Intel Core i7-5930K - Core i7 5th Gen Haswell-E 6-Core 3.5 GHz LGA 2011-v3 140W Desktop Processor - BX80648I75930K

Pros: Fast, powerful, stable, etc, etc. It's Intel's new E series and man does it deliver. If you want a stupidly high end system, then these are the processors to get. Overclocks great in most cases, and even the poor samples seem to hit 4-4.2GHz. Good ones hit 4.6GHz, maybe more. Make sure you get good cooling if you want to try that.

Also something to note is overclocking voids your warranty... but Intel will sell you an OC warranty. Called the Performance Tuning Protection Plan, it runs you like $25-30 straight from Intel. They'll then cover damage even if you OC. Consider picking it up if you get one of these and want to push it.

Cons: Price. E series stuff is always expensive, however this is a bit of a hard sell, what with the 5820K selling for so much less and trading off very little.

Overall Review: Make sure you buy a heatsink, the E series don't come with one.


Before you pull the trigger on this, consider the 5820K and the 5960X. The reason is for the price, this is not necessarily a good choice. Unless you need more PCIe lanes for 3-way SLI or the like, the 5820K should get you the same performance but for a good deal less money. The OC results seem to be right about the same according to the hardware sites. Also, the 5960X might seem a bit underwhelimg, since it has a 500MHz slower base clock, but again it seems to overclock no problems.

So the only case where the 5830K is the best is if you don't wish to overclock and want the highest base clocks, or if you have a use for more PCIe lanes, but can't swing the massive price for the 5960X.

I'm not saying don't get it, obviously I decided it was the best for me, just make sure you consider the other options. In many, many, cases the 5820K will save you 30%ish and when OC'd provide the exact same performance.

Pros: Still does plenty good enough in most of todays tasks (August 2018)

Cons: I personally was stuck with a really poor quality sample. I can't hold even a slight overclock no matter what is done. Even at stock frequencies I have a bad core that makes itself pretty apparent when running any form of stress test.

Overall Review: While the silicone lottery is really the only reason I gave this a 3 star review after a couple years of ownership. These Intel-E chips should not have these sorts of quality issues, and all of the cores and chips should be of a much higher quality bin than I ended up with.

I would like to replace this CPU with something newer, but until Intel makes it worth the upgrade, I will make do with the 5930K at a limited stock configuration.