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Test Setup and Testing Methodology Test Setup and Testing Methodology  Our test setup consists of an Intel Sandy Bridge-E 3960X, ASUS Rampage IV Extreme motherboard, two GTX 470s, 8GB of Corsair XMS DDR3-2000 9-9-9, and 32GB of Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1866 9-10-9. All this is powered by a Corsair AX1200w PSU. Here are a few shots of the setup and hardware:     First we have the whole test bench up and running. As you can see we used watercooling (Apogee XT) for the CPU along with two heatercores. A second GTX 470 was also added for SLI testing.     Above you can have a closer look at the CPU, memory and PSU. We tested all of the memory pictured in order to determine if there are any compatibility issues with x79. Overclocking Methodology At Hardware Canucks, we understand we have a diverse reader base and to represent a variety of user types, so we put the Rampage IV Extreme through three types of tests.
We did stability testing a little differently for the Sandy Bridge-E platform than usual. The main stability test used was Linpack (LinX version 0.6.4) with memory usage set to 4,096MB and 20 loops run. In the enthusiast world, Linpack is a benchmark designed to measure performance on Intel CPUs in GFlops. However, it's also a very useful tool for checking the stability of a CPU and memory. LinX picks up very quickly and if you are able to complete a 20 loop test with the specifications above your system is likely stable or very close to it. For testing the 32GB kit, we use HyperPI as running LinX with that much memory would take way too long. After LinX / HyperPI stability was achieved, 2 runs of 3DMark Vantage and 2 runs of 3DMark 11 were run to test 3D stability. Once an overclock passed these tests, this is the point deemed as “stable” for the purposes of this review. Windows 7 Service Pack 1 was installed to take advantage of the Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) with Sandy Bridge processors. Intel AVX is a 256-bit SIMD floating point vector extension of Intel architecture. The BIOS used for overclocking and benchmarking was version 0070b.  Benchmarking Methodology Benchmarks in the System Benchmarks section will be a comparison of the i7 3960X at stock speed, at auto overclock speed as set by CPU Level Up, and at maximum 24/7 overclock to give an idea of how much performance a user can gain when overclocking the Rampage IV Extreme. These results are then compared to a 2600k using the same settings. For stock testing, optimized defaults were loaded putting the CPU at 3,911Mhz (39 x 100.3) and memory at 669Mhz and 9-9-9-24 1T timings. Optimized defaults enable Turbo by default hence the 3,911Mhz instead of 3,300Mhz which is the stock speed of the processor. The auto overclocked speed on the 3960X (CPU Level Up) was 4,250Mhz (34 x 125) with memory at 667Mhz and 9-9-9-24 1T timings. The overclocked speed on the 3960X for 24/7 stability was 5,002Mhz (38 x 131.6) with memory at 1,228Mhz and 10-11-10-32 2T timings. Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit was used with SP1 installed. | ||||
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