Intel Core i7-3960X vs Intel Xeon E5-2689

Core i7-3960X vs Xeon E5-2689 comparison

In our benchmarks, the Xeon E5-2689 beats the Core i7-3960X in overall performance. Despite this, the Core i7-3960X has the advantage in our gaming benchmark.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Xeon E5-2689 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. The Xeon E5-2689 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.