The Intel Core i7-5930K’s $584 asking price might be way cheaper than the $1000 required for the 8-core i7-5960X, but it has its work cut out when the significantly cheaper 5820K has such a similar specification.
The i7-5930K has six cores – two fewer than the i7-5960X, but two more than Intel’s LGA1155 processors.
They’re clocked to 3.5GHz with a Turbo peak of 3.7GHz, which is the highest frequency of the three Haswell-E parts. This chip also stands out from the i7-5820K thanks to its 40 PCI-E lanes – the cheaper chip only has 28.
While the i7-5930K doesn’t have as many cores as the i7-5960X, its higher base clock still gives it an advantage in apps that are mostly single-threaded.
As such, it’s able to outpace a chip that’s more than £300 more expensive in our image editing test, where the i7-5930K scored 51,315. That’s the best result from all the Haswell-E chips, although it’s still unable to topple the i7-4790K with its 4GHz stock speed.
That was the only benchmark where the i7-5930K beat the 8-core chip though. In our heavily multi-threaded video encoding test, it settled into second place with a score of 324,929.
That score is telling too, as it’s very close to the 320,546 scored by the cheaper i7-5820K, but unable to touch the 405,115 result from the i7-5960X.
That pattern emerged again in the multitasking test. The Intel Core i7-5930K’s score of 163,678 squeezed past the cheaper Haswell-E chip, but there’s a much wider gap between the 5930K and the 5960X – those two extra cores make a significant difference in these scenarios.
These scores combine for an overall system score of 137,066. This result is a couple of thousand points ahead of the i7-5820K, but it’s a long way behind the i7-5960X – the two extra cores lift the pricier chip to an overall score of 158,169.
The Intel Core i7-5930K couldn’t shake off the 5820K in our 3D content creation benchmarks though. The 5930K’s 1,084 points in Cinebench was only 11 more than the cheaper chip, and the two were only half a second apart in Lightwave – and both were around eight seconds back from the 4960X. That pattern was repeated in Euler3D and Terragen too.
We then took to the EFI to eke more performance from the i7-5930K. Our sample wouldn’t accept any more voltage than 1.3V, but we finally got the silicon stable with a 1.25V vcore and a 4.5GHz clock speed.
That’s the highest overclocked speed of any Haswell-E chip, but it isn’t the biggest leap from stock speed – this chip’s 1GHz improvement doesn’t match the 1.3GHz of extra juice we extracted from the i7-5960X.
The overclock gave us decent improvements in our benchmarks, but they did nothing to change the status quo. In the video encoding benchmark, the gap between the i7-5930K and the i7-5960X grew wider, and in the multi-tasking benchmark, the overclocked 5930K part was still closer to the i7-5820K than the 8-core flagship.
The 5930K hit a revised overall score of 158,601 when overclocked, which was still just 4,000 points ahead of the 5820K.
SPECIFICATIONS
Frequency: 3.5GHz
Turbo Boost frequency: 3.7GHz
Core architecture: Haswell-E
Manufacturing process: 22nm
Number of cores: Six physical, 12 logical
Memory controller: Quad-channel DDR4, up to 2,133MHz
CacheL1: 32KB (each core), L2: 256KB (each core), L3: 15MB (shared)
Packaging: LGA2011-v3
Thermal design power: 140W
Features: SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4, SSE4.1, SSE 4.2, Turbo Boost 2, Hyper-Threading, Smart Cache, EIST, AES-NI
Conclusion
The Intel Core i7-5930K has a slightly higher clock speed than the cheaper i7-5820K, but extra frequency made little practical difference in our tests, except our image editing benchmark.
As such, the i7-5930K only really makes sense in certain types of gaming rig, as it has 40 PCI-E lanes, while the i7-5820K makes do with 28 lanes and has no support for 4-way SLI at all.
If you’re building a system with three or four high-end graphics cards, then the 5930K’s extra PCI-E lanes will make a difference.
For everyone else, though, the similar application performance and 3D content creation performance of the significantly cheaper 5820K effectively makes the 5930K redundant.
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