Well, I've got both PC's together now and I have to say I'm thrilled. This was quite simply the easiest, smoothest, and quickest assembly/setup/install I've ever had in my 13+ years building PCs. I'm very impressed with all the parts I purchased. The performance is top notch and even the overclocking was a cinch.
The 680i's BIOS settings were great and I was easily able to hit 3.2ghz without breaking a sweat using 1.375v and 2.125 on the memory with the memory set at 800mhz and it's EPP timings (tired 1T but that caused instabilities even with slightly higher voltages). With the video card I was able to hit 622 CPU/1000 MEM on the first try and I haven't touched it since as that is a great overclock and has been 100% stable after playing WoW for 3 hours. The Gigabyte case is phenomenal, much better than any other I've used and made assembly a cinch. The X-FI Fatality FPS sound card has been OK so far but it appears to be wrecking havoc with the Nvidia Control Panel as it crashes every time I try to run it (I've narrowed it down to the X-FI as the culprit). The Freezer 7 is doing a great job, I didn't even end up using the Artic Silver as the MX-1 compound is supposed to be just as good if not better and it's doing a bang up job so far. Temps are hovering in the 40's consistently. The Raptoer 150gb is definitely a step up from my old 74gb variety. The load times are unbelievable and it helps when you can load windows, a game, or whatever else you use and save some seconds or even minutes here and there.
I'm still runnings some benchmarks on the system but so far with Linkboost and all the other 680i features enabled plus the overclocking mentioned above I was able to 64.1 FPS in WoW, which it seemed to be capped at for whatever reason (no matter how I changed the screen view it wouldn't go higher). FPS never dropped below 45 FPS outside of zoning in/out, and the only time it dropped from ~60 was when I was in a battle with 10+ other people, so not bad at all. To put this in perspective my old system (Athlon XP 1800+@2.25ghz, 2Gb RAM, Nvidia 6800 GT 256mb) was only able to max around 19 FPS and that was with lesser quality settings. As soon as I finish running the PCMark05, 3DMark06, and Sandra XI tests I'll post those results as well. It's important to note that I have the latest Nvidia Nforce, GeForce, X-Fi, and other drivers installed.
World of Warcraft
SETTINGS: All graphic settings set to max except for VSync which was disabled. Audio settings and view distance set to max as well. Max Vid. Res. for monitor is 1680x1050 which was used in this test as well.
MAX: 64.1 FPS
MIN: 45 FPS
AVG: 55 FPS
Sisoft Sandra Lite 2007.2.11.17
Dhrystone: 29481
Whetstone: 19997
Integer x8: 176953
Floating-Point x4: 95341
Drive Index: 68 MB/s
Random Access Time (Est): 11 ms
RAM Bandwidth INT Buff'd: 7607 MB/s
RAM Bandwidth Float Buff'd: 7577 MB/s
PCMark05
7677 PCMARKS
3DMark06
11602 3DMARKS
The 680i's BIOS settings were great and I was easily able to hit 3.2ghz without breaking a sweat using 1.375v and 2.125 on the memory with the memory set at 800mhz and it's EPP timings (tired 1T but that caused instabilities even with slightly higher voltages). With the video card I was able to hit 622 CPU/1000 MEM on the first try and I haven't touched it since as that is a great overclock and has been 100% stable after playing WoW for 3 hours. The Gigabyte case is phenomenal, much better than any other I've used and made assembly a cinch. The X-FI Fatality FPS sound card has been OK so far but it appears to be wrecking havoc with the Nvidia Control Panel as it crashes every time I try to run it (I've narrowed it down to the X-FI as the culprit). The Freezer 7 is doing a great job, I didn't even end up using the Artic Silver as the MX-1 compound is supposed to be just as good if not better and it's doing a bang up job so far. Temps are hovering in the 40's consistently. The Raptoer 150gb is definitely a step up from my old 74gb variety. The load times are unbelievable and it helps when you can load windows, a game, or whatever else you use and save some seconds or even minutes here and there.
I'm still runnings some benchmarks on the system but so far with Linkboost and all the other 680i features enabled plus the overclocking mentioned above I was able to 64.1 FPS in WoW, which it seemed to be capped at for whatever reason (no matter how I changed the screen view it wouldn't go higher). FPS never dropped below 45 FPS outside of zoning in/out, and the only time it dropped from ~60 was when I was in a battle with 10+ other people, so not bad at all. To put this in perspective my old system (Athlon XP 1800+@2.25ghz, 2Gb RAM, Nvidia 6800 GT 256mb) was only able to max around 19 FPS and that was with lesser quality settings. As soon as I finish running the PCMark05, 3DMark06, and Sandra XI tests I'll post those results as well. It's important to note that I have the latest Nvidia Nforce, GeForce, X-Fi, and other drivers installed.
World of Warcraft
SETTINGS: All graphic settings set to max except for VSync which was disabled. Audio settings and view distance set to max as well. Max Vid. Res. for monitor is 1680x1050 which was used in this test as well.
MAX: 64.1 FPS
MIN: 45 FPS
AVG: 55 FPS
Sisoft Sandra Lite 2007.2.11.17
Dhrystone: 29481
Whetstone: 19997
Integer x8: 176953
Floating-Point x4: 95341
Drive Index: 68 MB/s
Random Access Time (Est): 11 ms
RAM Bandwidth INT Buff'd: 7607 MB/s
RAM Bandwidth Float Buff'd: 7577 MB/s
PCMark05
7677 PCMARKS
3DMark06
11602 3DMARKS