NickCPC
16-01-11, 01:58
Hi,
As promised, I said I’d do a review of effectively my new PC after its Sandy Bridge (and other components) upgrade. Unfortunately since there’s a lot to say, there’s also correspondingly a lot of text! I’ll try and make headers for each component… just scroll to what you want to read about. An advance apology for my photos – I didn’t have my tripod, so photos are a little blurry this time.
What I’m going to try and do is compare my old products to the new ones, if appropriate, and evaluate them in their own right briefly – if you haven’t read any other reviews from a proper review site, hopefully you’ll have a decent idea of what they’re like after reading my stuff, but if you’ve already read up you can just skip to the conclusions for each component. I don’t make any claims that any tests/graphs I’ve produced are absolutely scientific – these are just my findings with a view to being as neutral and unbiased as I can be (though I guess there will be an element of rose-tinted specs as it’s my money I’ve spent on my components). Anyway, let me begin with a photo of some boxes!
http://i52.tinypic.com/2094piu.jpg
Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 & Intel Core i5 2500K
http://saggyork.org.uk/images/P67A-UD7/Thumbs%20%2815%29.JPG (http://saggyork.org.uk/images/P67A-UD7/HD%20%2815%29.JPG)
Please see my preview of the UD7 here (http://forums.aria.co.uk/showthread.php?t=44565).
I must admit, it’s been an agonising wait for City Link to deliver my CPU after they sent it to the wrong depot – having a motherboard before release date and then not being able to use it is geek torture! However, it’s finally over and it got to me on Friday with a few other bits and pieces. It seems logical to review these two items together, and after playing with this great combo for the last 24 hours, my immediate conclusion is what a combination.
I’ve already said how I think the UD7 is one of the best looking boards ever – it does look absolutely fantastic; the black and gold theme really works very well and in my opinion, it looks like a true premium board. Though there are premium competitors, such as the Asus Maximus IV Formula, I prefer the discreet and quality look and I have to agree with Tom’s review that you have to see it in the flesh to appreciate just how good it does look.
Gigabyte have stuck with a BIOS implementation, as opposed to using EFI – but with dual 32MB flash chips on board (so dual BIOSes), EFI is evidently coming soon. The UD7 has an Award BIOS, so (for me at least) it’s very familiar and similar to my old MSI 770-C45. I’m currently on a beta F7A BIOS, and notably there aren’t currently profiles to save different overclocks, which is a little annoying. A failed overclock so far also appears to get the board stuck in a rebooting loop, where the board will power up for about 3-5 seconds, then shut down and restart a couple of seconds later – not especially elegant. However, turning the PSU off and waiting for a couple of these loops to clear usually gets it into the BIOS again. There’s also a handy CMOS clear button on the board labelled CMOS_SW.
As Tom said in his review though, it’s unbelievably easy to overclock a long way with the UD7 – I began by setting lots of things manually and got to around 4.7GHz. However, by setting everything to Auto, vcore to 1.400V, BCLK to 100.2MHz and the multiplier to 48, I’ve got a rock solid Prime95 stable overclock. I admittedly don’t like not knowing exactly how much voltage is going through each of the components, and in time I intend to have a longer fiddling session and get everything set manually and stable. There are many options, ranging from allowing the maximum power the board will supply the CPU (past the 95W [Intel definition] TDP) to detailed board health information on temperatures around the board.
http://i52.tinypic.com/29bbzgz.png
4.966GHz in Windows on the UD7 (please note the VID is wrong with this version of CPU-Z!)
Sadly I don’t have a second HD6850 to take advantage of this board’s x16/x16 lanes (it can operate at x16 or x16/x16 or x8/x8/x8 or x8/x8/x8/x8 thanks to the nForce 200 chip – a good job the heatsinks are more than just pretty, as they do get warm). However, it’s certainly one of the main selling point of this board and it’s nice to have the room to add a second card later on, should I choose to.
There are a few other premium features (as you’d expect with a board at this price!) – the LED displaying POST information and error codes has proven useful already. Talking of LEDs there are actually a lot more than I am used to, with a red LED appearing when the board is receiving power which turns green when the system is turned on. There’s also RAM and CPU LEDs which are green under normal load, and yellow and green when under heavy load/overvolted (so always on for me :P) and phase LEDs too. They’re certainly bright, but in a case you don’t notice them over fan LEDs if you have any of them.
There’s lots of VRMs too for smooth power delivery to the CPU, and copious numbers of USB3 ports along with 4 internal SATA3 6Gbps ports. The onboard Realtek ALC889 codec also outputs surprisingly good quality audio – not quite Xonar DS good and I’m reasonably confident I could tell the difference in a blind test, but better than most onboard audio I’ve heard. It’s a shame that there isn’t onboard Bluetooth though, and I’m still waiting for a board with an onboard DVB-T/DVB-T2 tuner given Windows 7 is begging for one.
