Intel Core i7-3960X vs Intel Xeon E5-2643 v2

Compare Intel Core X-series 6 core CPU vs Intel Xeon E5 v2 Family 6 core processor, specs and benchmark score. Which is the better CPU for gaming?

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Intel Xeon E5-2643 v2

Price

The cheapest price from our partner retailers

$ 250.00

$ 148.95 significantly less expensive

$ 398.95

Benchmark Score

Overall Score

A combined score of all workloads

3693 points

4657 points

26% slightly better overall score

Gaming Score

The raw gaming performance with a fast GPU

4998 points

5043 points

0.90% slightly better gaming score

Multitasking Score

Performance in workloads using up to 8 cores

3261 points

4542 points

39% slightly better multitasking score

Heavy Workload Score

Performance in workloads using up to 16 cores

3155 points

4510 points

42% significantly better heavy workload score

Free CPU Benchmark

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Other Benchmarks

Geekbench 5 (multi) score

Multi threaded benchmark

3363 points

4201 points

24% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (multi) score

Geekbench 5 (single) score

Single threaded benchmark

665 points

702 points

5% slightly higher Geekbench 5 (single) score

Geekbench 6 (multi) score

Multi threaded benchmark

3209 points

3212 points

0.09% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (multi) score

Geekbench 6 (single) score

Single threaded benchmark

661 points

2% slightly higher Geekbench 6 (single) score

642 points

Specifications

Cores

Number of physical processing units

Identical

Threads

Number of logical processing units

Identical

Clock Speed

Base frequency at which the chip operates

3.3 GHz

3.5 GHz

6% slightly higher clock speed

Turbo Speed

Higher frequency used for heavy workloads

3.9 GHz

2% slightly higher turbo speed

3.8 GHz

TDP

Thermal Design Power: Measure of heat generated by the CPU

130 W

Identical

130 W

PCIe Lanes

Number of physical connections between the CPU and expansion slots

Identical

Memory Channels

Lanes for simultaneous memory access

Identical

Supported Memory

Maximum amount of RAM supported by this CPU

64 GiB

768 GiB

1100% significantly more supported memory

Other details

Rank

Ranking in the hardwareDB database

464th of 1,089

373rd of 1,089

Family

The product line

Core X-series

Xeon E5 v2 Family

Release date

The official date of release of this chip

2011 November

2013 August

Memory Type

The type of memory used by this chip

DDR3-1066

Supports ECC memory

Does this CPU support error correcting memory

Yes

Core i7-3960X vs Xeon E5-2643 v2 benchmarks

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark tool, the Core i7-3960X is faster than the Xeon E5-2643 v2. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Xeon E5-2643 v2 in all gaming tests too.

Info from our database shows that they both have the same core count and the same number of threads. Our comparison shows that the Xeon E5-2643 v2 has a slightly higher clock speed compared to the Core i7-3960X. Despite this, the Core i7-3960X has a slightly higher turbo speed. Both these chips have an identical TDP (Thermal Design Power). This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

Modern CPUs generally have more logical cores than physical cores, this means that each core is split into multiple virtual cores, improving efficiency for parallel workloads. Indeed, the Core i7-3960X has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.