Brag: Intel® Xeon® Processor X5660 is my poison!

One lazy day (yesterday), I was forced to have longer time to stay in the office. Not that I like it, nor do I have an option but more so because I need to. Wifey's got to attend an event and I can choose to spend my time going with her but I rather let her enjoy her time with her friends since it's a company event. Then there's also an option for me to just go at to the movie theater while waiting for her. Or I could do some loitering around the malls. None of them really interest me, so I told wifey that I'll just stay in the office and play with the hardware.

Tech Link (Motherboard): First Look: MSI XPower X58 Big Bang Motherboard

The folks at bit-tech had their paws and fangs wet with their first look with MSI's latest board MSI XPower X58. It looks cool, black and blue combo with heatpipe hogging the CPU VRMs. Forget about your "legacy" add-on card because this board won't take any old technology in its six 16x PCI-Express slots!!!!

Everyone seems to be in the midst of an X58 refresh right now; partly due to the arrival of SATA 6Gbps and USB 3, but mostly thanks to Intel's new 6-core Gulftown Core i7-980X Extreme Edition. We've seen Asus' latest Republic of Gamers motherboard and we got an early look at MSI's latest XPower board at the start of last month. The board has been refined since, so MSI dropped it off at the bit-tech lab in order for us to take it apart have another look.

Source:bit-tech

Tech Link (CPU): The Core i7 980X Review: Intel's First 6-Core Desktop CPU

Anandtech has an article about Gulftown. They seem to like it though their overclocking is quite lacking. I'm pretty sure that despite the performance, there will always be fanboys that will hunger for more!

It’s rare that anything we review has the longevity that Intel’s Core i7 Bloomfield platform has enjoyed. If you were one of the fortunate few to buy a Core i7 920, 940 or 965 back in November 2008, you’d still have one of the fastest desktop CPUs today in March 2010.

Source:AnandTech

Brag: Gulftown Stock Fan is so awesomesauce!

I forgot to post a picture of the stock fan that came with my "Gulfy". It's quite a looker I might say. It sports a copper core, heat pipes, and blu-lit fan.



It has manual speed control (hi, lo) and has a retention frame commonly found on after market coolers. The fan has an Intel logo on top, and the heat pipes are nicely "embossed" compared to other heatpipe cooler where heatpipe ends are just "protruding".

Brag: Intel Gulftown CPU-Z is up and validated

As I used to say back in the "old days", the Dark Force is strong, alive, and kicking. Oh dear, I need to find where I stashed all my decent RAM. Oh yeah, the motherboard is a workstation board.

I'll tinker around and see if there's some tweaking options for this board. If there is, I'll probably overclock it a little. Hmmm, I need to "steal" someone else's video card too, probably a decent GTS 250. But sorry, I can't show any benchmark whatsoever. And oh, you can click on the image of CPU-Z to get to the validation thingie.

If you want to see Task Manager, temperature, voltage, and other CPU details, click this link (not a virus, I assure you)!

And oh, if you're saying how come its frequency is so low, well I uploaded another CPU-Z validation here!

Sorry for this incoherent mubling disguised as a post trying to pass it like a readable blog entry, till next, FanBoy out!