 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 gonna 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 NCIX 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 ASUS P7P55DE 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 P55 one 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 hyper threading enabled processor on an MSI P67 motherboard now P67 has some similarities and it has some differences when you compare it against the old P55 platform, so let's start with the similarities similarities is that it has 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 P55 will never be getting any six cores 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 8x graphics support and No support for dual 16x now you will have some motherboard manufacturers that are releasing boards with an nf-200 chip or Some other kind of work around in order to enable to 16x slots But I mean whether or not it actually adds any bandwidth to the system is Pretty debatable I would say okay, so I'm just taking off my 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 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 2600 K 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 2600 K here And that is what I will 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 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 camera man the cameras 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 what 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 that's a cougar 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 Noctua fans are not PWM enabled but that's okay because they're quiet anyway So I'll throw that on there and then I'm using my noise dampening mounts here to plug in here And then I'm going to plug in my power supply here So I'll 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 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 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 because I haven't used this board yet Although it's labeled one two three four 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 4 pin CPU connector over here So that's one thing that hasn't changed at all 24 pin 4 pin that's all fine You can see at the back we have some 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 Because 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 gigabit per second ports or rather two banks four SATA 6 gigabit per second ports And four SATA 3 gigabit per second ports so I'm plugging that into a SATA 3 gigabit per second port on there And actually here why don't we plug in 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 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 Linfield 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