Setup & Testing Procedures
Ok so let’s power the system on! When you first turn the system on you are brought right into Windows. iBUYPOWER has loaded the system with Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit). Let’s go ahead and install CPU-Z and see what all is running.
As you can see the system is running the Intel Core i7 3930K, ASUS P9X79 Pro motherboard, and 16GB of DDR3. The first thing that I noticed was that the CPU was not running at the stock 3.20GHz, but actually 4.56GHz! That is about a 40% overclock! IBUYPOWER did this by changing the CPU frequency to 120MHz and the multiplier to 38.
We will be running this system through a complete battery of benchmark. We have separated them into categories below.
CPU & Memory Benchmarks
SiSoftware Sandra (download)
– Processor Arithmetic
– Processor Multimedia
AIDA 64 (download)
– Cache & Memory Benchmark
System Benchmarks
PCMark 7 (download)
PCMark Vantage (download)
Sisoftware Sandra (download)
– Overall Benchmark
– Physical Disks Benchmark
PassMark Performance Test (download)
Geekbench (download)
Video Benchmarks
3DMark 11 (download)
3DMark Vantage (download)
Stone Giant Demo (download)
Heaven Demo v2.5 (download)
Gaming Benchmarks
Alien vs. Predator (download)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Call of Pripyat (download)
Battlefield 3
Man, seeing an X79 build review really takes me back. The i7-3930K was such a legend in its day; having 6 cores at 3.20GHz for a home gaming rig felt like absolute madness when most of us were still struggling to justify moving past quad cores. I especially remember the hype around liquid cooling being a “must-have” to really let those Sandy Bridge-E chips stretch their legs.
It’s funny to look at these specs now that my daily focus has shifted more toward enterprise hardware. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately with a ProLiant DL360 rack that has a 16 Core 2.9GHz Xeon https://serverorbit.com/pc-and-servers/proliant-dl360/16-core-2-9ghz-xeon, and it’s wild how much the “core wars” have evolved. Back then, 6 cores were for extreme gamers, but now 16 cores in a 1U chassis is just a standard Tuesday for virtualization tasks. I still have a soft spot for the “cool factor” of cases like the NZXT Phantom mentioned in the post, though—server rails definitely aren’t as fun to look at!
Do you think these older enthusiast platforms like X79 still have a place as budget workstations today, or has the power draw versus modern efficiency finally made them too expensive to keep running?