While you have a bit of financial pain moving to the latest and greatest Extreme Edition processors, you are guaranteed a specific performance window for doing so. In my testing, I found there were very few scenarios where the Core i7 6950X did not exceed the performance of the previous generation Haswell-E Core i7 5960X. In just about every test, the additional core count and Turbo Boost speeds helped out performance. From rendering tasks to gaming, the Core i7 6950X does a great job leveraging the core count of the processor. Where the largest performance gaps were found were in the single threaded applications where the lower base core clock is to blame. That all can be fixed with some overclocking of the core and ring bus. Overclocking does indeed add another layer of performance to the equation with by core overclocking the ability to modulate the amount of core clock speed you can bring to the party for heavy AVX based loads. That's just another layer to peel back and explore in our Core i7 6950X overclocking article coming soon.