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Unfortunately, AMD's new Bulldozer-based FX processors aren't even in the same ballpark as the new Intel Core i7-3960X for performance. So it's Intel's own Core i7-980X that provides the competition. With similar clock speeds and the same core count, it a battle of architectures.
As our results show, the Sandy Bridge architecture is better across the board than the 980X's Westmere-vintage transistors.
Question is, is the gap big enough to justify an upgrade? When you factor in the Intel Core i7-3960X's impressive overclcoking headroom, it might just be.
CPU multi-threaded rendering performance
CPU single-threaded rendering performance
CPU video encoding performance
Memory bandwidth
CPU gaming performance
Platform power consumption
Overclocking performance
