Intel Core i7-3960x Extreme Edition cpu Review

Intel's "Extreme Edition" CPUs have always represented the company's top consumer offerings. Typically priced in the $1,000 range, they have unlocked multipliers, lots of cache, and lots of cores. But until now, Intel's top Extreme Edition offering, the Core i7-990X CPU, was based on the older Gulftown architecture, and the performance gap between this CPU and the newer Sandy Bridge architecture Core i7-2600K and 2700K is pretty damn narrow, especially considering that the latter costs less than a third the price of the former. But now Intel's made a Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition, with six physical cores and a staggering 15 megabytes of cache. Benchmark Reviews takes the new Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition CPU around the benchmark course, testing it against the best CPUs Intel and AMD have to offer.

Intel's Sandy Bridge processors, especially the Core i5-2500K and the Core i7-2600K, set very high performance bars when they were introduced in early 2011. The new architecture significantly increased the instructions per clock (i.e. they were faster at the same clock speed than older CPUs), and the 32nm fabrication process enabled amazing overclocks, with 4.6GHz and higher frequencies being easily obtainable with air cooling. A 2600K CPU will beat a 980X CPU in several benchmarks, and the older CPU only really dominates in heavily threaded applications that can make use of its extra cores.

So now we have a hex-core Sandy Bridge processor and new X79 Express chipset to support it.

Asus Xonar Essence stx pci-Express Sound Card Review

Humans have five main senses; touch, taste, sight, smell and hearing. Modern computing strives to advance the integration of these senses to produce stimulation during interaction, whether it be for games, movies or writing lengthy documents like this one! Naturally, some senses are more difficult to implement in an appealing manner, such as taste - silicon doesn't taste too good!

Stimulating some senses may cause concern. The only time you're going to get a smell out of your PC is when you fry something, releasing the soul of the device in the form of a cloud of white smoke. Not to mention touch, which is wonderful on phones, and painful when you press your fingers against an overclocked northbridge.

But the sense we're here to discuss isn't either of these. It's hearing. People spend hundreds on their CPUs, GPUs, motherboards, storage and memory, but dedicated sound is oft considered an unnecessary expense. Why pay for a card when your motherboard has a Realtek chipset?

ASUS refuse to believe that onboard sound is enough. In our possession is their flagship audiophile audio card, the Essence STX, prepped for rigorous testing here at Benchmark Reviews. They claim "ultra-high fidelity" sound, and a remarkable 124dB signal-to-noise ratio on the front output. Will the onboard solution take a thrashing by this menacing card, or are enthusiasts correct in sticking with whatever their motherboard supplies?

Audio cards are often used by audiophiles, and those who work with music at a professional level. Factors such as noise, amplification, circuit quality, API extensions (such as EAX) and DSP effects (such as Dolby Headphone) are all valid considerations which deciding between audio solutions.