14 DAY TRIAL // Intel's Haswell-E CPUs are just around the corner, expected by some to start shipping even before AMD's Radeon R9 285 graphics card. As if to confirm this, one of them has shown up online.
Called Core i7-5960X, and bearing the codename BX80648I75960X, the central processing unit is a quad-core unit with a base clock of 3 GHz and a Turbo Boost maximum of 3.5 GHz.
It also has a TSP of 140W and 1 MB of L2 cache memory (8 x 256kB), plus 20 MB of L3 cache memory.
The number of PCI Express lanes has been confirmed as well: forty PCI Express 3.0 lanes.
As for the quad-channel memory controller, it is rated at DDR4-2133, but should handle overclocked RAM just fine.
All in all, the Intel Core i7-5960X is just as overpowered as we expected, so be sure you have one of those socket LGA 2011-3 motherboards ready to receive it if you're gunning for one.
They're all expensive, like the CPU itself really, but you'll want to grin and bear it if you want to benefit from all the above, as well as from Turbo Boost, Hyper-Threading, IPT, AES-NI, XD Bit, VT-x EPT, VT-d, Intel 64, Idle States, EIST and Thermal Monitoring.