Intel 3.4 5 LGA 2011 64 Technology Extended Memory CPU Processors BX80633I74930K

There were some games that were unplayable when more than 10 people are on the screen. I thought I needed to update my gfx card (evga gtx 680 superclocked). Nope, turns out that the gpu's perfectly fine and can play in max settings 120hz (1920x 1080 in 3d) almost without a hiccup. I probably won't need to upgrade it for another 3-5 year or so (but I'll probably get the maxwell because I hate being out of date). All I did was replace my amd fx8150 (and obviously the mobo). Wow, smooth as a baby, no more studder. I guess it turns out that the fx8150 was the bottleneck (oc'd to 4ghz). I thought cpus were better than that nowadays? I guess not. For the last 10 years I've been AMD all the way. But now I guess I'm going to be an intel fanboy. Okay, I suppose AMD is still the best bang for the buck hands down. But if you want top raw performance, AMD won't give it to you. I heard the fx9000 series were disappointing and not that much better so I took a chance on this 4930k which was cheaper, I'm glad I did! Pros: -No pins, wow when did that happen? I was worried because instead of pins, the cpu and mobo only had tiny gold bumps. I'm not too fond of connections that don't lock in, but I also don't like accidentally bending pins. I guess these guys know what they're doing. -4.2ghz without even trying to oc. like seriously. I just put turboost on auto and it maxes out at 4.2ghz when it needs to and comes back down to 1.5ghz on idle. Well I'm sure I probably did something while stumbling through the bios. -Processor speed debate aside, this thing is the fastest cpu I've owned. I probably wont need to upgrade until they come up with quantum cpus. -Very cool, not as hot as the other intel processors I've had in the distant past. Also I suck at putting on thermal paste, can't ever figure it out. So I'm glad this runs cold. Cons: Its too sexy, I caved in and bought it. I'm hope some of you have more willpower than I do.

We have a requirement for some decent processing horsepower, in contrast to the succession of low price laptops we've used over the past 10 years. Servers in this performance class appear to start at about $6,000, so we decided to build our system from scratch with case, power supply, mother board, memory, graphics card, keyboard, mouse, and this cpu. It installed easily and works great. Because of the detents and markings, there was little chance of installing it improperly. On choosing which CPU family to purchase: The 3000 series (eg 3930, 3960, etc) are the older Sandy Bridge technology, while the 4000 series (eg 4930, 4960, etc) are the next generation Ivy Bridge technology. I haven't seen reviews suggesting there is a big difference in performance among them. On which CPU among the families to purchase: We wanted top performance, so we chose Hex cores (6 processors) over Quad cores (4 processors). The price seemed to scale fairly linearly with number of cores, so you get what you pay for. The primary difference between the Hexa-core 4930 (3.4 GHz) and the Extreme 4960 (3.6 GHz) appears to be clock speed, which is less than 6% (probably not humanely noticeable), while the price difference is 2x ($500 vs $1000). You decide, 200% price for < 6% performance? We chose not. On coolers: We were surprised by one thing. In contrast to other Intel performance chips, this chip ships without a fan, but if you run it (even at low clock rates) without one, it runs hot enough to burn your hand. After just a few minutes, we became worried and shut it down. We immediately ordered a cooler from Amazon and waited a few more days before we could finish the build. After reading many reviews, we ordered the Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO which is working fine. In retrospect, though, we wish we had ordered the Cooler Master 212 EVO Plus (this newer variant hadn't been reviewed). As near as we can tell, the Plus is the same exact cooler kit with an additional fan attached. It delivers extra cooling and is still compact enough to not interfere with adjacent memory and PCI cards, and if (for whatever reason) you just want the 212 EVO, you can easily unclip one of the fans and you've just saved yourself $12.11. The 212 EVO is $38.99 on Amazon prime, while the 212 EVo Plus is $26.88. If you really want to overclock this CPU, you'll probably want a circulated water cooler. Again we compared clock rates you might achieve (4 GHz with our cooler, 4.6 GHz with a decent water cooler) and decided it wasn't worthwhile to spend 400% the cost for 15% performance improvement. On cost vs performance trade-offs in a power build: To put these decisions in perspective, the cost of all the components for this performance machine was about $4,000.00. We traded some cost for marginal top-end performance. The highest performance CPU would have cost maybe $600 more for 6% performance improvement (eg 15% cost growth for 6% performance growth). This was probably a good trade. The best performing cooler would have cost maybe $80 more for 15% performance improvement (eg 2% cost growth for 15% performance growth). One could question the wisdom of this trade, and we may re-think it. Since we've already bought the fan-based cooler, our upgrade cost is $120 not the $80 difference between air and water, so we would bear a 3% cost growth for that 15% performance growth. Time will tell... Just for background info (or ego), here's our total build: 212 EVO cooler fan thermal grease cpu solid state hard drive windows 8 pro 4K 20 Hz monitor monitor insurance gtx 780 graphics card rosewill thor case asus dvd 16 gb gskill trident ddr3 2800 asus rampage black edition lga 2011 motherboard extended warranty rosewill lightening 1000 power supply haven't bothered to address all software packages, as your own personal software installation will vary considerably. Hope this was helpful. Whichever build choices you make, I know you'll enjoy your PC for a long time to come, and I hope you have as much satisfaction as we have had throughout the extended planning, building, installing, and operating process.

