It sucks to have an addiction. I personally have one of the most insidious addictions known to man. I like computers. I like fast computers. I perhaps like fast computers a little more than is legal in some states. (Not the southern ones though.) And so I spend money on the darned things. Sometimes more money than I should. Ever since I built a new computer for our good friend Pappy, using one of the tasty new Intel Core 2 Duo processors, I've been eyeing them on and off for my next upgrade. It's been quite a while since I've upgraded my system. My Athlon64 3800+ and MSI K8N-SLI motherboard have stood by me well and true for a long time, in the case of the motherboard and MSI 7800GT video cards for over a year. It's unusual that I wait this long before upgrading but lately it seems that hardware is just so fast there's not much point in the once every few months upgrades that I did once upon a time. These days a machine is lasting me at least a year and in all honestly would probably last me two years even playing the latest most demanding games. However we have to take into account that darned addiction I was talking about and lately I've been feeling that itch to upgrade so I finally caved in and bought myself an Intel Core 2 Duo 6600, an ASUS P5N32-SLI Premium motherboard, 2 gigs of OCZ DDR2-667 RAM and an MSI Geforce 8800GTX video card. I would have preferred to get myself an MSI motherboard as I rather like them and they've been good to me but MSI claims that the Nforce for Intel chipset have some issues so they're not manufacturing the boards as of yet. Personally I haven't had any problems with them so I went out and bought myself the ASUS board.

The 8800gtx video card was actually purchased before the other parts but the performance on it was rather disappointingly lackluster and the only thing we could come up with was that it had an issue with the 8x PCI-E on the ol' MSI K8N-SLI motherboard. Once we had the video card and saw how poorly it performed it was decided that if we were in for a dime we were in for a dollar so we prayed that our instincts were right and the mobo was indeed the problem and got all the other parts.

The Core 2 e6600 was selected for a few different reasons. The first was price. It's half the price of the e6700 and a quarter the price of the retardedly expensive e6800. It also performs extremely well for it's price. The second reason was that it's a 2.4ghz processor, exactly the same clock speed as the old Athlon64 3800+ it was replacing so writing an article comparing the two would be simpler.

Before we gutted the machine and started the transformation we did a series of benchmarks to get a comparison with the new system. We timed the system's boot as well, but unfortunately for everything to fit and work with the new motherboard we had to change out the boot hard drive, so it wouldn't be all that accurate.

Installation/Observations

MSI 8800GTX

8800gtx is huge and very quiet. And by huge we're talking Big Bird on horse steroids huge. The MSI version of this card is a dual slot monster and it's nearly a foot long. That's a good thing in a hotdog but not so good in the tight confines of a computer case. We had to move one of the hard drives in the Thermal Take Matrix VX case up into one of the 5.25" bays to make room. The video card actually goes right back into one the hard drive bay. You wouldn't be mounting two of those brutes in this case and in fact it wouldn't fit into many of the mid tower cases we've seen. Make sure you've got clearance before you buy one of these cards unless you're looking at getting a bigger case. This video card also takes two of the 6 pin PCI-E power cables and sucks an enormous amount of power so make sure you've got a good power supply. (No that $25 500 watt you got with your case won't cut it.)

My 7800gt feels so inadequate. :(

Well, there goes my neat hard drive wiring job. This card is BIG.

ASUS P5NSLI-Premium Wi-Fi Edition

The only real installation issue (other than spacing problems) experienced with the new motherboard was that our old setup used an IDE drive for booting as well as two optical drives. The P5N32SLI-Premium like most new motherboards only has one IDE connector and six SATA connectors, so we had to ghost the boot drive over to an SATA drive and do a repair installation on the new drive. I wish that ASUS would give you the SATA installation drivers on a floppy with the board as well, as MSI does. The installation CD will create the floppy for you, but if you're replacing a dead motherboard and don't have a second computer handy that could be an issue.

The new system with the Intel e6600 and the ASUS P5N32SLI-Premium is very, very quiet. The CPU runs at 1-3 degrees over the case ambient temperature even under load and the stock fan is quiet. It's nice to have a heat pipe on the motherboard for cooling the chipset rather than those tiny annoying little high RPM fans that always develop an annoying whine. We didn't bother testing the onboard audio since we've got a Creative X-fi Platinum in the system for audio and we've got a strict aversion to onboard audio for anything involving gaming or listening to music. The onboard wireless worked well in our tests but we don't like wireless for gaming as we find that wired always gives a better and more reliable connection. We didn't test this feature, but the onboard wireless can apparently work as a wireless access point which could be handy if you didn't have a router.

Hmmmm.. Heat pipes. Pretty AND quiet.