However, at the end of the day I want as much performance as I possibly can out of the board and CPU, and although I managed to boot at 4.966GHz, I’ve done all my tests at 4.8GHz as this seems to be rock solid stable on the current F7A BIOS. Again, this was with everything at Auto other than the multiplier at x48, BCLK at 100.2MHz (appears in CPU-Z as 100.0MHz) and vcore at 1.4V. This was the base multiplier at x48, not Turbo Boosting. All power saving features were disabled.
As a point of comparison, I’ve got figures from my old Phenom II X2 555BE (now with RawZ, though I ran stock tests as though it were an X4 955 i.e. 3.2GHz quad and overclocked settings were at 4.034GHz) and a Core i3 530GHz (in overclocked tests running at 4.378GHz). Common components were a Crucial C300 64GB SSD, 4GB Corsair 2000MHz 9-9-9-24 1.65V RAM (1536MHz 7-7-7-20 on the Phenom) and a Sapphire HD6850 1GB overclocked to 1000MHz core/1050MHz RAM at 1.181V in Trixx. Motherboards used were the Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 for the i5 2500K, Gigabyte GA-H55M-S2H for the i3 530, and the MSI 770-C45 for the Phenom. PSUs varied from machine to machine – the Phenom had a Corsair CX400, the i3 had an Akasa 350W, and the i5 2500K has a Seasonic X-650. CPU coolers were also unfortunately different – I didn’t have time to test on the same cooler. The Phenom had a Titan Fenrir Xmas Edition with a Sharkoon Silent Eagle 120mm blue LED fan, the i3 had a Coolermaster Hyper TX3 with its standard 92mm fan, and the i5 has a Thermaltake Frio with both fans at medium speed. Each benchmark program was closed and reopened on completion, with each test repeated three times, more if there were obvious anomalies. All graphs show a mean score of the three repeats for each CPU.
http://i56.tinypic.com/95o10x.png
Cinebench CPU Test
http://i54.tinypic.com/2afj2bm.png
Cinebench OpenGL Test
http://i52.tinypic.com/1e5aq1.png
SuperPi 1M
http://i52.tinypic.com/31478rl.png
Custom PC Benchmark Suite
http://i52.tinypic.com/2b2pdz.png
Crysis CPU Benchmark
http://i51.tinypic.com/14nmqyt.png
3DMark06
http://i53.tinypic.com/fozzfr.png
Performance Analysis
As you can see, there’s clear evidence the i5 2500K is a significant upgrade over my old Phenom II. It’s massively faster at video transcoding, image editing is a breeze (particularly at 4.8GHz – nearly double the score of CPC’s reference stock Core 2 Duo E6750!) and even basic number crunching as with SuperPi. Worthy of note was how much faster the Intels were than the AMD at SuperPi – even on my extreme 4.18GHz run on my Phenom, it was still behind the i3 at stock. Though I don’t have any benchmarks to prove it, Maple (a Java-based advanced mathematics program) is a huge amount faster at calculations than with my Phenom. Cinebench just gets eaten alive with the i5 2500K when overclocked, so if you’re serious about rendering times, you should definitely be seriously considering a K-series Sandy Bridge CPU and overclocking the nuts off it.
With regards to gaming, there’s a noticeable step up in CPU-dependant games; 3DMark being very heavily CPU weighted, and Crysis needing plenty of GHz… though it was interesting to see that all the CPUs at 4GHz or above seem to bunch up in terms of performance. I was very surprised to see how little extra you get from overclock to 4.8GHz over stock on Crysis, showing that my HD6850 was likely to be the limiting factor. On a more subjective level, TF2 and Audiosurf have gotten noticeably higher framerates since the upgrade – I don’t get dropped frames when FRAPSing Audiosurf and on Premium settings at 1280x1024, I’m seeing a good 60% framerate increase at 4.8GHz on the 2500K compared to the Phenom at 4GHz.
Conclusion
To conclude, given how ridiculously easy it was to overclock my 2500K with the UD7, it’s difficult to argue that they make a brilliant pair together (particularly when the 2500K is overclocked), and for me a massive and certainly tangible upgrade. Even in Windows, booting up on a nearly-full SSD takes a good couple of seconds less than it used to (wish I had recorded the times!). The UD7 is clearly a performance, gaming or folding motherboard with all of its PCI-E lanes, though it’s more difficult to recommend were you not planning on overclocking. A few niggles aside (no UEFI on yet, no overclock profiles, lack of Bluetooth), it’s definitely a premium board compared to other board reviews I’ve seen, and it looks a million dollars. If you can afford it, and you’re on anything less powerful than a Core i5 750 but looking to upgrade, this is a fantastic combination of components.
Buy the i5 2500K here (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/CPUs+%2F+Processors/Intel+Core+I5+%281155%29/Intel+Core+i5-2500K+3.30GHz+%28Sandybridge%29+Socket+LGA1155+Pro cessor+-+Retail+?productId=43216) and the Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 here (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Intel+1155+P67/Gigabyte+GA-P67A-UD7+Intel+P67+%28Socket+1155%29+DDR3+PCI-Express+Motherboard+?productId=42996)!
