It has been a while since Intel has released a CPU at $1000, which has felt a little strange as historically they’ve had a flagship processor in that price range.  Sangy Bridge E spells the return to this price point with the Core-i7 3960X Extreme Edition CPU.  The basic stats will make you drool, 6 cores and 12 threads of 32nm, 130W TDP CPU with a base clock of 3.3GHz, Turbo speed of 3.9GHz and 15MB of shared cache.  The benchmarks however leave something to be desired; certainly it is faster than the original Sandy Bridge but it does not leave the competition eating its dirt.  Single GPU gamers probably won’t even notice a change from previous chips, however with the extra power of the 3960X paired with the amazing amount of PCIe lanes available on the X79 series of motherboards, multi-GPU users may benefit much more from this chip.  That still doesn’t change [H]ard|OCP’s final comment about this chip, "Sandy Bridge E, maximizing BitTorrent ratios, one desktop at a time."

Catch Ryan’s full review here.

"Intel debuts its $1000+ Extreme Edition 3960X processor parroting how great it is for the gamer and enthusiast. With 6 cores and 12 threads, a new motherboard and chipset platform, and quad channel DDR3, Intel as done the impossible, given us everything we don’t want, and nothing we do want."

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