Intel Core i7-3960X vs Intel Xeon E5-2660

Core i7-3960X vs Xeon E5-2660 benchmarks

According to the hardwareDB Benchmark tool, the Core i7-3960X is faster than the Xeon E5-2660. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Xeon E5-2660 in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Xeon E5-2660 has slightly more cores with 8 cores compared to the Core i7-3960X that has 6 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i7-3960X. Our comparison shows that the Core i7-3960X has a significantly higher clock speed compared to the Xeon E5-2660. Also, the Core i7-3960X has a slightly higher turbo speed. The Xeon E5-2660 outputs less heat than Core i7-3960X thanks to a slightly lower TDP. 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.