Coming from an overclocked 4ghz i7-920, this was a pleasant upgrade. If you're upgrading to this expecting a huge jump, you'll be disappointed. I upgraded to this mainly because I do a lot of video editing, 3D modeling, and photography work. Rendering my raw Nikon D3100 footage with effects in Sony Vegas were much noticeably faster, and the preview screen didn't skip frames like on my old rig. The same goes for my GoPro footage, although the 2k/4k resolutions did seem to make it skip a little bit. Most of my multi-threaded apps were noticeably faster. If you are a gamer or just uses this for daily browsing and not really doing a whole of intensive tasks, this probably isn't for you. Quad cores nowadays are more than sufficient for gaming and browsing. Save yourself some money. I'm a gamer also and didn't notice a difference in any of games except maybe ARMA3. Flight Simulator X also was an improvement, but anyone who actually has been on FSX for a long time knows that simulator is more about clock speed than cores. I didn't mess with a whole lot of overclocking, I did get it to 4.0ghz a little bit and it was pretty easy but I didn't test it for stability. So I can't really say much there except that I've heard this chip doesn't overclock too particularly well. It certainly runs cooler than my i7-920 too. All in all, this processor was a nice upgrade for me. It's not for everybody, and certainly isn't worth the price tag if you're just gaming or browsing.

I have this CPU installed in an Asus Rampage IV Black motherboard with 64GB of DDR3 2133 memory and a custom-built liquid cooling system that includes a 480 mm radiator dedicated to CPU cooling only. I had this CPU overclocked to 5.1 GHz with no heat problems. However, I could not keep it stable at this level. It would blue screen every time I tried to restart the computer. I finally had to compromise and settle for 4.7 GHz. I have read articles where this CPU is able to break all sorts of speed records so I was expecting closer to 5.5. I am disappointed that I have not been able to achieve this.

I bought this in November 2013. I did not install and use it until winter of 2014. So this is a review with 2 years of usage of the product. This is one of the best processors I've ever had. It's incredibly fast, and is more than enough for gaming on maximum settings. I can load intensive games like future-era huge maps in Civilization 5, Skyrim running with over a hundred mods, a 1000-year game on a 1000-star galaxy with max civilizations in Stellaris, pretty much anything. I can run Firefox with multiple tabs including streaming AND downloading while having multiple VoIP programs like Discord and Teamspeak and Uplay running with the Division, and I get no lag at all. Keep in mind, I have a 980 GTX and 16 GB of Ram as well as a high end SSD. I highly recommend this processor, especially now that it's getting cheaper.

I've had an Intel i7 Six Core processor before with the LGA 1366 socket type. My motherboard's SATA controller fried and I decided to upgrade to this CPU with a highly rated LGA 2011 ASUS mobo. Now I have had excellent results with Intel processors in the past and highly recommend them as well. I loved the previous Intel six core's ability to run a lot of programs simultaneously, no complaints there. Yet I haven't even gotten this CPU operational yet because: Unlike every Intel processor I've ever purchased this one did not bother to come with a stock fan! My last corei7 six core Intel came with a lovely fan with huge heat-sink with eight pipes. I was so impressed I used it instead of purchasing an overpriced third party heat-sink/fan. I had high expectations for the same with this Core i7 and was sorely disappointed to find it had no heat-sink/fan included. I had overnighted this CPU and motherboard to find I can't even use it. I had to drive an hour to a computer parts store to buy thermal compound and they didn't have any fan/heat-sink that would fit the LGA 2011 socket type. I was told I would have to order it... So I'm overnighting an expensive third party heat-sink and fan combo and hoping for the best. I'm sure the CPU is excellent, but I am disappointed that Intel would sell this high-end CPU without a CPU cooler, that just seems irresponsible.

Wickedly fast and runs cool to boot. How can you not give a CPU that overclocks to 4.5 on air without any effort a 5 star rating! Just stuck it in my new Asus Rampage IV Gene microATX 2011 mobo and stuck a cooler master Hyper 212 Evo on it and let ROG's CPU Level Up go to work and instant 4.5 on air! And even at this speed the cpu speed still only get's up to 38C! My last Intel core i7 ran at around 50C just at idle and would quickly go up to around 90C if I tried overclocking it! If you already own a i7-950 or faster probably normal user won't notice speed increase much then again they should be buying a cheap 4770. In my case I needed every ounce of speed I could get because I"m running multiple monitors with a 4K monitor and it definitely helps. Mouse scrolling is a lot smoother in 4K with this cpu than my older i7-950 which couldn't keep up. Finally, if you have a bunch of video files you need to recode for tablet devices like my iPad mini this thing will quickly pay for itself in time it saves you! I can drag entire folders of older wmv files into Nero recode and it recodes them to MP4 format ridiculously fast in no time since it will use all 12 cores!!! So kudos to Nero since it's one of the few apps that can push this processor.

After seven years with the i7-3820 I decided that it was time upgrade my CPU (and GPU). I also elected to stay with the LGA 2011 socket, not wanting to switch mobo which would require reinstalling Windows 10 and apps. After researching both the i7-4960X and the i7-4930K it came down to a decision of performance for the $$$. I am happy to say that thE i7-4930k meets all my expectations. The replacement CPU came well packaged, was clean, and showed no signs of wear of damage. The installation was plug 'n play. All that was required was to clean the old thermal paste off the cooler, add new paste and power it on. I am absolutely thrilled with the purchase.