Seasonic X-650 PSU
http://i51.tinypic.com/33auys6.jpg
I sadly don’t have a power meter to hand, let alone any advanced PSU loading equipment or temperature-controlled chambers to provide objective testing for the X-650, so this will just be a really brief subjective review. For more detailed scientific findings, there are some excellent reviews on the web so I’ll let you find them. It’s also worth searching for DTC’s work on these forums, which took an in-depth look at the costs so you can judge for yourself whether it’s worth investing in one, and roughly what the payback period would be.
I’ve got to start by saying a modular PSU is certainly worth the premium over non-modular units if you’re one of those people who seeks cable-routing perfection. My old Corsair CX400W was a great little unit, with its braided cables and wide range of connectors, but in the Antec 300, it was certainly a pain to route everything and keep it tidy, particularly as I have a habit of changing components fairly frequently for various reasons.
The X-650 also has braided cables which were on the whole easy to manipulate and keep tidy. Modular cables meant I only installed what I needed, so it’s a lot easier to fit in all the spare/excess cables in the 300’s cable compartment behind the HDDs. My one complaint with the cables was the length of the EPS 12V CPU power cable – I’m still yet to understand why they have to be so short. As a result I have one wire which is forced over my Xonar DS and messily stuffed up the side of the case next to the exhaust fan I have. I’ll be looking to buy a longer EPS cable soon, and hopefully can improve its routing. Scroll to the very end of my write up to see a picture of what I mean.
The CX400 was very quiet, and under Prime95 and Furmark with my Phenom and old HD4870 1GB, I was once able to draw about 370W but it never showed any signs of struggling or having to ramp the fan up. However, the X-650 may as well be passive if you have a single GPU – I haven’t seen or heard it spin yet, even when I did some pretesting out of my case heavily loading both my i5 and HD6850. I did make a faux pas by installing my PSU upside down (so the fan is facing the bottom of the case and only has ~1cm of breathing space), and though I don’t recommend it for other people, I did that for three reasons – I doubt the fan will ever spin and even if it does, there’s enough space for the fan still to operate; the label on the side is upside down if you install it with the fan facing up to the top of the case, and finally with the cables I needed, they are closer to the motherboard which means it looks a little tidier. Again, not a recommended way of installing the PSU though!
The two main reasons I bought this PSU were to provide my other kit with the cleanest possible power (the X-650 supports the latest ATX 2.31 standard), and to improve the efficiency. Again, with the kit I have, it’s difficult to provide any objective proof that these aims have been fulfilled. That’s also not to say the CX400 was a bad unit at all – I feel it’s a fantastic unit for the money – but it just seemed like an appropriate time to upgrade, and I’m confident the X-650 could take a second GPU with ease and will provide me with several years of service in which time I’ll easily have made up the cost of the unit with its higher efficiency.
Conclusion
It’s a premium PSU, and the packaging and unit feels very robust and high-quality. There’s plenty of cables, and I’d fully trust it to run a couple of high-end GPUs – I’d use this any day over a generic 1000W PSU. Whether you think it is worth it or not is dependent on whether you can overlook the high asking price and can see the benefits of using a more efficient unit. If you have your PC on for many hours during the day, and you do put your PC under significant load, then I think this is a totally justifiable investment. As DTC says, saving >40W/hr over a basic 80+ unit can quickly add up. I probably wouldn’t say it’s worth it if you evaluate your rig and it comes to less than £650, but more than that and you should take a close look at an 80+ Gold PSU, and I don’t think you can go far wrong with the X-650, even if it is coming up to 18 months old.
Buy the Seasonic X-650 here (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Power+Supplies/Modular+650W+or+less/650W+Seasonic+X-650+Modular+Ultimate+Performance+PSU+80%2B+Gold+90 %25+Eff%27+DC-DC+?productId=41423)!
Thermaltake Frio
http://i53.tinypic.com/11gnn5u.jpg
Another component I wish I had had more time to test, but I’m afraid I’ve been limited to testing it only on i5 2500K, so I can’t compare it to my old HSF, the Titan Fenrir (I had the Xmas Edition in black and red). I’ll start by saying it’s extremely well packaged and clearly could sustain a few blows in the post. The instructions, however, leave something to be desired; they aren’t particularly clear and installation is fiddly unless you’ve done it before. I hear it’s worse on 1366 but cannot confirm.
It’s a shame it ships with both fans mounted pointing in towards the centre of the heatsink, requiring you to remove one and flip it over should you want air to travel from one end to the other, i.e. intake and exhaust. Neither fan is 4 pin PWM (both are standard 3 pin), but both do have individual fan control in the form of a small rotary dial splitting off the cable plugging in to your fan header.
As I mentioned, installation was OK should you have done it before. It’s a lot easier if you have a second person to help out, especially when it comes to lining up the brackets with the holes on your motherboard. I used a large pea-sized blob of IC Diamond 24 in the centre of my CPU as my thermal paste, warming up the paste with a hairdryer on a low heat while in the tube before applying, then turning the Frio upside down (along the UD7). I didn’t bother with the plastic grommets/standoffs – just tightened the caps up.
