Intel i7 3960X EE / Gigabyte GA X79 UD3 / 16GB GSkill Ripjaws Z (2133mhz) Review

1. Introduction2. Intel i7 3960x Extreme Edition3. Intel Active Thermal Solution (RTS2011LC)4. Intel i7 3960x & RTS2011LC (Super High Res Gallery)5. GSkill Ripjaws Z (2133mhz)6. GSkill Ripjaws Z (Super High Res Gallery)7. Intel DX79SL Extreme Series Motherboard8. Intel DX79SL Extreme Series (Super High Res Gallery)9. Gigabyte GA X79 UD3 Motherboard10. Gigabyte GA X79 UD3 Motherboard (Super High Res Gallery)11. Technical: Bios & Overclocking12. Testing Methodology13. Synthetic: PCMark 714. Synthetic: Unigine Heaven 2.015. Synthetic: 3DMark Vantage16. Synthetic: 3DMark 1117. Synthetic: SiSoft Sandra18. Synthetic: Cinebench R11.5 64 bit19. Synthetic: SSD Performance20. Synthetic: AIDA 6421. Image Quality: HQV Benchmark22. Real World: 3D Rendering23. Real World: Media Encoding24. Real World: BluRay Playback25. Real World: Flash HD Playback26. Real World: HandBrake 9.527. Gaming: Battlefield 3 - Eyefinity28. Technical: Power Consumption29. Closing Thoughts30. View All Pages

SiSoftware Sandra (the System ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) is an information & diagnostic utility. It should provide most of the information (including undocumented) you need to know about your hardware, software and other devices whether hardware or software.

Sandra is a (girl’s) name of Greek origin that means “defender”, “helper of mankind”. We think that’s quite fitting.

It works along the lines of other Windows utilities, however it tries to go beyond them and show you more of what’s really going on. Giving the user the ability to draw comparisons at both a high and low-level. You can get information about the CPU, chipset, video adapter, ports, printers, sound card, memory, network, Windows internals, AGP, PCI, PCI-X, PCIe (PCI Express), database, USB, USB2, 1394/Firewire, etc.

Native ports for all major operating systems are available:

• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x86)
• Windows XP, 2003/R2, Vista, 7, 2008/R2 (x64)
• Windows 2003/R2, 2008/R2* (IA64)
• Windows Mobile 5.x (ARM CE 5.01)
• Windows Mobile 6.x (ARM CE 5.02)

All major technologies are supported and taken advantage of:

• SMP – Multi-Processor
• MC – Multi-Core
• SMT/HT – Hyper-Threading
• MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE 4.1, SSE 4.2, AVX, FMA – Multi-Media instructions
• GPGPU, DirectX, OpenGL – Graphics
• NUMA – Non-Uniform Memory Access
• AMD64/EM64T/x64 – 64-bit extensions to x86
• IA64 – Intel* Itanium 64-bit

The Core i7 3960X EE leads the group by a clear margin in all tests. The Quad Channel G SKILL Ripjaws Z @ 2133mhz delivers over 45 GB/s of bandwidth which is 5GB/s more than the 1600mhz memory we used in the Asus P9X79 Deluxe review, and around 5GB/s less than the 2,400mhz Corsair GTX8 memory used in the Asus Rampage IV Extreme Edition review. Whatever way you look at it, this is some serious bandwidth!

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