General Usage & Basic Testing
When you first turn the system on you will be asked to create a user name and activate Windows. This is usually how it goes with most full system we have received. Once we created a user name and activated Windows we logged into the system and checked things out. This is not a bloated system with tons of junk on there you don’t need. iBUYPOWER did add a cool sidebar widget to check CPU and Memory usage. This system uses the ASUS P7P55D Deluxe motherboard so you have the ASUS TurboV software installed. It allows you to change your voltages and frequencies on the fly. Also installed is the ASUS Audio Envy software the shows you what audio ports are being used, which is pretty cool. After starting the system up I went into the Windows System information and we can see that the system is running Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit with service pack 2. iBUYPOWER also provides their customer support number and website here.
To get a better look at what’s under the hood I ran CPU-Z. Here is what all we have.
As you can see iBUYPOWER overclocked the system from 2.98GHz to 3.49GHz!
The CPU is liquid cooled by the Asetek Liquid CPU Cooling System w/ 240mm radiator at the top of the case. I wanted to see how well the cooling system would perform so I used Prime 95 to put full load on the system. Here are the results from the test.
The idle temperatures are great, but when we put full load on the CPU it did get quite hot! Our only comparison to something like this would be our CPU cooler testing on an Intel i7 920 CPU, where air coolers did a much better job. Although you have to keep in mind that no games or programs will probably put a full load on this CPU and that this CPU is overclocked.
There are 2 different hard drives in this system the Kingston SSDNow V-Series 128GB solid state drive and the Hitachi 7200RPM SATA drive. Obviously the solid state drive is going to outperform the regular drive, but the Hitachi drive still performs quite well. Here are the HDTune results from both tests.
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