Intel Core i7-6950X vs Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3

Core i7-6950X vs Xeon E5-2690 v3 specs and performance

Our benchmark analysis concludes that the Xeon E5-2690 v3 performs better than the Core i7-6950X. Furthermore, our gaming benchmark shows that it also outperforms the Core i7-6950X in all gaming tests too.

When comparing core counts for these CPUs, we notice that the Xeon E5-2690 v3 has slightly more cores with 12 cores compared to the Core i7-6950X that has 10 cores. It also has more threads than the Core i7-6950X. With our hardware info, we find that the Core i7-6950X has a slightly higher clock speed than the Xeon E5-2690 v3. Furthermore, both these CPUs have identical turbo speeds. The Xeon E5-2690 v3 outputs less heat than Core i7-6950X thanks to a slightly lower TDP. This measures the amount of heat they output and can be used to estimate power consumption.

The more cores a CPU has, the better the overall performance will be in parallel workloads such as multitasking. Many CPUs have more threads than cores, this means that each physical core is split into multiple logical cores, making them more efficient. Indeed, the Core i7-6950X has more threads than cores. Each physical core is split into multiple threads.