Intel Core i7 5960X EE (Haswell-E) CPU and X99 Chipset Review

PCMark 8

Version and / or Patch Used: Latest Steam Update

When it comes to stock PCMark 8 performance, you can see the i7 5960X EE sits just ahead of the i7 4960X EE. Sitting just ahead, though, means that we're falling behind the i7 4790K and its higher clock speeds. Saying that, though, you can see when it comes to the Home preset, the i7 5960X EE manages to sneak out just slightly ahead of it i7 4770K.

Overclocking yields some massive gains across the board that put it easily ahead of everything else. You could argue overclocking the i7 47960K will also yield big performance gains. However, our testing has shown due to the limited amount of overclocking headroom on the platform, there's not all that much more performance to be had out of it under PCMark 8. You can get a closer look at this from any of our recent motherboard reviews.

HyperPi 0.99

Version and / or Patch Used: 0.99

While out of the box the i7 5960X EE performance is stronger than the i7 4960X EE, you can see it does lag behind the i7 4790K in this particular benchmark. When it comes to overclocking, though, it really is more down to the raw clock speed under HyperPi, as we see our i7 5960X EE close the gap significantly and score pretty much even with the i7 47960K.

AIDA64

Version and / or Patch Used: 1.00.1035BETA

Looking at cache performance out of the box, you can see it just blows the other setups out of the water. The L2 and L3 numbers are great against the other processors, but you can see the L1 numbers are just huge, jumping well and truly in front of everything else.

Increasing the core clock a solid 900MHz just helps push those performance numbers even higher. You can see at this speed the new i7 5960X EE on the X99 platform leaves everything else for dead.

Looking at quad-channel DDR4 performance against DDR3 performance, you can see while the read number jumps only slightly, the write and copy numbers show more of a gain against it. When it comes to overclocking, you can see that just like the Z97 and Z87 platform, the extra MHz clock from the CPU does little to nothing to improved memory performance.