Every new Intel microarchitecture is met with a mix of enthusiasm and skepticism, but all power users ask, "When will the Extreme Edition be available?" For the Haswell/Haswell-E platform, that time is now. The Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition ($1,059) beings another two processor cores to the game, upping the total to eight cores working on 16 threads total. While it isn't the fastest-clocked CPU of the day, it is certainly the most powerful when you run multithreaded apps.

The Core i7-5960X is a power user's dream. It's overclockable from its 3GHz base configuration up to and over 4.2GHz with basic liquid cooling and no esoteric tweaking. There are eight processor cores and 20MB of Intel Smart Cache, while more common enthusiast Core i7 processors make due with four less cores and 6MB to 8MB of cache. The CPU uses the updated 2011-v3 socket and DDR4 memory, so you'll likely have to buy a new motherboard and memory. This is exciting for content creators and enthusiasts because DDR4 allows for magnitudes of higher-density memory.

Fully threaded tasks and tests like CineBench, Handbrake, and POV Ray showed the most improvement compared with the older six-core Extreme Edition processors. That said, most tasks (even single-threaded ones) would show improvement with the new Core i7-5960X processor. The list of apps that take advantage of four or more processor cores tend to favor content creation professionals who constantly have to deal with change orders, but well-heeled gamers and power users will no doubt want the processor as well.

For a user who wants the best possible performance and for whom price is not an issue, there's a lot to like about the Core i7-5960X. For the rest, there are more practical (and less expensive) options available.

For more details, check out the Intel Core i7-5960X Extreme Edition review on our sister site, Computer Shopper.