Intel Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E CPU Review

Bioshock Infinite

Although the synthetic benchmarks are nice testing tools that can give a good indication of a system’s performance, for most enthusiasts it all boils down to games. Bioshock Infinite is the latest in the wildly popular Bioshock series and although it is based on the Unreal Engine, it has a lot of eye candy that can be turned on to really push a system to its limits. We ran the test at 1080p at Ultra and DDOF and even with these extreme settings we averaged over 90 fps at stock and never dropped below 30. Adding our overclock gave us a couple fps boost across the board.

GRID 2

GRID 2 is the most recent racing game from Codemasters, creators of the popular DiRT racing series. This game is absolutely stunning with all of the eye candy maxed out, and even at 1080 our system averaged nearly 100 fps with a minimum of 76 fps at stock. Despite the amazing performance, this game is clearly GPU limited as our overclock only gave us about a 1 fps bump.

Metro Last Light

Metro Last Light is the newest addition to the Metro franchise from 4A Games. With incredible graphics and lighting effects, this game is more than capable of bringing any system to its knees. After 3 runs with everything turned all the way up, our average framerate came out to 40 fps with the minimum dropping all the way down to 10.8. Applying our overclock didn’t help much here, giving us only a small boost to our minimum.

Tomb Raider

The Tomb Raider reboot by Square Enix is a another graphical marvel. We of course maxed out the settings and set it loose on our system which then handily chewed it up and asked for more. We averaged about 76 fps which saw a very small boost with our overclock.