The Frio is taller than I was expecting, and though I haven’t measure the clearance, it easily cleared the UD7’s heatsinks and the puny heatsinks of my Corsair RAM. I doubt you’d get Corsair Vengeance RAM installed, mind, but if there are any requests to measure the clearance I’ll try and find out. You don’t want the fans on high speed other than if you’re doing a benchmarking session – they’re extremely loud at full speed. However, I’ve got mine set at maybe 1/3 speed, and they’re much quieter and still effective at cooling. I may well put them on minimum speed given the temps I’ve got, and the fact it’s in push-pull configuration – a huge amount of air is passing over the heatsink itself.
Below are the temps I’ve found with the i5 – with idling, I left my PC for 10 minutes on the desktop and recorded the temps CoreTemp was displaying at the time. With load, I left Prime95’s smallfft test going for 10 minutes and took another spot reading. With stock speeds, I hit “Load optimised defaults” in the BIOS, so turbo boosting and speedstep were both enabled. With my overclocked settings, 4.8GHz was achieved by setting the multiplier manually, and disabling all power saving features including turbo boost and speedstep.
http://i53.tinypic.com/2hwee03.png
Conclusion
This is another premium cooler – the only quality issue I have is the red plastic clip things on the top of the heatsink are a bit too easy to remove. I might well remove them to keep my black and gold theme going, but am undecided as of yet. I’ve got to say, the temperatures as far I’m concerned are excellent, even with a heavy overclock. Installation is a little tricky, but with some help and perseverance, it’s worth the effort. Just remember to turn the fan speed down and you have a great CPU cooler. I feel this is good value – I couldn’t bring myself to spend more than £40 on a cooler, but the performance seems to be up there. Not quite Cogage Arrow (or similar) good, but enough to keep a heavy overclock running at a low temperature.
Buy the Thermaltake Frio here (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Fans%2C+Heatsinks%2C+Coolers/CPU+Coolers/Thermaltake+Frio+CPU+Cooler+?productId=41063)!
Other components – a brief mention
I already had the 2x2GB Corsair 2000MHz, but it seems to be a great set. Sadly Aria no longer stock it, but it’s been happy to run at 1536MHz at 7-7-7-20 at 1.55V with the Phenom. It never caused any problems with the i3 either at 2000MHz, nor at 8-8-8-24 and 1867MHz with the i5 2500K. The small heatsinks were the primary reason I got it, and they easily fit under many HSFs I imagine.
My HD6850 has been excellent, and I don’t think it’s been held back by my CPU any more either. It’s a big step up over the old HD4870, proving to be much faster when antialiasing is applied. It’s a shame there still isn’t a Folding @ Home client out which supports it as that’s one thing I’d like to see how well it performs on. However, in all my commonly played games it always hits over 60fps with everything maxed out on 1280x1024. The Sapphire model I have is very quiet too – not as cool as my old HD4870 with the Akasa Vortexx Neo, but I’ve yet to see temps go over 70.
The final thing I recently added was an Asus Xonar DS. I’ve got to say I have noticed a difference with this over some Logitech X-240s, and I’ve noticed higher bass sounds that I had previously missed in songs and in films. Driver installation is painful, but the software is pretty good when installed and sound reproduction is appreciably better than onboard audio. It’s a shame it uses PCI, but worthy of your notes if you do enjoy music and you’ve got a set of speakers more than a fiver.
Final summary
So that is my introduction to Sandy Bridge. I’ve only had it for about 36 hours, but it’s a fantastic platform and unbelievably fast – so much faster than my Phenom setup. That’s not to say the Phenom was bad at all, but it was built on a shoestring budget and it’s impossible to knock the value for money you get with an AMD setup. However, for a non-base PC, you really should be looking at a Sandy Bridge setup if you can afford one.
However, the performance with Sandy Bridge is just astonishing. It’s really nice to know I’m not being held back in games or tasks any more by my CPU – think my limiting factors now are my headphones and my monitor. Unless you’re going for a multi-GPU setup, the UD7 if I’m being brutally honest probably isn’t worth it. However, it is a fantastic board and I’d fully recommend getting one if you can budget for it. The i5 2500K is an obvious choice – about £100 cheaper than the 2600K, overclocking way past 4.5GHz, and not much more than a 760, it is the new Q6600 in my opinion. My only complaint is I’m disappointed as anyone that the Z68 chipset wasn’t available on launch. The X-650 is also a fantastic PSU from what I can tell so far, and if you’re one of those people who’s willing to splash out in order to save money in the long run, you can’t get much better than this unit… especially if you have a single GPU (though I have every confidence it could take a couple of graphics cards with ease). I’m also very pleased with the Frio – just keep the fan speed down!
