Bulldozer vz. Sandy Bridge

[lonerider]

Just finished building the thing last night, what took forever was the Windows patches, updates, etc (not to mention, house chores lol). When I was done it was almost midnight. Initially, the thing ran a little hotter than I've expected, thanks to the crappy OEM bundled heatsink/fan. I'm going to wait for a sale on a liquid cooler or one of those high-end air pushers. In the meantime, the CPU is running on stock speeds (3.1Ghz default, 4Ghz turbo mode), but I've lowered the CPU voltage to -0.05 over default setting. It dropped running temps from 57' to 52' under load. I'll probably drop it a bit more when I get home tonight.

The thing RUNS like a champ. Running my normal boxed team of 5 wow clients, and set CPU affinity to 5 separate cores per instance. Each window is super smooth... no more choppy frames in IF (which I was suffering from before this upgrade... had Q6600). Average CPU utilization is around 50-60% per bound core in Ironforge (on "medium" graphics settings across all toons). I'll post screenshots tonight, will probably download MSI's afterburner so I can see the exact frame rates per instance.

My new specs:

AMD FX-8120 @ stock speeds, -0.05 CPU voltage (OEM Heatsink/fan)
Gigabyte 990XA-UD3 SLI motherboard
8GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600 8-8-8-24
Dual MSI GTX-460 768MB in SLI (surroundview mode, x3 LCD screens, 5760x1080 resolution)
Dual 500GB 7200 RPM HDDs in Raid-1
Ultra 750W PSU