Intel Core i7 5960X Haswell-E On Linux

When all the systems were hammered with building the mainline Linux kernel, the Core i7 5960X system consumed an average of 181 Watts with a peak of 211 Watts, which still is good considering the performance in nearing a 40 second kernel compile.

The overall system power consumption while using the WattsUp Pro and running many benchmarks showed the Intel Core i7 5960X under Linux as having a 160 Watt system power draw and a peak of 211 Watts throughout all testing. This was with the Crucial SSD, 16GB of Corsair DDR4 memory, HD 6870, and Scythe Mugen Max heatsink.

While our Intel Core i7 5960X Haswell-E testing just got underway this week after the initial motherboard issue, so far the results are excellent. For those using source-based distributions or commonly building software from source, the i7-5960X is such a beautiful processor with being able to build out the Linux kernel in nearly 40 seconds (quite possibly even better once we try with a RAMdisk, higher-performing SSDs, or other tweaks) and all-around was running great for the many mulit-threaded Linux workloads that are common to enthusiasts and power users. The Core i7 5960X was commonly performing about 35% or greater than the previous-generation Core i7 4960X, was outperforming the Core i7 4770K/4790K for workloads caring more about cores than raw frequency, and sadly AMD's processors posed no competition to this thousand dollar processor.

Stay tuned for many more Linux (and BSD) benchmarks from the Intel Core i7 5960X + X99 + DDR4 platform and thanks to Intel Corp for sending out the i7-5960X review sample. If you appreciate all of this extensive Linux hardware testing done at Phoronix, please join Phoronix Premium today.