Many thanks for reading (even if it was only the conclusions!), and if there’s any questions I can answer do post away! I’ll leave you with a pic of what my rig first looked like when I assembled it, and what it’s like now :)
http://i53.tinypic.com/24fa16q.jpg
http://i56.tinypic.com/2lwunti.jpg
http://i53.tinypic.com/95mywo.jpg
As promised, I said I’d do a review of effectively my new PC after its Sandy Bridge (and other components) upgrade. Unfortunately since there’s a lot to say, there’s also correspondingly a lot of text! I’ll try and make headers for each component… just scroll to what you want to read about. An advance apology for my photos – I didn’t have my tripod, so photos are a little blurry this time.
What I’m going to try and do is compare my old products to the new ones, if appropriate, and evaluate them in their own right briefly – if you haven’t read any other reviews from a proper review site, hopefully you’ll have a decent idea of what they’re like after reading my stuff, but if you’ve already read up you can just skip to the conclusions for each component. I don’t make any claims that any tests/graphs I’ve produced are absolutely scientific – these are just my findings with a view to being as neutral and unbiased as I can be (though I guess there will be an element of rose-tinted specs as it’s my money I’ve spent on my components). Anyway, let me begin with a photo of some boxes!
http://i52.tinypic.com/2094piu.jpg
Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 & Intel Core i5 2500K
http://saggyork.org.uk/images/P67A-UD7/Thumbs%20%2815%29.JPG (http://saggyork.org.uk/images/P67A-UD7/HD%20%2815%29.JPG)
Please see my preview of the UD7 here (http://forums.aria.co.uk/showthread.php?t=44565).
I must admit, it’s been an agonising wait for City Link to deliver my CPU after they sent it to the wrong depot – having a motherboard before release date and then not being able to use it is geek torture! However, it’s finally over and it got to me on Friday with a few other bits and pieces. It seems logical to review these two items together, and after playing with this great combo for the last 24 hours, my immediate conclusion is what a combination.
I’ve already said how I think the UD7 is one of the best looking boards ever – it does look absolutely fantastic; the black and gold theme really works very well and in my opinion, it looks like a true premium board. Though there are premium competitors, such as the Asus Maximus IV Formula, I prefer the discreet and quality look and I have to agree with Tom’s review that you have to see it in the flesh to appreciate just how good it does look.
Gigabyte have stuck with a BIOS implementation, as opposed to using EFI – but with dual 32MB flash chips on board (so dual BIOSes), EFI is evidently coming soon. The UD7 has an Award BIOS, so (for me at least) it’s very familiar and similar to my old MSI 770-C45. I’m currently on a beta F7A BIOS, and notably there aren’t currently profiles to save different overclocks, which is a little annoying. A failed overclock so far also appears to get the board stuck in a rebooting loop, where the board will power up for about 3-5 seconds, then shut down and restart a couple of seconds later – not especially elegant. However, turning the PSU off and waiting for a couple of these loops to clear usually gets it into the BIOS again. There’s also a handy CMOS clear button on the board labelled CMOS_SW.
As Tom said in his review though, it’s unbelievably easy to overclock a long way with the UD7 – I began by setting lots of things manually and got to around 4.7GHz. However, by setting everything to Auto, vcore to 1.400V, BCLK to 100.2MHz and the multiplier to 48, I’ve got a rock solid Prime95 stable overclock. I admittedly don’t like not knowing exactly how much voltage is going through each of the components, and in time I intend to have a longer fiddling session and get everything set manually and stable. There are many options, ranging from allowing the maximum power the board will supply the CPU (past the 95W [Intel definition] TDP) to detailed board health information on temperatures around the board.
http://i52.tinypic.com/29bbzgz.png
4.966GHz in Windows on the UD7 (please note the VID is wrong with this version of CPU-Z!)
Sadly I don’t have a second HD6850 to take advantage of this board’s x16/x16 lanes (it can operate at x16 or x16/x16 or x8/x8/x8 or x8/x8/x8/x8 thanks to the nForce 200 chip – a good job the heatsinks are more than just pretty, as they do get warm). However, it’s certainly one of the main selling point of this board and it’s nice to have the room to add a second card later on, should I choose to.
There are a few other premium features (as you’d expect with a board at this price!) – the LED displaying POST information and error codes has proven useful already. Talking of LEDs there are actually a lot more than I am used to, with a red LED appearing when the board is receiving power which turns green when the system is turned on. There’s also RAM and CPU LEDs which are green under normal load, and yellow and green when under heavy load/overvolted (so always on for me :P) and phase LEDs too. They’re certainly bright, but in a case you don’t notice them over fan LEDs if you have any of them.
There’s lots of VRMs too for smooth power delivery to the CPU, and copious numbers of USB3 ports along with 4 internal SATA3 6Gbps ports. The onboard Realtek ALC889 codec also outputs surprisingly good quality audio – not quite Xonar DS good and I’m reasonably confident I could tell the difference in a blind test, but better than most onboard audio I’ve heard. It’s a shame that there isn’t onboard Bluetooth though, and I’m still waiting for a board with an onboard DVB-T/DVB-T2 tuner given Windows 7 is begging for one.
