Okay so i am literally a couple of days away from purchasing the 5960X for productivity. Story short I am in my senior year classes as a 3D art student and i would love to have a solid workstation. But after a discussion with my friend he insists that the 5960x is a brain dead buy and I am wasting my money.
His reason is the generation succeeding an extreme proc has better offerings at the $400 range, Next year will be superseded by the base i7. As well as the performance gain from the chip is not much from a $500 cpu.
Me personally i felt like the benchmarks that were rolling out were amazing. With cinebench scores reaching around the 1600's compared the $500 dollar x99 model reaching the 1200's. (overclocked)
I am wondering what your take is on this situation?
(The upgrade is going to be from an 8350)
I don't ever see the next generation's low end i7 superceding the current i7-5960X Extreme Edition. On X79, the extreme edition didn't make sense. However, on X99, the Extreme Edition has two more cores than the middle and lower end i7s. It's pricy, but if you're work can benefit from it, I don't see why you shouldn't go with it.
It's certainly cheaper than a Xeon.
I'd maybe wait until DDR4 is a little bit cheaper.
Ibelieve what your friend is referring to is the refresh equivalent of the 5930k, looking through history, Intel introduces a uber high end CPU, for example their first consumer six core the 980x, then a little while later they introduce a similar CPU for far less, e.g. i7 970. I am thinking the same as your friend in that the refresh park of the 5930k will have 8 cores as well as the refresh part of the 5960x, leaving only the refresh 5820k as a six core.
I see now, Either way I decided to not go with the 5960x only becasue i felt the xtra 500ish dollars was not worth the little increase of performance. I ended up going with the 5930k and im just going to oc it.
Final build - http://pcpartpicker.com/user/kyleadavis94/saved/FYRwrH (gpu and sandisk ssd were purchased a couple months ago.)