Haswell-E is here. Well, technically, it's been ?here? for a while but has undergone refinements throughout the last year to ready itself for launch. One of those refinements was more performance and cooler operating temperatures. Without creating a whole new architecture, the only feasible direction, given the current TDP and heat challenges facing Haswell, was to refine the silicon, add more cores, lower the core voltage, and assign a frequency that can be maintained across those cores. The result is the new Core i7-5960X Haswell-E processor that uses 8 physical cores and 16 threads to flex its muscle.

Today, we?re giving the new Core i7-5960X its debut, after repeated torture tests for days on end. The question on everyone's mind is, do all those threads really make this new processor worth the money? That's exactly the question we want to answer.