However, at the end of the day I want as much performance as I possibly can out of the board and CPU, and although I managed to boot at 4.966GHz, I’ve done all my tests at 4.8GHz as this seems to be rock solid stable on the current F7A BIOS. Again, this was with everything at Auto other than the multiplier at x48, BCLK at 100.2MHz (appears in CPU-Z as 100.0MHz) and vcore at 1.4V. This was the base multiplier at x48, not Turbo Boosting. All power saving features were disabled.
As a point of comparison, I’ve got figures from my old Phenom II X2 555BE (now with RawZ, though I ran stock tests as though it were an X4 955 i.e. 3.2GHz quad and overclocked settings were at 4.034GHz) and a Core i3 530GHz (in overclocked tests running at 4.378GHz). Common components were a Crucial C300 64GB SSD, 4GB Corsair 2000MHz 9-9-9-24 1.65V RAM (1536MHz 7-7-7-20 on the Phenom) and a Sapphire HD6850 1GB overclocked to 1000MHz core/1050MHz RAM at 1.181V in Trixx. Motherboards used were the Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 for the i5 2500K, Gigabyte GA-H55M-S2H for the i3 530, and the MSI 770-C45 for the Phenom. PSUs varied from machine to machine – the Phenom had a Corsair CX400, the i3 had an Akasa 350W, and the i5 2500K has a Seasonic X-650. CPU coolers were also unfortunately different – I didn’t have time to test on the same cooler. The Phenom had a Titan Fenrir Xmas Edition with a Sharkoon Silent Eagle 120mm blue LED fan, the i3 had a Coolermaster Hyper TX3 with its standard 92mm fan, and the i5 has a Thermaltake Frio with both fans at medium speed. Each benchmark program was closed and reopened on completion, with each test repeated three times, more if there were obvious anomalies. All graphs show a mean score of the three repeats for each CPU.
http://i56.tinypic.com/95o10x.png
Cinebench CPU Test
http://i54.tinypic.com/2afj2bm.png
Cinebench OpenGL Test
http://i52.tinypic.com/1e5aq1.png
SuperPi 1M
http://i52.tinypic.com/31478rl.png
Custom PC Benchmark Suite
http://i52.tinypic.com/2b2pdz.png
Crysis CPU Benchmark
http://i51.tinypic.com/14nmqyt.png
3DMark06
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Performance Analysis
As you can see, there’s clear evidence the i5 2500K is a significant upgrade over my old Phenom II. It’s massively faster at video transcoding, image editing is a breeze (particularly at 4.8GHz – nearly double the score of CPC’s reference stock Core 2 Duo E6750!) and even basic number crunching as with SuperPi. Worthy of note was how much faster the Intels were than the AMD at SuperPi – even on my extreme 4.18GHz run on my Phenom, it was still behind the i3 at stock. Though I don’t have any benchmarks to prove it, Maple (a Java-based advanced mathematics program) is a huge amount faster at calculations than with my Phenom. Cinebench just gets eaten alive with the i5 2500K when overclocked, so if you’re serious about rendering times, you should definitely be seriously considering a K-series Sandy Bridge CPU and overclocking the nuts off it.
With regards to gaming, there’s a noticeable step up in CPU-dependant games; 3DMark being very heavily CPU weighted, and Crysis needing plenty of GHz… though it was interesting to see that all the CPUs at 4GHz or above seem to bunch up in terms of performance. I was very surprised to see how little extra you get from overclock to 4.8GHz over stock on Crysis, showing that my HD6850 was likely to be the limiting factor. On a more subjective level, TF2 and Audiosurf have gotten noticeably higher framerates since the upgrade – I don’t get dropped frames when FRAPSing Audiosurf and on Premium settings at 1280x1024, I’m seeing a good 60% framerate increase at 4.8GHz on the 2500K compared to the Phenom at 4GHz.
Conclusion
To conclude, given how ridiculously easy it was to overclock my 2500K with the UD7, it’s difficult to argue that they make a brilliant pair together (particularly when the 2500K is overclocked), and for me a massive and certainly tangible upgrade. Even in Windows, booting up on a nearly-full SSD takes a good couple of seconds less than it used to (wish I had recorded the times!). The UD7 is clearly a performance, gaming or folding motherboard with all of its PCI-E lanes, though it’s more difficult to recommend were you not planning on overclocking. A few niggles aside (no UEFI on yet, no overclock profiles, lack of Bluetooth), it’s definitely a premium board compared to other board reviews I’ve seen, and it looks a million dollars. If you can afford it, and you’re on anything less powerful than a Core i5 750 but looking to upgrade, this is a fantastic combination of components.
Buy the i5 2500K here (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/CPUs+%2F+Processors/Intel+Core+I5+%281155%29/Intel+Core+i5-2500K+3.30GHz+%28Sandybridge%29+Socket+LGA1155+Pro cessor+-+Retail+?productId=43216) and the Gigabyte GA-P67A-UD7 here (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Motherboards/Intel+1155+P67/Gigabyte+GA-P67A-UD7+Intel+P67+%28Socket+1155%29+DDR3+PCI-Express+Motherboard+?productId=42996)!
