How to Do a Motherboard Swap - Upgrading My Test Bench Linus Tech Tips
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2011-05-08
·
1,508 words · ~7 min read
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okay guys so it is finally time for me to upgrade my trusty test platform so
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I'll take this episode to sort of spend some time talking about what I used to
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be using versus what I will be using now
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so I'm just going to sort of yak at you guys while I disassemble this so I've
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actually had a lot of people ask me about my test bench here it is a
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high-speed PC tech station just so you guys know you can buy them from ncx or a
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variety of other places so I'm taking off my graphics card here
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you can see the motherboard I was using before was actually an assus p7p 55 de
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premium motherboard so that is a p55 board I had been questioned a lot of
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times also about my use of a p55 board
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even in dual graphics card testing and I
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can tell you guys with much confidence that in my experience dual 8X Graphics
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slots does not adversely affect performance versus using two 16x slots
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so I will be upgrading my platform from a p551 with an 875k and 4 gigs of RAM to
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a p67 platform and this is going to be
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with a core i7 2600k so that is an unlocked
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hyperthreading enabled processor on an MSI p67 Motherboard now
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p67 has some similarities and it has some differences when you compare it
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against the old p-55 platform so let's start with the similarities similarities
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is that it has uh support for quad core sockets our quad core CPUs so just like
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p55 p67 has no six core processors
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enabled for the platform at launch and
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p-55 will never be getting any six course six cores are going to be
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exclusively the domain of 1366 and then future sockets from Intel
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another similarity that I mentioned before is that they both have dual 8ex
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Graphics support and no support for dual
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16x now you will have some motherboard manufacturers that are releasing boards
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with an nf200 chip or some other kind of
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workaround in order to enable 2 16x
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slots but I mean whether or not it
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actually adds any bandwidth to the
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system is pretty Deb able I would say
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okay so I'm just taking off my uh my back plate here now this is something
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that I wanted to mention you know I'll probably do a separate video about this
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concept uh but the mounting sockets the
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mounting holes for LGA 1156 and LGA 1155
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are identical so I've actually taken my
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LGA 1156 cooler and I've thrown it right
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onto my LGA 1155 motherboard just like
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that so that's all I had to do now I can take that throw it on my test platform
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and I have upgraded to the 2600k now one
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of the things I'm going to have to do is see what kind of an overclock I can get
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out of my 2600k here and that is what I
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will oh look at that that was close and that is what I will be using to give you
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guys performance results whenever I do any graphics card testing or anything
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like that so this is a bit of a quick and dirty uh motherboard swap so I'm
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just going to use some TP clean off the
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CPU use some TP clean off my heat sink over
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here this is a heat pipe direct touch heat sink so I'm actually going to use
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quite a bit more thermal compound than I normally
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would because there are these large grooves that thermal compound can settle
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into so if you have a flat bottomed heat
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sink you wouldn't want to use quite as much cameraman the camera's in my way
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you wouldn't want to use quite as much thermal grease as I'm about to use so
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there we're going to call that clean enough like I said this is not
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necessarily the correct procedure for any of the things that I'm doing but
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this is kind of when I need to get things done in a hurry and I'm on camera
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so that is like gobs more than I would normally
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use all right so go ahead and throw the
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heat sink on there there we are then I have my little
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washers so in terms of memory we haven't
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actually seen any changes from that previous platform LGA 1156 to the new
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one so I'll be using my same Kingston
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DDR3 2133 modules these are their hyperx
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H2O modules these are oh sorry pardon me DDR3 2000 so these are high performance
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modules whether you're running them with the water cooling that they do support
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or whether you're not bothering doesn't really matter they'll still perform
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really well and I'm just going to carry those right over to the new platform I'm
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going to be carrying over my old power supply so that was uh that's a c suar 80
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plus silver Power Supply with the funky snake looking
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wiring okay we have our heat sink installed now I'm going to go ahead and
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plug this into the CPU fan header noct fans are not pwm enabled but that's okay
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cuz they're quiet anyway so throw that on there and then I'm using my noise
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dampening mounts here to plug in here
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and here in case you guys are ever wondering how to mount a fan using these
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uh noise dampening rubber mounts this is how to do it just position them in place
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then pull them all through and then your fan will not make any vibration noises
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against the heat sink I think they're great I remember
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when they first came came out it was like amazing it's like wow we have a way
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to mount fans it doesn't involve like bolting them directly to things so that
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it's noisy now like LGA 1156 you have to make sure that you
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install the memory in the first slots so
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I'm actually guessing on this board right now cuz I haven't used this board
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yet although it's labeled 1 2 3 4 that
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doesn't seem right because typically what I've seen in the past can you see
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those labels there yeah there you go typically what I've seen in the past is
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that the primary slots tend to be the two that are a little bit further away
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from the motherboard socket or from the CPU socket in order to enable the use of
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larger coolers that overhang tall memory modules although it looks like we're not
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going to run into any problems with this
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configuration so I'm going to go ahead and so if it doesn't post I'll know what
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to try right away and I will take those modules and I'll move them over to the
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next slots over so I'm going to go ahead and plug in my four pin CPU connector
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over here so that's one thing that
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hasn't changed at all 24 pin four pin
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that's all fine you can see at the back we have some uh some new slots so
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instead of running only two USB 3.0
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ports on the back panel we actually have two on the back panel and two on an
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internal header so that's one change that will be made to my test platform
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here I'm also going to be changing the
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way I plug in my SATA cable for my DVD drive apparently cuz this isn't going to
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reach to where I had it plugged in before so we've actually that's another
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thing that's changed we've got two SATA 6 gbit per second ports or rather two
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Banks four SATA 6 gbit per second ports
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and four SATA 3 gbit per second ports so I'm plugging that into a SATA 3 gbit per
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second port on there and uh actually
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here why don't we plug in uh here I found another video card we're
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going to plug in a GTX 580 so I had a 460 on there before but we're going to
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go ahead and throw the highest per performance graphics card I have on hand
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onto the test platform for my upgrade and from now on all the results I
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provide to you guys will be using the LGA
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1155 Sandy Bridge platform versus the
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older LGA 1156 Lindfield platform so find out what
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kind of an overclock I can get I'll let you guys know and then we will go from
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there so my upgrade is complete that is how we do a motherboard swap in however
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many minutes or less there's our old
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board