The show floor presence was much more vibrant for Intel at this year’s PAX Prime. When we visited the company at East, presentation was largely devoted to a few 700-series SSDs, some (very large) gaming notebooks, and that was about it. This event’s booth came equipped with Intel-branded lamp shades over the ceiling lights – a clear indication of the company’s technological progress.
Impressive light diffusion aside, Intel did have fairly exciting lineup of hardware to look at: The i7-5960X had its embargo officially lifted at 9AM PST and made an appearance at the show, ASUS has its new X99-Deluxe boards powering the booth, Alienware, Falcon Northwest, Maingear, and other shops have systems present, and there’s a clear push toward the DIY PC consumer. A huge step in the direction we all want to move.
A Quick i7-5960X Specs Recap
| Core Arch | Haswell |
| Socket Type | LGA 2011 |
| Core Count | 8-core Hyperthreaded 16 threads |
| Frequency | 3.0GHz |
| L2 Cache | 8 x 256KB |
| L3 Cache | 20MB |
| Manuf. Process | 22nm |
| TDP | 140W |
| MSRP | $1050 |
Intel i7-5960X Hands-On & Specs Overview
The video content is admittedly fairly limited in its technical capacity. We were not able to locate architects in time for the interview, but managed to get the marketing overview on the CPU, for those who are unfamiliar with its core stats and target audience. We’ll have a more detailed overview of the new CPU online once we return from PAX Prime.
The i7-5960X is Intel’s first consumer-class eight-core processor running on the Haswell-E architecture, which is a modified version of existing Haswell architecture. The processor is targeted primarily at enthusiast gamers and production rigs, though optimization is forthcoming for professional software (like After Effects). As already widely-known, the 5960X is the first CPU on the market to support DDR4 memory, which we’ll be showcasing throughout PAX Prime from memory vendors.
Stock frequency is clocked at 3GHz, but the CPU can be easily overclocked to 4.4GHz, from what on-site system builders told us.
Retail price, though Intel was not prepared to discuss it at the show, the i7-5960X eight-core CPU is selling presently for $1050.
ASUS X99-Deluxe Motherboard Specs
Moving on, ASUS has its new X99-Deluxe motherboard available for use in Extreme Series systems. The specs are as follows:
ASUS highlighted the use of a black color theme accented with white. When asked about the future of the “gold” theme, it was suggested that white may be phased in due to initial positive response. If I were to speculate, I’d say that this can be interpreted as a succession of the white/black theme over the gold/black theme.
EVGA and MSI are also at the show with new X99 boards, though we haven’t had time to get hands-on with them yet.
- Steve "Lelldorianx" Burke.