May 21 2011 review by pcper

Despite being based on an older architecture when compared to the new hotness that is Sandy Bridge, the Core i7-990X is arguably the fastest processor that Intel offers to consumers with a fat wallet. In cases where applications were highly threaded and could take advantage of the 6-cores / 12 threads of the Gulftown CPU, examples of which are Handbrake and POV-Ray, the 990X ran away with the performance advantage followed closely by the Core i7-980X. Even though the processor runs at 3.46 GHz as the default clock speed (and that the i7-2600K can reach much higher than that) the power of 6-cores is hard to get away from when it comes to processor-bound computing.

Benchmarks Tested:

3D Mark Vantage, 7zip, Cinebench, Euler 3D Fluid Dynamics, Handbrake, HyperPi, Lame, Microsoft Image Composite Engine, PC mark vantage, POV-Ray, Power Consumption, Sisoft Sandra, Valve Source Particle Simulation, VirtualDub, Windows Media Encoder x64.

Overclocking:

The reviewer did not perform any overclocking.

3-9-2011 review by hothardware

The new Core i7-990X hexacore is app. 3% across the board. This cpu is what it is, a little bit faster than Intel's 980x desktop chip. It's unlocked and clocked at 3.45GHz stock speed with a Turbo Boost top-end speed of 3.73GHz. Intel claims its their fastest desktop chip.

Overclocking:

The 990x was OCed @ 4.3GHz overclock, app. a 24% gain.

Test Setup:

• CPU : Intel Core i7-990X
• Graphics Card : GeForce GTX 280
• HDD : Western Digital WD150 "Raptor" 10000RPM
• Mainboard : Intel DX58SO2
• Memory : 3x2GB Kingston DDR3-1333 MHz
• Operating System : Windows 7 x64

Benchmarks:

3D Mark Vantage, Cinebench, Crysis, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, Lame, PC mark vantage, Sisoft Sandra, Winrar.