Intel Core i7 980X 

By pumping up the voltage to 1.425V we were able to get the Intel Core i7 980X processor up to 4.32GHz, which is 10MHz shy of exactly a 1GHz overclock.

Benchmark Results: Looking at POV-Ray 3.7 Beta 35a, the Intel Core i7 980X processor dominates the other two high-end processors, as you can see from the chart above.

Results: The Intel Core i7-980X desktop processor Extreme Edition does very well in power consumption testing due to the fact that the processor is based on the new 32nm manufacturing process.

The acoustics of the fan are also very good as at idle it spins at 800 RPM and is just 20 dBA.

By increasing the CPU Core Voltage 1.300V and increasing the multiplier to 29 we were able to read 3.9GHz with ease.

We then take that file and output it as a Blu-ray disc using Sony Vegas 9.0c. The output is a 1920x1080 60i Blu-ray Disc ISO image.

Intel updated the core to a more advanced process than early Core i7 processors.

At full load we found the Core i7-980X to be 50% faster than the Core i7-975 and here we see at full load the Core i7-980X uses 9% less power!

The Intel Core i7-980X processor will cost you the same $999 that the Intel Core i7-975 retails for, even though it has two more physical cores and 4MB of extra cache.

That means that the Intel Core i7-980X processor not only is faster in the majority of the benchmarks, but it also consumes less power.

Benchmark Results: Running the Sony Vegas 9.0c benchmark shows just how important a CPU is when it comes to creating video content.

It's also an absolute monster in benchmarks that traditionally favour chips with fewer cores but higher clocks, such as gaming and file decompression.

Intel publicly showed off the new Core i7-980X processor at the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco this week, so they have allowed the press and analysts to tell you all about it.

If you run multi-threaded applications you'll want a 980X, but when it comes to gaming, having a six-core processor isn't going to help you win any LAN parties.

The GPU Score seems to be GPU limited at around 61,000 3DMarks since we didn't see much of a gain on the FPS in the game benchmarks.