Cooling and Power

With eight cores and all of the performance the 5960X would be expected to put out a ton of heat and spin your electric meter like crazy but with it being a Haswell CPU I really wasn’t sure what to expect. The Original Haswell CPUs did well in power and not too bad in cooling, but Haswell-E Intel went with a soldered HIS for even better cooling performance. So I when running wPrime to put it under load I was able to get an idea of its power draw and heat generation all at once, there is nothing like hitting two birds with one stone. On the power side we are still pulling more power than the mainstream CPUs, this isn’t a huge shock with a TDP of 140. What is great to see is the big drop from the 3970X to the 4960X and then again to the 5960X. The Idle numbers looked especially great with it dropping down the the same 67 watts that the AMD APUs use at idle. It’s great to see Intel improving performance while dropping power usage at the same time. Also keep in mind these are the numbers for the entire PC, including the GTX 780

Using the exact same heatsink the 5960X really performed well in temperature testing. The results came in below both the 4770k and 4790k. I suspect that this is related to the clock speed as well, but none the less very impressive numbers, not even taking into account the extra four cores it has on the those two.