Like cinebench,7zip,blender etc

i am actually uploading most of these tests right now.

i didn't realize how brief my "Part 1" of IB really is


Then i remembered that i only had 3 days to bench it :p


i'll make you a deal .. if the finished article isn't up tomorrow AM (PST), i'll post what you request here

There is a LOT of things that i simply did not cover in Part 1

Here is what i expanded on:

Overclocking system memory's effects on game benchmarks (920 vs 3770k); 4GB vs 8GB of system memory in gaming (and stability of an overclock discussion). Then i ran the synthetics - Sandra, PC Mark Vantage and 7.
-- and of course, i ran gaming benches with 8GB of 1866MHz RAM (vs 4GB) with the GTX 690 (as well as the GTX 680; both at stock clocks).

Once this evaluation is finished, i can get back to comparing everything in future back to it as a baseline.

And it is time to retire my X58 system (what a nice run as ABT's flagship system!) and then set up the EVGA MB for future overclocking including watercooling to try and reach 5.0GHz. And back to driver performance analysis. i think i'll cover HD 7970 and GTX 680 from release drivers to the present. And CrossFire and SLI

I bet my venerable old ASUS A7n8X Deluxe 2.0 had a longer run back in the day. Went from GeForce 4 Ti 4200 to GeForce 6800 GT on that and still going with the BFG 7800 GS in it.

My Abit P4 MB had a longer run than x58. However, for a flagship CPU plaftorm as a test bed for the latest graphics (and still very relevant), 3 years is remarkable.
----Your old MB is not running GTX 690 and still competing with Sandy and Ivy bridge CPUs in gaming.

It's kind of difficult for it to do so with the death of AGP and discontinuation of K7. It did manage to beat a K8 3200 though.

That's what i mean. X58 had a very long run at the top of Intel's best desktops and it still it a potent solution when overclocked (for gamers)

However, you are going to see it eclipsed for just about everything else. i guess you could update it some what with PCIe cards since it has plenty of bandwidth, but it is aging finally (and for sale too; this is a MB and CPU that i bought from Newegg)

Anyway, i had another mini-disaster where IE crashed WordPress and took an older save with it. It's like Gothic 3 all over again. i lost about 4 hours of work (counting the two hours it will take to recreate what i lost)


There is a lot of information. This was (looking at it with hindsight) too ambitious of a project and it should have been broken up into several parts

Some of the pics came out OK

i will just keep working on it as top priority until it is published

For sell?????? lets talk about that some

Yes. As a matter of policy we do not sell any hardware that we receive for review.

However, my i7-920 and Gigabyte X58 MB was purchased by me from Newegg about 3 years ago and i no longer need it as my comparison is finished and i will be using Ivy Bridge for future evaluations and as the flagship platform.

For gaming, Bloomfield holds up really well against Ivy Bridge at the same clocks and is an excellent platform for multi-GPU. As a platform for everything else, it is showing its age but it is still plenty fast. Clearly it does 4.2GHz with reasonable temperatures and although it has been overclocked, it has never been abused. The MB went to Gigabyte on a RMA about a year ago and was returned fixed with no issues since.

PM me if you are interested. i am going to disassemble my system shortly. As for PC1800 DDR3, only one Kingston 2GB stick is available (as i purchased one from Newegg when i got Tri-Channel to match the other two that came from Kingston as evaluation units)

i am benching my EVGA Z77 FTW MB now (and writing a Thermaltake Overseer RX-I case eval).

a 128GB Kingston SSD arrived - Vnow 200 series .. so next week, i will compare with the enthusiast HyperX and HyperX 3K SSDs
-- also going to compare Thermaltake Water2.0 Pro and Performer against Noctua's NH-DH14 in the quest for 5.0GHz with Ivy
(4.9GHz is definitely doable)