Intel Core i7 4960X EE CPU / Asus X79-Deluxe Motherboard Review

According to EA, Battlefield 3 garnered 3 million pre-orders by the day of its release. It is unknown at present whether these figures are worldwide or just for the US. The pre-order total makes it “the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history”, according to the publisher. The engine is beautiful on the PC and very demanding of the partnering hardware.

We used the game's demanding ‘Ultra' setting and a 1920 x 1080 resolution to push today's gaming hardware.

Battlefield 3 gives a clear indication that, once you pass a certain point, cores, threads and cache mean very little in modern games, at a 1920 x 1080 resolution, at least. The micro-architectural improvements given to Intel's latest mainstream part allow it to gain an additional frame over the higher-core-count models that we pitted it against.

Despite being beaten by the 4770K, the single frame per second difference is unlikely to be of much concern when using the 4960X with test configurations similar to ours. The graphics card provides the biggest bottleneck in our system.

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