We have a requirement for some decent processing horsepower, in contrast to the succession of low price laptops we've used over the past 10 years. Servers in this performance class appear to start at about $6,000, so we decided to build our system from scratch with case, power supply, mother board, memory, graphics card, keyboard, mouse, and this cpu. It installed easily and works great. Because of the detents and markings, there was little chance of installing it improperly.
On choosing which CPU family to purchase:
The 3000 series (eg 3930, 3960, etc) are the older Sandy Bridge technology, while the 4000 series (eg 4930, 4960, etc) are the next generation Ivy Bridge technology. I haven't seen reviews suggesting there is a big difference in performance among them.
On which CPU among the families to purchase:
We wanted top performance, so we chose Hex cores (6 processors) over Quad cores (4 processors). The price seemed to scale fairly linearly with number of cores, so you get what you pay for.
The primary difference between the Hexa-core 4930 (3.4 GHz) and the Extreme 4960 (3.6 GHz) appears to be clock speed, which is less than 6% (probably not humanely noticeable), while the price difference is 2x ($500 vs $1000). You decide, 200% price for < 6% performance? We chose not.
On coolers:
We were surprised by one thing. In contrast to other Intel performance chips, this chip ships without a fan, but if you run it (even at low clock rates) without one, it runs hot enough to burn your hand.
After just a few minutes, we became worried and shut it down. We immediately ordered a cooler from Amazon and waited a few more days before we could finish the build.
After reading many reviews, we ordered the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO which is working fine. In retrospect, though, we wish we had ordered the Cooler Master 212 EVO Plus (this newer variant hadn't been reviewed). As near as we can tell, the Plus is the same exact cooler kit with an additional fan attached. It delivers extra cooling and is still compact enough to not interfere with adjacent memory and PCI cards, and if (for whatever reason) you just want the 212 EVO, you can easily unclip one of the fans and you've just saved yourself $12.11. The 212 EVO is $38.99 on Amazon prime, while the 212 EVo Plus is $26.88.
If you really want to overclock this CPU, you'll probably want a circulated water cooler. Again we compared clock rates you might achieve (4 GHz with our cooler, 4.6 GHz with a decent water cooler) and decided it wasn't worthwhile to spend 400% the cost for 15% performance improvement.
On cost vs performance trade-offs in a power build:
To put these decisions in perspective, the cost of all the components for this performance machine was about $4,000.00. We traded some cost for marginal top-end performance.
The highest performance CPU would have cost maybe $600 more for 6% performance improvement (eg 15% cost growth for 6% performance growth). This was probably a good trade.
The best performing cooler would have cost maybe $80 more for 15% performance improvement (eg 2% cost growth for 15% performance growth). One could question the wisdom of this trade, and we may re-think it. Since we've already bought the fan-based cooler, our upgrade cost is $120 not the $80 difference between air and water, so we would bear a 3% cost growth for that 15% performance growth. Time will tell...
Just for background info (or ego), here's our total build:
212 EVO cooler fan
thermal grease
cpu
solid state hard drive
windows 8 pro
4K 20 Hz monitor
monitor insurance
gtx 780 graphics card
rosewill thor case
asus dvd
16 gb gskill trident ddr3 2800
asus rampage black edition lga 2011 motherboard
extended warranty
rosewill lightening 1000 power supply
haven't bothered to address all software packages, as your own personal software installation will vary considerably.
Hope this was helpful. Whichever build choices you make, I know you'll enjoy your PC for a long time to come, and I hope you have as much satisfaction as we have had throughout the extended planning, building, installing, and operating process.
| Processor | 3.4 GHz core_i7 |
|---|---|
| Memory Speed | 1000 GHz |
| Wireless Type | 802.11abg, 802.11bgn, 802.11ab |
