Soldato
- Joined
- 8 Mar 2007
- Posts
- 10,938
OK so as a 3820 owner I'm biased but say for 99% people the answer is no.
Firstly the 3820 is a very good overclocker. I think a lot of people are being hoodwinked by the 'K' suffix due to the deserved reputation that line of CPUs got on the 1155 platform and as a result subconsciously assuming the 3820 must be a locked down processor not worth bothering with. In fact it's unlocked to 44x with a very good strap tolerance (I have it at 125Mhz), you can hit well over 4 GHZ 24/7 stable easily (the standard clock is 3.6 after-all) and over 4.6 if you persevere a bit. I've seen numerous reports of 3820s running stably at 5GHz including from Paradigm on this board.
From what I've seen a similarly clocked 3930K achieved a mere 10GFlops more than my 3820 did on IBT (110 GFlops vs 120 GFlops) and the 3820 seemed to be able to achieve more stable plus 4.5GHz clocks as well (just from the various posts and forums I've read) which is probably due to the fact is easier to stabilise 4 cores than 6. Generally speaking as more cores are added the standard clock of each core is slower than the previous generation with less cores (as is evident by the fact the 3820 has a stock 3.6Ghz speed whilst the 3930K is 3.2)
And that's the only major difference from what I can see, the 3960K has 6 cores and opposed to 4 on the 3820. No game is going to use more than 4 cores and most software will barely use two. When dual cores first appeared almost no software could utilise them and their individual core performance was quite a bit lower than the mid to high range single core processors at the time so in the real world they actually performed worse than their single core counterparts for quite a while. I think we're in a similar situation with CPUs with more than 4 cores currently.
Don't get me wrong, if I won the lottery this week I'd be ordering myself a 3960X but for most people (inc me pre-hypothetical lottery win) money is an object and an important one at that. I'm seeing on various forums quite a few people who obviously only have a certain budget and are opting for the 3930K but then skimping on the other parts and going mid-range on them and will lose overall computer performance as a result. I used the £200 I saved by not giving into temptation by going for the K series to buy a couple of 120GB SSDs which I'm now running in RAID and I can say that has a far more noticeable effect than anything the £450 3930K would give me over my £250 3820.
So I guess in a little way I'm trying to justify my purchase and I'm sure they'll be 3930K owners who will tell me I'm a noob with a sh*te processor but hey, they probably think the same as me about 3960X owners, who in turn think the same as them about both of us!
Firstly the 3820 is a very good overclocker. I think a lot of people are being hoodwinked by the 'K' suffix due to the deserved reputation that line of CPUs got on the 1155 platform and as a result subconsciously assuming the 3820 must be a locked down processor not worth bothering with. In fact it's unlocked to 44x with a very good strap tolerance (I have it at 125Mhz), you can hit well over 4 GHZ 24/7 stable easily (the standard clock is 3.6 after-all) and over 4.6 if you persevere a bit. I've seen numerous reports of 3820s running stably at 5GHz including from Paradigm on this board.
From what I've seen a similarly clocked 3930K achieved a mere 10GFlops more than my 3820 did on IBT (110 GFlops vs 120 GFlops) and the 3820 seemed to be able to achieve more stable plus 4.5GHz clocks as well (just from the various posts and forums I've read) which is probably due to the fact is easier to stabilise 4 cores than 6. Generally speaking as more cores are added the standard clock of each core is slower than the previous generation with less cores (as is evident by the fact the 3820 has a stock 3.6Ghz speed whilst the 3930K is 3.2)
And that's the only major difference from what I can see, the 3960K has 6 cores and opposed to 4 on the 3820. No game is going to use more than 4 cores and most software will barely use two. When dual cores first appeared almost no software could utilise them and their individual core performance was quite a bit lower than the mid to high range single core processors at the time so in the real world they actually performed worse than their single core counterparts for quite a while. I think we're in a similar situation with CPUs with more than 4 cores currently.
Don't get me wrong, if I won the lottery this week I'd be ordering myself a 3960X but for most people (inc me pre-hypothetical lottery win) money is an object and an important one at that. I'm seeing on various forums quite a few people who obviously only have a certain budget and are opting for the 3930K but then skimping on the other parts and going mid-range on them and will lose overall computer performance as a result. I used the £200 I saved by not giving into temptation by going for the K series to buy a couple of 120GB SSDs which I'm now running in RAID and I can say that has a far more noticeable effect than anything the £450 3930K would give me over my £250 3820.
So I guess in a little way I'm trying to justify my purchase and I'm sure they'll be 3930K owners who will tell me I'm a noob with a sh*te processor but hey, they probably think the same as me about 3960X owners, who in turn think the same as them about both of us!
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