okay guys so it is finally time for me to upgrade my trusty test platform so
I'll take this episode to sort of spend some time talking about what I used to
be using versus what I will be using now
so I'm just going to sort of yak at you guys while I disassemble this so I've
actually had a lot of people ask me about my test bench here it is a
high-speed PC tech station just so you guys know you can buy them from ncx or a
variety of other places so I'm taking off my graphics card here
you can see the motherboard I was using before was actually an assus p7p 55 de
premium motherboard so that is a p55 board I had been questioned a lot of
times also about my use of a p55 board
even in dual graphics card testing and I
can tell you guys with much confidence that in my experience dual 8X Graphics
slots does not adversely affect performance versus using two 16x slots
so I will be upgrading my platform from a p551 with an 875k and 4 gigs of RAM to
a p67 platform and this is going to be
with a core i7 2600k so that is an unlocked
hyperthreading enabled processor on an MSI p67 Motherboard now
p67 has some similarities and it has some differences when you compare it
against the old p-55 platform so let's start with the similarities similarities
is that it has uh support for quad core sockets our quad core CPUs so just like
p55 p67 has no six core processors
enabled for the platform at launch and
p-55 will never be getting any six course six cores are going to be
exclusively the domain of 1366 and then future sockets from Intel
another similarity that I mentioned before is that they both have dual 8ex
Graphics support and no support for dual
16x now you will have some motherboard manufacturers that are releasing boards
with an nf200 chip or some other kind of
workaround in order to enable 2 16x
slots but I mean whether or not it
actually adds any bandwidth to the
system is pretty Deb able I would say
okay so I'm just taking off my uh my back plate here now this is something
that I wanted to mention you know I'll probably do a separate video about this
concept uh but the mounting sockets the
mounting holes for LGA 1156 and LGA 1155
are identical so I've actually taken my
LGA 1156 cooler and I've thrown it right
onto my LGA 1155 motherboard just like
that so that's all I had to do now I can take that throw it on my test platform
and I have upgraded to the 2600k now one
of the things I'm going to have to do is see what kind of an overclock I can get
out of my 2600k here and that is what I
will oh look at that that was close and that is what I will be using to give you
guys performance results whenever I do any graphics card testing or anything
like that so this is a bit of a quick and dirty uh motherboard swap so I'm
just going to use some TP clean off the
CPU use some TP clean off my heat sink over
here this is a heat pipe direct touch heat sink so I'm actually going to use
quite a bit more thermal compound than I normally
would because there are these large grooves that thermal compound can settle
into so if you have a flat bottomed heat
sink you wouldn't want to use quite as much cameraman the camera's in my way
you wouldn't want to use quite as much thermal grease as I'm about to use so
there we're going to call that clean enough like I said this is not
necessarily the correct procedure for any of the things that I'm doing but
this is kind of when I need to get things done in a hurry and I'm on camera
so that is like gobs more than I would normally
use all right so go ahead and throw the
heat sink on there there we are then I have my little
washers so in terms of memory we haven't
actually seen any changes from that previous platform LGA 1156 to the new
one so I'll be using my same Kingston
DDR3 2133 modules these are their hyperx
H2O modules these are oh sorry pardon me DDR3 2000 so these are high performance
modules whether you're running them with the water cooling that they do support
or whether you're not bothering doesn't really matter they'll still perform
really well and I'm just going to carry those right over to the new platform I'm
going to be carrying over my old power supply so that was uh that's a c suar 80
plus silver Power Supply with the funky snake looking
wiring okay we have our heat sink installed now I'm going to go ahead and
plug this into the CPU fan header noct fans are not pwm enabled but that's okay
cuz they're quiet anyway so throw that on there and then I'm using my noise
dampening mounts here to plug in here
and here in case you guys are ever wondering how to mount a fan using these
uh noise dampening rubber mounts this is how to do it just position them in place
then pull them all through and then your fan will not make any vibration noises
against the heat sink I think they're great I remember
when they first came came out it was like amazing it's like wow we have a way
to mount fans it doesn't involve like bolting them directly to things so that
it's noisy now like LGA 1156 you have to make sure that you
install the memory in the first slots so
I'm actually guessing on this board right now cuz I haven't used this board
yet although it's labeled 1 2 3 4 that
doesn't seem right because typically what I've seen in the past can you see
those labels there yeah there you go typically what I've seen in the past is
that the primary slots tend to be the two that are a little bit further away
from the motherboard socket or from the CPU socket in order to enable the use of
larger coolers that overhang tall memory modules although it looks like we're not
going to run into any problems with this
configuration so I'm going to go ahead and so if it doesn't post I'll know what
to try right away and I will take those modules and I'll move them over to the
next slots over so I'm going to go ahead and plug in my four pin CPU connector
over here so that's one thing that
hasn't changed at all 24 pin four pin
that's all fine you can see at the back we have some uh some new slots so
instead of running only two USB 3.0
ports on the back panel we actually have two on the back panel and two on an
internal header so that's one change that will be made to my test platform
here I'm also going to be changing the
way I plug in my SATA cable for my DVD drive apparently cuz this isn't going to
reach to where I had it plugged in before so we've actually that's another
thing that's changed we've got two SATA 6 gbit per second ports or rather two
Banks four SATA 6 gbit per second ports
and four SATA 3 gbit per second ports so I'm plugging that into a SATA 3 gbit per
second port on there and uh actually
here why don't we plug in uh here I found another video card we're
going to plug in a GTX 580 so I had a 460 on there before but we're going to
go ahead and throw the highest per performance graphics card I have on hand
onto the test platform for my upgrade and from now on all the results I
provide to you guys will be using the LGA
1155 Sandy Bridge platform versus the
older LGA 1156 Lindfield platform so find out what
kind of an overclock I can get I'll let you guys know and then we will go from
there so my upgrade is complete that is how we do a motherboard swap in however
many minutes or less there's our old
board