Pentium B960: specs and benchmarks

VS

Aggregate performance score

Pentium B960
2011
2 cores / 2 threads, 35 Watt
0.62

Pentium B960 provides poor benchmark performance at 0.62% of a leader's which is a 96-core EPYC 9655P.

Summary

Intel started Pentium B960 sales 2 October 2011 at a recommended price of $134. This is a Sandy Bridge architecture notebook processor primarily aimed at office systems. It has 2 cores and 2 threads, and is based on 32 nm manufacturing technology, with a maximum frequency of 2.2 and a locked multiplier.

Compatibility-wise, this is FCPGA988,PGA988 processor with a TDP of 35 Watt. It supports DDR3 memory.

Primary details

Pentium B960 processor market type (desktop or notebook), architecture, sales start time and pricing.

Place in the ranking2792
Place by popularitynot in top-100
Market segmentLaptop
SeriesIntel Pentium
Power efficiency1.68of 100.00 (Ryzen Z1 Extreme)
Architecture codenameSandy Bridge (2011−2013)
Release date2 October 2011 (13 years ago)
Launch price (MSRP)$134of 17,906 (Xeon Platinum 8280L)

Detailed specifications

Basic microprocessor parameters such as number of cores, number of threads, base frequency and turbo boost clock, lithography, cache size and multiplier lock state. These parameters can generally indicate CPU performance, but to be more precise you have to review its test results.

Physical cores2 (Dual-core)
Threads2
Base clock speed2.2 GHzof 4.7 GHz (FX-9590)
Boost clock speed2.2 GHzof 6.2 GHz (Core i9-14900KS)
Bus typeDMI 2.0
Bus rate4 × 5 GT/s
Multiplier22of 42 (Core i7-7700K)
L1 cache64K (per core)of 80 KB (EPYC 9965)
L2 cache256K (per core)
L3 cache2 MB (shared)of 1152 MB (EPYC 9684X)
Chip lithography32 nmof 3 nm (Apple M3 Max 16-Core)
Die size131 mm2
Maximum core temperature85 °Cof 110 °C (Atom x7-E3950)
Number of transistors504 millionof 135,240 million (EPYC 9684X)
64 bit support+
Windows 11 compatibility-

Compatibility

Information on Pentium B960 compatibility with other computer components and devices: motherboard (look for socket type), power supply unit (look for power consumption) etc. Useful when planning a future computer configuration or upgrading an existing one. Note that power consumption of some processors can well exceed their nominal TDP, even without overclocking. Some can even double their declared thermals given that the motherboard allows to tune the CPU power parameters.

Number of CPUs in a configuration1 (Uniprocessor)of 8 (Opteron 842)
SocketFCPGA988,PGA988
Power consumption (TDP)35 Wattof 500 Watt (Xeon 6960P)

Technologies and extensions

Technological capabilities and additional instructions supported by Pentium B960. You'll probably need this information if you require some particular technology.

Instruction set extensionsIntel® SSE4.1, Intel® SSE4.2
FMA+
Enhanced SpeedStep (EIST)+
My WiFi-
Turbo Boost Technology-
Hyper-Threading Technology-
Idle States+
Thermal Monitoring+
Flex Memory Access+
Demand Based Switching-
FDI+
Fast Memory Access+

Security technologies

Processor technologies aimed at improving security, for example, by protecting against hacks.

TXT-
EDB+
Anti-Theft-

Virtualization technologies

Supported virtual machine optimization technologies. Some are specific to Intel only, some to AMD.

VT-d-
VT-x-

Memory specs

Types, maximum amount and channel number of RAM supported by Pentium B960's memory controller. Depending on the motherboard, higher memory frequency may be supported.

Supported memory typesDDR3
Maximum memory size16 GBof 6 TiB (EPYC 9124)
Max memory channels2of 12 (Xeon Platinum 9221)
Maximum memory bandwidth21.335 GB/sof 460.8 GB/s (EPYC 9124)

Graphics specifications

General parameters of a GPU integrated into Pentium B960.

Integrated graphics cardIntel HD Graphics for 2nd Generation Intel Processors
Clear Video HD-
Graphics max frequency1.1 GHz
InTru 3D-

Graphics interfaces

Available interfaces and connections of Pentium B960's integrated GPU.

Number of displays supported2
eDP+
DisplayPort+
HDMI+
SDVO+
CRT+

Peripherals

Specifications and connection types of supported peripherals.

PCIe version2.0of 5.0 (Core i9-12900K)
PCI Express lanes16of 128 (EPYC 7551P)

Benchmark performance

Single-core and multi-core benchmark results of Pentium B960. Overall benchmark performance is measured in points in 0-100 range, higher is better.


Combined synthetic benchmark score

This is our combined benchmark performance rating. We are regularly improving our combining algorithms, but if you find some perceived inconsistencies, feel free to speak up in comments section, we usually fix problems quickly.

Pentium B960 0.62

Passmark

Passmark CPU Mark is a widespread benchmark, consisting of 8 different types of workload, including integer and floating point math, extended instructions, compression, encryption and physics calculation. There is also one separate single-threaded scenario measuring single-core performance.

