Intel's "Extreme Edition" CPUs have always represented the company's top consumer offerings. Typically priced in the $1,000 range, they have unlocked multipliers, lots of cache, and lots of cores. But until now, Intel's top Extreme Edition offering, the Core i7-990X CPU, was based on the older Gulftown architecture, and the performance gap between this CPU and the newer Sandy Bridge architecture Core i7-2600K and 2700K is pretty damn narrow, especially considering that the latter costs less than a third the price of the former. But now Intel's made a Sandy Bridge Extreme Edition, with six physical cores and a staggering 15 megabytes of cache. Benchmark Reviews takes the new Intel Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition CPU around the benchmark course, testing it against the best CPUs Intel and AMD have to offer.