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Thanks to Intel, the Core i7 980X review will be the first review scheduled for the new i4memory.com version 3.0 design.

Lot of delays have occurred due to family health issues, work and midway test failure of my Corsair Dominator GT 2000C7 kit, so still writing the full review, but thought I'd post up a preview of some of the results only so far. The rest of the review will be posted up on i4memory.com front page.

The Corsair Dominator GT 2000C7 kit which was 13+ months old from original Corsair TR3X6G2000C7GTF sku was used for ~75% of the review. But due to one module failing at short notice, for the rest of the review I used my recently rma replacement #2 kit of Kingston 2000C8 with the newly revised KHX2000C8D3TK3/6GX sku - the only other Elpida Hyper memory kit I had on hand to fill in Corsair Dominator GT's shoes. The Kingston kit is rated for 2000Mhz 8-8-8-24 2T 1.65v and is brand new and this is the first time I've used this kit, so had to test it thoroughly at 2000Mhz 7-8-7-20 1T timings to complete the tests for this review.

For this review, I'll be using custom water cooling with EK Supreme LT, Feser 480 radiator and Swiftch MCP655 pump. I'll save the stock Core i7 980X heatsink tests for a different review planned later.



System configuration:

System:

• Intel Core i7 980X 3951A763 B1 Step 2 ES
• EK Supreme LT H20 + TFC480 + MCP655
• Asus P6T6 WS Revolution 0609 beta bios
• Sapphire HD5870 10.3 beta
• 6GB Corsair Dominator GT 2000C7 (TR3X6G2000C7GTF)
• 6GB Kingston 2000C8 (KHX2000C8D3TK3/6GX)
• 80GB Intel X25-M G2 SSD (OS)
• 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD (DATA)
• Pioneer DVR216 Burner
• Corsair HX1000
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit RTM (fully updated)

Methodology:
Not having luxury of time to retest all my Core i7 cpus for comparisons to Core i7 980X, I decided to do the Core i7 980X review comparing results in terms of cpu scaling with four configurations:

1. @3341Mhz - i7 980X stock speed with Turbo disabled (25x133bclk, 14x133 mem, 28x133 uncore)
2. @3474Mhz - i7 980X stock speed with Turbo enabled (26x133bclk, 14x133 mem, 28x133 uncore)
3. @4000Mhz - i7 980X overclocked with Turbo disabled (20x200bclk, 10x200 mem, 20x200 uncore)
4. @4600Mhz - i7 980X overclocked with Turbo disabled (23x200bclk, 10x200 mem, 20x200 uncore)

Benchmarks Tested

Synthetic Tests

• Everest Ultimate
• Sandra 2010 Lite
• Futuremark 3DMark Vantage
• Futuremark 3DMark06
• Futuremark PCMark Vantage
• Super Pi v1.6
• MaxxMem2 v1.74
• MaxxPI2 v1.55
• Wprime 1.55

Productivity & Rendering

• 7-Zip Compression
• Winrar Benchmark
• WinZIP 14.0
• TrueCrypt
• Microsoft Excel 2007 SP2 NumberCrunch
• Microsoft Excel 2007 SP2 Monte Carlo
• Bibble 5 Pro Trial
• Cinebench R10
• Cinebench R11.5
• TechARP's x264 HD benchmark

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Synthetic Tests

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Break down of subtest suite component scores along with the percentage weighting for each subtest for cpu, memory, graphics card and hard drive as per Futuremark PCMark Vantage white paper specifications. For instance, you can see in PCmark TV & Movies 2 - HDD Windows Media Center, the results fluctuate with the four test configurations due to the test being heavily weighted on hard drives - 25% CPU, 25% graphics card and 50% hard drives.

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Productivity & Rendering

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