Cinebench 15 Graphics test (average frame rate)

• Core i7 4790K (4 cores, 4.0GHz) - 166.14


• Core i7 5820K (6 cores, 3.2GHz) - 166.91


• Core i7 5960X (8 cores, 3 GHz) - 162.52

Geekbench 3 Single Core 64-bit

• Core i7 4790K (4 cores, 4.0GHz) - 4215


• Core i7 5820K (6 cores, 3.2GHz) - 3629


• Core i7 5960X (8 cores, 3 GHz) - 3541

Geekbench 3 Multi Core 64-bit

• Core i7 4790K (4 cores, 4.0GHz) - 16453


• Core i7 5820K (6 cores, 3.2GHz) - 19652


• Core i7 5960X (8 cores, 3 GHz) - 24676

For real-time 3D performance, I used Tomb Raider's built-in benchmark on Ultimate detail at 1080p, and the Unigine Heaven benchmark on Extreme detail, at 1,600 x 900 resolution.

Tomb Raider Ultimate 1080p (average frame rate)

• Core i7 4790K (4 cores, 4.0GHz) - 53.9


• Core i7 5820K (6 cores, 3.2GHz) - 52.5


• Core i7 5960X (8 cores, 3 GHz) - 52.8

Unigine Heaven 4.0 (average frame rate)

• Core i7 4790K (4 cores, 4.0GHz) - 47.5


• Core i7 5820K (6 cores, 3.2GHz) - 44.2


• Core i7 5960X (8 cores, 3 GHz) - 46.3

I encoded a 14GB h.264 video of Avatar using the iPad preset in Handbrake. I also ran 3ds Max, rendering the included Underwater scene at HDTV resolution. The shortest times are best.

Handbrake encode (duration)

• Core i7 4790K (4 cores, 4.0GHz) - 1 hour 19 minutes


• Core i7 5820K (6 cores, 3.2GHz) - 1 hour 3 minutes


• Core i7 5960X (8 cores, 3 GHz) - 46 minutes

3ds Max Underwater render (duration)

• Core i7 4790K (4 cores, 4.0GHz) - 13 minutes 59 seconds


• Core i7 5820K (6 cores, 3.2GHz) - 11 minutes 33 seconds


• Core i7 5960X (8 cores, 3 GHz) - 8 minutes 59 seconds

The results confirm what I suggested above, the additional cores in the Haswell-E processors make a big difference in large parallel tasks, but the raw clock speed of the Core i7 4790K takes over in single-threaded software and 3D applications (i.e. games). If you're building a system with gaming in mind, the Devils Canyon chips will run faster than the Haswell-E processors.

Memory bandwidth is approximately 25% higher with Corsair's 2400MHz DDR4 modules. If Haswell-E was using DDR3 memory, there would be a far wider performance gap between the 4790K and 5960X in gaming tests.

Verdict

We Liked

Having six or eight processor cores on the desktop is a lovely thing to have, especially if you regularly use software that can take advantage of it. Re-encoding a massive movie file to a file size more suited to tablet or phone is far quicker, and it makes the prospect of encoding a huge movie collection a lot less daunting.

DDR4 memory is great as well. There's a big performance improvement over DDR3, and this translates to better performance all round. DDR4 will likely be a cornerstone of Intel's Broadwell platform, and future processor generations, so this aspect of X99 is a component that you will probably be able to reuse in a future upgrade.

The X99 chipset itself has some nice goodies and it's unlikely you'll run into a lack of SATA or USB 3 ports with it. This will be great news for people who like to build PCs with stupid amounts of hard disks. Then there's the nice SATA Express connector for faster SSD performance, which will become a growing market next year.

We Disliked

DDR4 memory currently commands a significant premium over DDR3. It makes the prospect of a Haswell-E system a lot more expensive. The great value of the Core i7 5820K processor is somewhat negated by this.

The single-core performance of all three processors isn't necessarily higher than the more affordable Devils Canyon processors. In many applications, that will have a bigger effect than the six or eight cores you get with Haswell-E. So it might make sense to save your money and go with an older chip.

And finally, while it's technically reasonable that Intel requires a new motherboard socket for its new processors, it's still slightly irritating that you can't just drop a Haswell-E processor into an older motherboard.

Final verdict

Minor quibbles aside, Haswell-E is a brilliantly fast computing platform. Having eight processor cores unlocks performance for consumers that was previously only found in workstations. You pay for the privilege, or course, but an eight-core Haswell-E system is still significantly more affordable than a Xeon-based workstation.

 Memory performance is great too.

DDR4 is the future, so investing in this memory now means you'll most definitely be able to use it for years to come.

 But as a closing thought, think carefully before jumping in right away. If you don't use software that will see any advantage from more than four cores, the only benefit will be bragging rights.

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