Intel Haswell-E; Intel Core i7-5960X Review, X99 Chipset and DDR4

DDR4 Memory

DDR4 has been in the pipeline for a number of years and has been most highly anticipated for server use thanks to its 20 per cent lower power draw and standard voltage of just 1.2V. Of course this is welcome on any platform, as is the increased density of up to 16GB, but as far as desktop users go, it's speed that we're most concerned with.


As per usual with a new memory standard, timings aren't great - for example 15-15-15-36 is considered pretty good, even for the fastest kits. These will fall in time but thankfully, frequencies are already quite high, with Haswell-E supporting 2,133MHz out of the box and 3,000MHz kits already commonplace, albeit for eye-watering price tags. The stage is set though for better memory performance and as standard, DDR4 offers double the internal banks, faster burst access and higher data rates as well as significant power savings. See over the page for our own tests.


Intel X99 Chipset


For the most part, X99 doesn't offer anything drastically different to X79. The minor differences are additional SATA 6Gbps ports - up to 10 in this case plus Thunderbolt 2 support, which is up to four times faster in terms of bi-directional bandwidth compared to USB 3. There's also up to eight PCI-E 2.0 x1 lanes, configurable as x2, x4, and x8 depending on desktop motherboard designs and TRIM is supported on RAID 0 configurations too.