Hardware Canucks: Benchmarkers Guide to the Phenom II

The center that this article is revolving around is the three different cooling setups we will be testing this processor with. With this type of testing, we will obviously have three different cooling setups. Below are a couple photos of the major hardware players and of course, the complete list of hardware used for the benchmarks we will be looking at shortly.

Motherboard:	Gigabyte GA-MA790GP-DS4H
Processor:	AMD Phenom II X4 940 ES
Processor Cooling:	Thermalright Ultra-120 w/120mm AD1212MS-A73GL 2050RPM/80.5CFM Chilly1 Single Stage Phase Change MMouse Rev3. CU w/LN2
North Bridge Cooling:	Stock
South Bridge Cooling:	Stock
PWM Cooling:	Stock
Memory:	Team Xtreem 2x1GB PC2-6400 3-3-3 (TXDD1024M800C3)
Power Supply:	Ultra X-Pro 750W
Video Card:	BFG GTX 280 OCX GeForce Release 180.48 WHQL
Additional Fans:	120mm AD1212MS-A73GL 2050RPM/80.5CFM
Hard Drive:	Seagate 7200.9 80GB SATAII 8MB cache
OS:	Windows Vista SP1 / Windows XP Pro SP3

As mentioned, the cooling setups will consist of three different cooling devices, ambient air cooling with a standard Thermalright cooler, phase change cooling by way of a single stage Chilly1 design, and liquid nitrogen via a MMouse Rev3 CU pot. This setup ranges from ambient air temperatures of 23C~24C, to -50C idle temperatures of the phase change, to a potentially -196C of the liquid nitrogen should the processor be willing. Before we can get to any testing, however, let's first take a closet look at the motherboard we will be using today since it is probably the most vital piece of hardware aside from the processor in question.
The GA-MA790GP-DS4H is based on the AMD 790GX chipset mated to an AMD SB750. This is considered a mainstream motherboard and by no means designed to be a super overclocking monster, it just so happens that it is the motherboard AMD was using at their recent tech demos with the Phenom II so we figured we couldn't go wrong using it with our article here today. The motherboard is only capable of supporting ATI Crossfire so we will only be using a single GTX 280 for all benchmark results. The BIOS supports plenty of voltage for our needs, even without voltage modifications, so this board will be used like it came out of the box. This should bring a lot of credibility to our results here today. With an average price around $160CND, this motherboard should it prove to be a worthy overclocker for this processor, would make for a very nice budget quad core build when mated to the new Phenom II.
The one big benefit we found with this motherboard before we even powered it up is the fact that it will be dead simple to insulate the motherboard for sub-zero benching. Believe it or not, this can actually be a factor in some peoples purchasing decisions, especially those that will be running a phase change on a 24/7 system. The heat sink setup on the GA-MA790GX-DS4H will also be left stock to truly replicate what the average user can expect from this motherboard with the new processors. We will now take a brief look at the benchmark suite we will be running the setup under for each of the cooling options and then get into each setup with the accompanying results.