Intel Core i7 5960X Haswell-E On Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Processors on 10 September 2014 at 10:40 AM EDT. Page 2 of 8. 18 Comments.

For testing the flagship Intel Core i7 desktop system was equipped with the i7-5960X engineering sample at stock speeds, Gigabyte X99-UD4-CF motherboard (after the failed MSI X99S SLI PLUS board), 4 x 4GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR4-2666 memory (running at DDR4-2133MHz in this stock testing), Radeon HD 6870 (for maximum open-source Radeon Gallium3D driver compatibility and not focusing on graphics in this article), Corsair CX750M power supply, 128GB Crucial CT128MX1 solid-state drive, and a Scythe Mugen Max heatsink fan.

While the motherboards and memory (2 x 8GB Corsair DDR3-2133MHz memory was used on the DDR3 platforms) had to be swapped out for the different processor tests, the memory capacity, storage, and graphics card remained the same during testing. The software stack was also the same throughout with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x86_64 with manual upgrades to the Linux 3.17 development kernel, Mesa 10.4-devel, and other upgraded Oibaf PPA graphics components.

The processors covered in this comparison include:

1: Intel Pentium G3258
2: Intel Core i3 4130
3: Intel Core i5 4670
4: Intel Core i7 4770K
5: Intel Core i7 4790K
6: Intel Core i7 4960X
7: Intel Core i7 5960X
8: AMD Athlon 5150
9: AMD A6-7400K
10: AMD A10-7800
11: AMD A10-7850K
12: AMD FX-8350
13: AMD FX-8370E
14: AMD FX-8370
15: AMD FX-9590

This should be a nice 15-way AMD/Intel CPU comparison under Linux. Some of the tests were the same as done recently for AMD's FX-8370(E) processor launch. Also for the FX-9590 there still are some odd performance findings due to thermal restrictions or other problems being encountered as noted in the recent AMD Linux processor reviews.

All of this benchmarking was done via the Phoronix Test Suite software for open-source, fully-automated, and fully-reproducible Linux benchmarking.

In this article no Core i7 5960X overclocking was done due to only resolving the X99 motherboard issue on Monday and being concerned about overclocking until investigation with my original motherboard failure and that of Legit Reviews' motherboard is complete, as theirs happened while adjusting DDR4 memory settings.

Following our raw performance results are the power consumption and power efficiency numbers.


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