Almost two years ago we were struck by the awesome performance of Intel’s flagship Haswell-E CPU. Featuring eight cores clocked at 3 GHz, it ploughed through meaty tasks such as video rendering with aplomb, greatly outpacing both Haswell 'Devil's Canyon' performance CPUs and, as we would later discover, the rest of the Haswell-E lineup. It’s perhaps unsurprisingly that we see a similar picture emerge with the new Broadwell-E CPUs, but one where a different conclusion is warranted.

The Core i7-6950X is without any shadow of a doubt the highest performing CPU currently on the market, blitzing even the blisteringly fast i7-5960X. Improvements of 25% were not unrealistic across a wide range of benchmarks including valuable real-world examples such as video rendering, where minimising time spent has tangible worth to professionals and enthusiasts. Although not quite so pronounced, there was also a measurable benefit to the i7-6900K over the i7-5960X; this was not a result we had expected, even factoring in the disparities in reference clock speeds.

By the same token gaming performance differences were relatively minor, and with low-level APIs such as DirectX 12 slowly entering the market powerful CPUs may well diminish in importance. This emphasises the need to base purchasing decisions on your specific use case: a $1500 CPU is likely wasted on simply gaming, even at high resolution; factor in heavy rendering workloads however and the payoff may well be worth it.



It’s clear that Intel want to draw direct comparisons between the new and previous Extreme Edition CPUs, but we wonder whether that this appropriate in this context. The i7-6950X sits in a price bracket 50% higher than the i7-5960X did at launch, and at $1500 is at the extreme end of an already narrow market segment. In many respects the 6950X is a class apart, and that’s reflected in the CPU’s performance.

The Broadwell-E Core i7-6950X is not a CPU for the average consumer, nor even the exceptional one. Instead it’s firmly in the ballpark for gamers and content creators who make a living through streaming, editing and rendering for later monetised upload to video sharing sites. With this sort of use case it’s more justifiable, simply because rendering time is a key bottleneck in workflow.

Other users will find more value from models lower down in the Broadwell-E range. The Core i7-6900K is a meaningful enough boost over the i7-5960X to justify its existence, if not upgrading to it from the older platform. We’re looking forward to putting the lower-specced CPUs through their paces, especially comparing the six-core Core i7-6800K to the quad-core ‘Skylake’ i7-6700K

One other aspect that surprised us was in power consumption, and not in a positive way. We found that comparable Broadwell-E parts had higher idle and load values than the Haswell-E counterpart, something that we wouldn’t expect considering that in moving to a 14nm process node we should be seeing greater efficiencies. Some workloads will see an improved performance/watt, but not as meaningful a change and might have expected given the transition.

Despite relatively modest reference frequencies, and Haswell-E’s towering reputation for being a great overclocking chip, we found that Broadwell-E excelled in overclocking. We were able to push both the i7-6950X and i7-6900K to 4.4Ghz using only simple multiplier tweak, exceeding a 1GHz overclock over reference frequencies that, although it doesn’t touch the 4.9GHz of our Core i7-5960X, is more than sufficient to interest enthusiasts. Power draw and temperatures do ramp up significantly with only small alterations in CPU voltage however, so pushing Broadwell-E to its 24/7 stable limit may well require more complex cooling solutions than our already very robust Corsair H100i GTX.



That’s a lot to take in, so let’s break it down into a key takeaway: with the exception of the 10-Core flagship model, Broadwell-E doesn’t present an enticing draw over the previous generation, but will nonetheless be a significant boost to anyone running systems over two years old. Whether you're in the market for the best upgrade over your aging Ivybridge/Ivybridge-E system, or your personal/small business requirements have changed to include workloads that scale with CPU performance, Broadwell-E as a platform should be something you consider. Even so, you should ensure that the sorts of workloads you’ll be putting the CPU through – simply gaming; workhorse tasks; or more taxing jobs – match the capabilities of the CPU to ensure it’s worth additional investment over Skylake.

The exception is the Core i7-6950X Extreme Edition, which stands alone in almost every aspect. It’s a 10-core, 20-thread part that is unmatched outside of the workstation/enterprise space, and in performance exceed its meagre competition. This justifies the Elite label we’re happy to affix to the Broadwell-E series, but anyone looking to invest almost $2000 in a CPU and motherboard combination should be absolutely sure it’s the best option for them that represents worth beyond bragging rights.