The front facing SATA block on the P5N32SLI-Premion is a great idea. Love it. It's a solid block of 6 SATA plugs. But again, we're using a smallish mid tower case so we've got clearance issues. The SATA cables are resting against the hard drive mount inside the case. It's not a problem unless we decide to hook up another hard drive or SATA device. Then it's going to be time to play that delightful game we all love so much: Remove the motherboard.

Also on the SATA front, this is one of the first motherboards I've seen that has rear SATA ports on the back panel. There's two of the things and it took me a minute to realize what I was looking at. I've only ever seen one external SATA device and it was an external hard drive bay. I'm tempted to get one it'd be nice to have an external hard drive that's almost as fast as your internal drives. It's an idea that really makes a lot of sense when you think about it.

Power plug. Gah. The 26 pin PSU plug on the motherboard is mounted front and center on the board. Right where I'd just moved my hard drive to get it out of the way of the 8800GTX. The ol' K8N-SLI had the power connecter back by the CPU, out of the way where it should be. The connector location wouldn't be a problem in a larger case, but again I'm struck down by the small midtower blues and forces to move the hard drive yet again.

ASUS are clever monkeys, they included some little adapters for the front panel, USB and firewire. I couldn't figure out what they were for then Protocal pointed out that they allow you to plug all your headers into them then plug the whole adapter into the motherboard rather than screwing around trying to read the tiny silk screening and get cables plugged into the right spots. It's a small thing but it's slick as heck and worked great.

Less screwing around with big fingers and tiny pins is good.

ASUS also included enough cables to wire a house with this motherboard. It came with all of the normal back plates (USB, Sound and Firewire) as well a 6 SATA cables and SATA power splitters, floppy and IDE cables.

Once the whole system was assembled we did a repair install on our month old Windows XP install, loaded all the new drivers and we were ready to go.

Benchmarking

We've done benchmarks using the old system which was an Athlon 3800+ on an MSI K8N-SLI motherboard with 2 gigs of corsair XMS DDR400 RAM as well as the new rig. We used Aquamark at various quality settings as well as 3D Mark 2003, 2005, 2006, and Doom3 at various settings as well. We consider Aquamark to be a decent benchmark even it's not particularly relevant to modern games as it seems to be quite CPU dependant. We've dropped most of the Aquamark benchmarks as they showed very similar results on both systems and video cards no matter what we put the settings to. The drivers used testing were the latest official Nvidia, 93.71 for the 7800gt and 97.02 for the 8800gtx. The system was left at it's default settings with no overclocking or tweaking. For comparison we've also included the benchmarks from our original 7800gt SLI article of September 2005 where applicable.

As you can see, the 8800gtx really shows it's colors on the more grueling of the benchmarks. It's faster in Aquamark, but it's not a "wow!" faster.... Unlike the 3Dmarks 2003 and 2005 where it's getting almost double the benchmarks and 3Dmark 2006 where it's over twice as fast.

At this point, much thanks was given to the computer gods. If the benchmark results with the 8800 weren't better on the new mobo and CPU much wailing, lamentation and gnashing of teeth would have ensued.

After getting our results from the Aquamark and the various 3D Marks we moved on to the test that separates the real gaming video cards from the S3 and Matrox wannabes.... Doom 3.

We did a fresh install and patched it up to 1.3 then ran the "timedemo demo1" command from the console. It was run twice for each test to get the real result. We were unable to run 16x anti-aliasing on the 8800gtx as Doom3 would just reset it's video to default when this setting was enabled. Not sure what's going on there.

Conclusions

From the benchmarks it's fairly obvious that the 8800GTX likes the new motherboard and processor. It's also rather obvious that it only really stretches itself out when you hit high levels of anti-aliasing and higher resolutions, much like our SLI 7900gt benchmark results from a year ago. Sure the 8800gtx is fast, but is it something you need? Unless you absolutely have to have the newest and fastest toys and you don't have a fairly fast video card already I'd recommend waiting for the next revision of the 8800 cards, which hopefully will be smaller and cooler. Even sitting at idle the heatsink on the MSI 8800GTX is hot enough that you can't touch it for more than a few seconds, but it is quiet with that huge fan. It has been perfectly stable even through our long benchmarking and gaming sessions, so hopefully the heat it generates isn't an issue. It'll be interesting to see how this card handles newer games such as Crysis and Quake Wars when they come out.

The ASUS P5N32SLI-Premium is a super quiet, well laid out motherboard. The only downfalls of the board are it's lack of PCI slots (It only has two) which shouldn't really be an issue for most users, the location of the PSU plug and the SATA block which aren't a problem unless you have a very small case. Combined with the Intel E6600 processor it performs well, is very stable and installed without any problems and I'd have no problems recommending it to anyone who's looking for a good high end motherboard.

The system is noticeably snappier with the new processor and motherboard as well. We were surprised at how much smoother things are and at how much faster the system boots up and loads all of our software.