Seasonic X-650 PSU
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I sadly don’t have a power meter to hand, let alone any advanced PSU loading equipment or temperature-controlled chambers to provide objective testing for the X-650, so this will just be a really brief subjective review. For more detailed scientific findings, there are some excellent reviews on the web so I’ll let you find them. It’s also worth searching for DTC’s work on these forums, which took an in-depth look at the costs so you can judge for yourself whether it’s worth investing in one, and roughly what the payback period would be.
I’ve got to start by saying a modular PSU is certainly worth the premium over non-modular units if you’re one of those people who seeks cable-routing perfection. My old Corsair CX400W was a great little unit, with its braided cables and wide range of connectors, but in the Antec 300, it was certainly a pain to route everything and keep it tidy, particularly as I have a habit of changing components fairly frequently for various reasons.
The X-650 also has braided cables which were on the whole easy to manipulate and keep tidy. Modular cables meant I only installed what I needed, so it’s a lot easier to fit in all the spare/excess cables in the 300’s cable compartment behind the HDDs. My one complaint with the cables was the length of the EPS 12V CPU power cable – I’m still yet to understand why they have to be so short. As a result I have one wire which is forced over my Xonar DS and messily stuffed up the side of the case next to the exhaust fan I have. I’ll be looking to buy a longer EPS cable soon, and hopefully can improve its routing. Scroll to the very end of my write up to see a picture of what I mean.
The CX400 was very quiet, and under Prime95 and Furmark with my Phenom and old HD4870 1GB, I was once able to draw about 370W but it never showed any signs of struggling or having to ramp the fan up. However, the X-650 may as well be passive if you have a single GPU – I haven’t seen or heard it spin yet, even when I did some pretesting out of my case heavily loading both my i5 and HD6850. I did make a faux pas by installing my PSU upside down (so the fan is facing the bottom of the case and only has ~1cm of breathing space), and though I don’t recommend it for other people, I did that for three reasons – I doubt the fan will ever spin and even if it does, there’s enough space for the fan still to operate; the label on the side is upside down if you install it with the fan facing up to the top of the case, and finally with the cables I needed, they are closer to the motherboard which means it looks a little tidier. Again, not a recommended way of installing the PSU though!
The two main reasons I bought this PSU were to provide my other kit with the cleanest possible power (the X-650 supports the latest ATX 2.31 standard), and to improve the efficiency. Again, with the kit I have, it’s difficult to provide any objective proof that these aims have been fulfilled. That’s also not to say the CX400 was a bad unit at all – I feel it’s a fantastic unit for the money – but it just seemed like an appropriate time to upgrade, and I’m confident the X-650 could take a second GPU with ease and will provide me with several years of service in which time I’ll easily have made up the cost of the unit with its higher efficiency.
Conclusion
It’s a premium PSU, and the packaging and unit feels very robust and high-quality. There’s plenty of cables, and I’d fully trust it to run a couple of high-end GPUs – I’d use this any day over a generic 1000W PSU. Whether you think it is worth it or not is dependent on whether you can overlook the high asking price and can see the benefits of using a more efficient unit. If you have your PC on for many hours during the day, and you do put your PC under significant load, then I think this is a totally justifiable investment. As DTC says, saving >40W/hr over a basic 80+ unit can quickly add up. I probably wouldn’t say it’s worth it if you evaluate your rig and it comes to less than £650, but more than that and you should take a close look at an 80+ Gold PSU, and I don’t think you can go far wrong with the X-650, even if it is coming up to 18 months old.
Buy the Seasonic X-650 here (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Power+Supplies/Modular+650W+or+less/650W+Seasonic+X-650+Modular+Ultimate+Performance+PSU+80%2B+Gold+90 %25+Eff%27+DC-DC+?productId=41423)!
Thermaltake Frio
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Another component I wish I had had more time to test, but I’m afraid I’ve been limited to testing it only on i5 2500K, so I can’t compare it to my old HSF, the Titan Fenrir (I had the Xmas Edition in black and red). I’ll start by saying it’s extremely well packaged and clearly could sustain a few blows in the post. The instructions, however, leave something to be desired; they aren’t particularly clear and installation is fiddly unless you’ve done it before. I hear it’s worse on 1366 but cannot confirm.
It’s a shame it ships with both fans mounted pointing in towards the centre of the heatsink, requiring you to remove one and flip it over should you want air to travel from one end to the other, i.e. intake and exhaust. Neither fan is 4 pin PWM (both are standard 3 pin), but both do have individual fan control in the form of a small rotary dial splitting off the cable plugging in to your fan header.
As I mentioned, installation was OK should you have done it before. It’s a lot easier if you have a second person to help out, especially when it comes to lining up the brackets with the holes on your motherboard. I used a large pea-sized blob of IC Diamond 24 in the centre of my CPU as my thermal paste, warming up the paste with a hairdryer on a low heat while in the tube before applying, then turning the Frio upside down (along the UD7). I didn’t bother with the plastic grommets/standoffs – just tightened the caps up.
