Intel 6950X Review - A $1,700 Processor??
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,700 words · ~8 min read
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let's be honest with each other a lot of what we do in the do-it-yourself PC
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Community is because we can and that's not always a bad thing especially if you
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just want to throw in some sick looking lighting or something like that but
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today we're talking about CPUs
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specifically Intel's new Broadwell e Enthusiast line even though CPU cores
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have become a little like cylinders in your city Only cruising sedans engine
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where the only point in having a V12 is to say screw you I have 12 cylinders
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Intel is hoping that its new top-end 10 core Behemoth with a price to match will
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be a hit with those who need topend performance so let's take a look at it
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and the rest of the Broadwell E Line and see if it's more than just a status
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symbol for
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techies the GTX 1080 amp extreme from
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Zotac features their ice storm cooler with triple 90mm Eco fans for better
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airflow and heat extraction check out the link below to learn more so it's
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been almost 2 years since we've gotten a new line of Enthusiast processors from
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Intel the main thing that sets these CPUs apart from their mainstream
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Brethren is the inclusion of more cores and the inclusion of more RAM slots
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Broadwell e is no exception the bottom two chips on the ladder the core i7
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6800k and 6850k are each hexacore with
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the ladder providing 40 PCI Express Lanes instead of 28 while the 6900k
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features eight cores and 16 threads
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meaning it's essentially a direct replacement for the previous Top Dog the
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i7 5960x but if you want to go all out the
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new chip sitting at the top of the Heap is the
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6950x featuring 10 cores and 20 threads
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the most that Intel has ever packed in tune in class CPU of course it shouldn't
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be surprising that since Intel is trying to set 10 cores as the new gold standard
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for desktops consumers will pay a hefty premium the chips MSRP is over
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$1,700 enough to build an entire
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high-end gaming rig with peripherals
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that would be like pretty good and all you're really getting for the $600
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premium over the roughly $1,100 6900k
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other than the X in the model number that is important to some people are two
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more cores and an extra 5 megabytes of cash and even then you take an overall
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hit on clock speed now huge price jumps
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for more cores isn't exactly new for
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anyone but spending that much for two more cores when you're already at eight
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and then taking a hit in the speed department is iffy especially at that
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cost our best guess is that Intel priced at this High to keep part of their Z
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online from being cannibalized by the high and core i7s as many zeeon SKS have
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10 cores and will work on consumer grade
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x99 motherboards but for the average home PC Builder how can anything
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actually justify forking this much money over for well Broadwell e does come with
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a cool feature where the core with the greatest overclocking potential as
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determined by Intel at the factory is marked in the BIOS with an asterisk so
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if you're running a heavily single-threaded application and want the
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best possible performance you can overclock that core alone then in
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Windows Intel turbo boost 3.0 will
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automatically set the Affinity of that application to that core specifically
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making optimizing performance for single-threaded programs pretty easy but
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that alone won't get most of you to spend
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$1,700 especially as these features are on all the Broadwell e SKS not just the
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69 50x and even then why are you
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optimizing for single core applications if you're buying one of these CPUs you
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should probably be buying one of these CPUs for definitely multi-threaded
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applications as in single core they don't do that great so speaking of which
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let's talk about performance instead we benchmarked all four Broadwell e chips
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on the x99 deluxe 2 from ASUS which
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features their New Aura onboard RGB lighting for not only some cool effects
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on the PCIe slots but also for the rest of your rig which is pretty cool as it
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has a header to allow board lighting effects to sync with other case lights
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you also get a u.2 and m.2 slots for
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higher-end NVMe ssds and an extra four pin connector for additional CPU power
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and USB 3.1 support including a type-c
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connector the rest of our test bench consisted of 32 GB of Corsair Dominator
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ddr4 an h100i GTX AIO a GeForce GTX 1080
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Founders Edition and a Kingston hypx Savage SSD we tested the Broadwell E
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Line against the previous generation 5960x as well as the current Skylake
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core i76700k so we instead use the ASUS z170
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Deluxe for the ladder right off the bat it's pretty fair to say that it's hard
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to justify buying any Broadwell e chip
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if your heaviest workload will be gaming as the $315 Skylake 6700k beat every
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single Broadwell e skew in all of our gaming benchmarks including the flagship
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6950x even in City's skylines which tends to be more CPU bound than many
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other titles but of course that's not surprising it's been known for a long
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time that CPUs with more than four cores see more utility on the content creation
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side and with things like file compression or encryption here we see
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more threads and cores benefiting in cinebench 7zip and h26 64 video
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rendering as well as an Ida 64's AES
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encryption Benchmark photo editing benchmarks were a bit of a mix bagged
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however which Ida 64's Photo Works Benchmark favoring the higher core count
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of Broadwell e but real bench's tests showed the Skylake 6700k pull
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ahead on the single core tasks indeed
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cine bench's single core Benchmark showed the 6700k well ahead of the other
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four Broadwell e chips as well well but what about overclocking could cranking
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up our clock speeds add more value to the Broadwell E Line we chose to
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overclock the 6900k since it's the closest thing to a direct upgrade from
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the older X Series skew we got our review sample up to 4.3 GHz or 300 mahz
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over the stock turbo boost unfortunately there was a huge power and thermal
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penalty as CPU cores shot up to 88° C
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and we had to put 1 375 volts through
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the processor to get it stable not exactly ideal since the last gen Haswell
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E Series seemed to have a little more Headroom across the board performance
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did increase notably in some benchmarks with the overclock but single core
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performance still lagged behind our 6700k running at stock speeds so with
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all of that said do any of these CPUs really make any sense no doubt there are
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real scenarios like 3D rendering or really heavy encryption work where more
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cores do matter but from a price to Performance standpoint the
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6800k seems to make the most sense since you're only paying $120 more than you
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would for a 6700k and get two extra
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hyperthreaded cores and while it only has 28 PCI Express Lanes that might not
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be as important as it used to be especially as NVIDIA is no longer
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supporting more than two graphics cards in SL for gaming purposes and you'll pay
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a hefty premium to upgrade to the 6850
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K's 40 Lanes I'm talking almost another
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$200 so while Broadwell e might be the ultimate thing for enthusiasts to drool
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over right now I'd rather spend my money
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on the Glam that won't spend its life hidden under a water block even though
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that would probably be pretty cool today
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we're highlighting the k7xx black headphones of course from m M drop and
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they have a bunch of other cool products that you can check out at the link in
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the video description as well hopefully you guys know about Mast drop by now but
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if not the concept is still pretty simple the more people commit to a
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purchase the more people that commit to a certain price for a certain product
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the lower the price of that product goes these are the exact same ones that Lin
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reviewed last year and remember this is a limited drop so if you want a pair
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you're going to have to act pretty fast these headphones were configured by mass
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drop and Manu manufactured by AKG so if you want to check him out and grab a
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pair of k7xx headphones head over to the link in the video description down
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below thanks for watching guys if you liked this video and you're like I'm
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going to buy the 6800 or maybe just not an Enthusiast
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series 1 cuz I want to play games cool
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if you dislike the video cuz you're like screw you I want 10 cores and I don't
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care about gaming performance and I don't do anything else with it anyways I
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just want 10 cores you can uh yeah you can do that if you want to purchase one
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of the items featured in this video check out Amazon if you want to talk
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about the items featured in this video check out the Forum you can become a
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contributor there it doesn't really do a ton but it's like cool and you get a little badge thing and some people care
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about those and there's also like a member title thingy that shows up in
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it's different colors depending on what T don't worry about it uh if you want to
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see our review of the 6700k check that out up here gaming
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processor that's what it's marketed for so that actually totally makes sense