Pentium B960 986

GeekBench 5 Single-Core

GeekBench 5 Single-Core is a cross-platform application developed in the form of CPU tests that independently recreate certain real-world tasks with which to accurately measure performance. This version uses only a single CPU core.

Pentium B960 325

GeekBench 5 Multi-Core

GeekBench 5 Multi-Core is a cross-platform application developed in the form of CPU tests that independently recreate certain real-world tasks with which to accurately measure performance. This version uses all available CPU cores.

Pentium B960 534

Cinebench 10 32-bit single-core

Cinebench R10 is an ancient ray tracing benchmark for processors by Maxon, authors of Cinema 4D. Its single core version uses just one CPU thread to render a futuristic looking motorcycle.

Pentium B960 2851

Cinebench 10 32-bit multi-core

Cinebench Release 10 Multi Core is a variant of Cinebench R10 using all the processor threads. Possible number of threads is limited by 16 in this version.

Pentium B960 5500

3DMark06 CPU

3DMark06 is a discontinued DirectX 9 benchmark suite from Futuremark. Its CPU part contains two scenarios, one dedicated to artificial intelligence pathfinding, another to game physics using PhysX package.

Pentium B960 2231

Cinebench 11.5 64-bit multi-core

Cinebench Release 11.5 Multi Core is a variant of Cinebench R11.5 which uses all the processor threads. A maximum of 64 threads is supported in this version.

Pentium B960 2

Cinebench 11.5 64-bit single-core

Cinebench R11.5 is an old benchmark by Maxon, authors of Cinema 4D. It was superseded by later versions of Cinebench, which use more modern variants of Cinema 4D engine. The Single Core version loads a single thread with ray tracing to render a glossy room full of crystal spheres and light sources.

Pentium B960 0.86

TrueCrypt AES

TrueCrypt is a discontinued piece of software that was widely used for on-the-fly-encryption of disk partitions, now superseded by VeraCrypt. It contains several embedded performance tests, one of them being TrueCrypt AES, which measures data encryption speed using AES algorithm. Result is encryption speed in gigabytes per second.

Pentium B960 0.2

WinRAR 4.0

WinRAR 4.0 is an outdated version of a popular file archiver. It contains an internal speed test, using 'Best' setting of RAR compression on large chunks of randomly generated data. Its results are measured in kilobytes per second.

Pentium B960 1367

x264 encoding pass 2

x264 Pass 2 is a slower variant of x264 video compression that produces a variable bit rate output file, which results in better quality since the higher bit rate is used when it is needed more. Benchmark result is still measured in frames per second.  

Pentium B960 9

x264 encoding pass 1

x264 version 4.0 is a video encoding benchmark uses MPEG 4 x264 compression method to compress a sample HD (720p) video. Pass 1 is a faster variant that produces a constant bit rate output file. Its result is measured in frames per second, which means how many frames of the source video file were encoded per second.  

Pentium B960 52

Gaming performance

Closest competitors

Pentium B960's performance relative to its closest rivals among notebook CPUs.


Pentium B950 101.61
A4-4300M 101.61
Pentium B960 100
Celeron B840 98.39
A6-9220e 98.39

AMD equivalent

According to our data, the closest AMD alternative to Pentium B960 is A4-4300M, which is faster by 2% and higher by 10 positions in our ranking.

Here are some closest AMD rivals to Pentium B960:

A6-4400M 103.23
A6-7000 103.23
A4-4300M 101.61
Pentium B960 100
A6-9220e 98.39
E2-9000 98.39

Similar processors

Here is our recommendation of several processors that are more or less close in performance to the one reviewed.

Recommended GPUs

People consider these graphics cards to be good for Pentium B960, according to our PC configuration statistics.

These are the fastest graphics cards for Pentium B960 in our user configuration statistics. There is a total of 6218 configurations using Pentium B960 in our database.

RTX 4090 GeForce RTX 4090
1% (62/6218)
RTX 4080 GeForce RTX 4080
0.02% (1/6218)
RTX 3090 Ti GeForce RTX 3090 Ti
0.1% (7/6218)
PRO W7800 Radeon PRO W7800
0.02% (1/6218)
RTX 3080 Ti GeForce RTX 3080 Ti
0.1% (7/6218)
RX 6900 XT Radeon RX 6900 XT
0.02% (1/6218)
RTX 3090 GeForce RTX 3090
0.02% (1/6218)
RTX 3070 Ti GeForce RTX 3070 Ti
0.06% (4/6218)
RTX 4060 Ti GeForce RTX 4060 Ti
0.02% (1/6218)

All comparisons with Pentium B960

Community ratings

Here is the rating given to the reviewed processor by our users. Let others know your opinion by rating it yourself.


2.9 517 votes

Rate Pentium B960 on a scale of 1 to 5:

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5

Questions & comments

Here you can ask a question about Pentium B960, agree or disagree with our judgements, or report an error or mismatch.