The Frio is taller than I was expecting, and though I haven’t measure the clearance, it easily cleared the UD7’s heatsinks and the puny heatsinks of my Corsair RAM. I doubt you’d get Corsair Vengeance RAM installed, mind, but if there are any requests to measure the clearance I’ll try and find out. You don’t want the fans on high speed other than if you’re doing a benchmarking session – they’re extremely loud at full speed. However, I’ve got mine set at maybe 1/3 speed, and they’re much quieter and still effective at cooling. I may well put them on minimum speed given the temps I’ve got, and the fact it’s in push-pull configuration – a huge amount of air is passing over the heatsink itself.
Below are the temps I’ve found with the i5 – with idling, I left my PC for 10 minutes on the desktop and recorded the temps CoreTemp was displaying at the time. With load, I left Prime95’s smallfft test going for 10 minutes and took another spot reading. With stock speeds, I hit “Load optimised defaults” in the BIOS, so turbo boosting and speedstep were both enabled. With my overclocked settings, 4.8GHz was achieved by setting the multiplier manually, and disabling all power saving features including turbo boost and speedstep.
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Conclusion
This is another premium cooler – the only quality issue I have is the red plastic clip things on the top of the heatsink are a bit too easy to remove. I might well remove them to keep my black and gold theme going, but am undecided as of yet. I’ve got to say, the temperatures as far I’m concerned are excellent, even with a heavy overclock. Installation is a little tricky, but with some help and perseverance, it’s worth the effort. Just remember to turn the fan speed down and you have a great CPU cooler. I feel this is good value – I couldn’t bring myself to spend more than £40 on a cooler, but the performance seems to be up there. Not quite Cogage Arrow (or similar) good, but enough to keep a heavy overclock running at a low temperature.
Buy the Thermaltake Frio here (http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Fans%2C+Heatsinks%2C+Coolers/CPU+Coolers/Thermaltake+Frio+CPU+Cooler+?productId=41063)!
Other components – a brief mention
I already had the 2x2GB Corsair 2000MHz, but it seems to be a great set. Sadly Aria no longer stock it, but it’s been happy to run at 1536MHz at 7-7-7-20 at 1.55V with the Phenom. It never caused any problems with the i3 either at 2000MHz, nor at 8-8-8-24 and 1867MHz with the i5 2500K. The small heatsinks were the primary reason I got it, and they easily fit under many HSFs I imagine.
My HD6850 has been excellent, and I don’t think it’s been held back by my CPU any more either. It’s a big step up over the old HD4870, proving to be much faster when antialiasing is applied. It’s a shame there still isn’t a Folding @ Home client out which supports it as that’s one thing I’d like to see how well it performs on. However, in all my commonly played games it always hits over 60fps with everything maxed out on 1280x1024. The Sapphire model I have is very quiet too – not as cool as my old HD4870 with the Akasa Vortexx Neo, but I’ve yet to see temps go over 70.
The final thing I recently added was an Asus Xonar DS. I’ve got to say I have noticed a difference with this over some Logitech X-240s, and I’ve noticed higher bass sounds that I had previously missed in songs and in films. Driver installation is painful, but the software is pretty good when installed and sound reproduction is appreciably better than onboard audio. It’s a shame it uses PCI, but worthy of your notes if you do enjoy music and you’ve got a set of speakers more than a fiver.
Final summary
So that is my introduction to Sandy Bridge. I’ve only had it for about 36 hours, but it’s a fantastic platform and unbelievably fast – so much faster than my Phenom setup. That’s not to say the Phenom was bad at all, but it was built on a shoestring budget and it’s impossible to knock the value for money you get with an AMD setup. However, for a non-base PC, you really should be looking at a Sandy Bridge setup if you can afford one.
However, the performance with Sandy Bridge is just astonishing. It’s really nice to know I’m not being held back in games or tasks any more by my CPU – think my limiting factors now are my headphones and my monitor. Unless you’re going for a multi-GPU setup, the UD7 if I’m being brutally honest probably isn’t worth it. However, it is a fantastic board and I’d fully recommend getting one if you can budget for it. The i5 2500K is an obvious choice – about £100 cheaper than the 2600K, overclocking way past 4.5GHz, and not much more than a 760, it is the new Q6600 in my opinion. My only complaint is I’m disappointed as anyone that the Z68 chipset wasn’t available on launch. The X-650 is also a fantastic PSU from what I can tell so far, and if you’re one of those people who’s willing to splash out in order to save money in the long run, you can’t get much better than this unit… especially if you have a single GPU (though I have every confidence it could take a couple of graphics cards with ease). I’m also very pleased with the Frio – just keep the fan speed down!
Many thanks for reading (even if it was only the conclusions!), and if there’s any questions I can answer do post away! I’ll leave you with a pic of what my rig first looked like when I assembled it, and what it’s like now :)
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