You must make sure when looking at performance reviews for new cpus they are being tested fairly. I'm going to try and sum this up quickly and easly and try and bury the hatchet in why everyone is tricked into believing that the i-7 2600k gives more gaming performance than a i-7 3960k at the same GHZ clock rate.
for example
world of warcraft can only run on 2 cores
Heres an illistration on what hyperthreading does to a core.
[1][2]
[3][4] <--- is a quad core with hyper threading disabled
[1A][1B][2A][2B]
[3A][3B][4A][4B] <------- is a quad core with hyper threading enabled
Since wow is only ABLE to run on two cores in the first picture it would run on cores 1,2
Since wow is only ABLE to run on two cores in the second picture it would run on cores 1A,1B
This leads to a decrease and bottle necking in performance due to basically only being ran on 1 core instead of 2.
so here is the next illustration
Please review this review http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...k,3090-10.html
Crysis 2 - engine was built so that it could run on up to 8 cores (yay for hyper threading)
Diagram 3
[1A][1B][2A][2B]
[3A][3B][4A][4B] <---- the game crysis using all cores efficiently there's no easy way to put this and this does not reflect the 100% accuracy of what is happening here but it is the best way to simply explain it using words.
If each core is running at 4ghz that means [1A] = 2ghz and [1B] = 2ghz making core [1] = 4ghz so crysis is using 4 cores at 4ghz basic level.
now heres a diagram for i-7 3930k with hyper threading on running crysis
[1A][1B][2A][2B]
[3A][3B][4A][4B]
[5A][5B][6A][6B] <--- so basicly its still only using 4 cores at 4ghz which will result in the same or slightly lower performance as the 4 core chip leading to superficial results in gaming benchmarks.
Now here is the i-7 3930k with hyperthreading disabled
[1][2]
[3][4]
[5][6] <---- now instead of just running on 4 cores at 4ghz your running 6 full cores at 4ghz
This is how you will actually test if a cpu is better in the game performance and why that crysis review was superficial.
If crysis was patched to be able to run efficiently on up to 12 cores then you'd see alot of benchmarks with the i-7 3960k way ahead, but since that's not likely to happen then you have to tweak your cpu settings to match the software thats running on it for a fair test.
EDIT
Testimony
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/2412081539
http://elitistjerks.com/f15/t40955-w...weaks_etc/p27/
http://www.techpowerup.com/forums/ar.../t-145737.html