Most notably, RAM prices have soared, the Xeons are just $20-40 more expensive than they were at their lowest point, and it's still a great bargain to build this Xeon machine if sheer multi-core processing power is what you need.ĭesktop Sandy Bridge processors arrived in 2011, while the Xeon models came a year later. We have revised it and bumped it as part of our #ThrowbackThursday initiative. Note: This feature was originally published on.
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Even today, Sandy Bridge chips are able to hold their own against Skylake processors, with a full four-generation gap between them. In addition, the X7560 was a 45nm Nehalem (read: hot!) based part.Īs with desktop processors, Xeons saw a leap in efficiency and compute power with the arrival of Sandy Bridge, which used a 32nm design process. Clocked at just 2.27GHz, the X7560 was no longer impressive when the 5960X arrived. The cheapest of these originally went on sale for ~$2500, while the flagship model cost a cool $3700. Before Intel graced us with the 8-core i7-5960X, there were server-grade 8-core Xeon processors on the market way back in 2010 in the form of the Xeon X6550, X7550 and X7560. Thanks to its 8-core design aided by Hyper-Threading, the 5960X is a multi-threading monster, and a popular choice for those doing a lot of video editing, particularly with 4K content.īut here's the thing. Granted most would consider $1000+ an unreasonable amount of money to pay for a desktop processor - but for some, the price to pay for these isn't as important as the performance they deliver. Out of the box, the 6950X is 20 to 30% faster than the Core i7-5960X in applications that can use those extra cores, however at $1650 it's also absurdly expensive. That title now belongs to the equally impressive but even more expensive 10-core Core i7-6950X. It's been two years since Intel released their first octa-core desktop processor, the Haswell-E based Core i7-5960X, which until just recently was the most powerful consumer grade processor available.