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The system I’m going to be using is:

AMD FX-8120 with a Cooler Master Hyper 412S and a Little Devil PC-V2 phase unit.

Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD7

ASUS Reference 5870

Crucial C300 128GB

Cooler Master Silent Pro 850W

Windows 7 Ultimate x64

Antec SOLO II

A few may know of a couple of flaws this board has. First off is the Vdroop. Vdroop is when you apply load to your CPU and the voltage being sent to the CPU drops. The UD7 has this badly and for that reason some of the voltages in the below screenshots are higher than what I would normally use.

The two main benchmarks I focused on are wPrime and Super PI.

First off I checked up on HWBot.org to see what and who I had to beat.

wPrime 7sec 347ms at 4730 MHz on air

wPrime 5sec 991ms at 5587 MHz on Single stage phase

Super PI 17sec 221ms at 5066 MHz on air

There is no Super PI Single stage phase record.

So I dropped on my Cooler Master Hyper 412S with two Gentle Typhoons and opened up my window, fortunately my PC is right next to my window so cold air goes straight in.

Here’s my three scores for air.

Got 1st place with 6.817 for wPrime 32mb on air.

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I got 1st place with 17.129 for Super PI 1mb on air.

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Finally I got 214.159 for wPrime 1024mb on air, also a 1st.

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After those couple of scores I got a bit bored and started setting up my LD PC-V2 phase unit.
Here’s a photo of the unit.

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The unit is able to drop -60C in the correct ambient. Here’s a photo of display, this is while the CPU was sitting at idle.

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So I set off to beat both wPrime 32m and Super PI 1mb in the phase category.

After tweaking for around 20 – 30 minutes I reached this score.

It’s a 1st but only just.

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10 – 15 Minutes after I got this Super PI score, it’s has no competition so that’s in the 1st spot too.

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After completing the bench runs I went for maximum CPUZ validation. I got 5.8GHz on Phase. I was running at 6GHz but unfortunately the validation file was corrupt.

To sum up, I’m pretty happy with this chip, it did well considering the slow DDR3 RAM I was running.
I’m very happy with this FX-8120 and I feel it’s at a good price point. Lastly I hope to get a 6GHz validation very soon and update this! Wish me luck.

WillHemmens

I hope to continue that ethos well into the future and I hope you’ll be there with us.

Thanks again, here’s to the future and an excellent 2012.

PS. Look out for an anniversary competition here very soon.

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Not sure if it was supposed to get here before Christmas – probably, though I haven’t seen any other sites mention them – but it’s a little “holiday” present from Steelseries. Not only do a I get a little thank you note that I’ll quote from below, but an old school NES cartridge with some custom labelling on it. Unfortunately, because I was a Mega Drive (Genesis) gamer in my youth, I don’t own a NES. I need to find someone who does though, as if this works and continues to tell me how cool I am, that’d be epic.

We wanted to send a little token of nerd-appreciation to you for the incredible review that you gave to the Steelseries Sensei mouse. This is our way of saying thank you for taking the time to review the newest and most awarded, Steelseries mouse! Enjoy this original, NES “badge of honor” cartridge that recognises you as a reviewer and lover of this fine little peripheral.

Happy Holidays,

The Steelseries team.

It was incredible wasn’t it. If you haven’t read it yet, you obviously need to now. Here’s the link.

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The back of the cartridge also has a new label.

• May results in serious ass clicking.
• May cause headshot injury and trauma
• Do not fondle while whispering “my precious.”

Have a good one dudes. Thank you for reading our content for the past year, it means a lot. Hopefully we can continue to provide high quality(ish) news and reviews for you in the New Year.

Jon “Whoopty” Martindale

However, five is the magic number in this instance, so please ladies and gentlement, put your hands together for our winners:

Steve Q
ET3D
Curis Golen
Jordan
Balazs

I hope you all provided legitemate email addresses with your entries. I’ve sent out confirmation emails of your win(s). Please send over your addresses and I’ll get the prizes out to you as soon as possible.

As to the rest of you, thank you once again for entering. We hope to have another competition soon so watch this space.

Our buddies over at Immacula are joining in and the darling of the bunch, Chris, has yet to receive much in the way of sponsorship. Don’t let him feel left out. Go give him a £1 or two, he’d really appreciate it. Look out for pictures soon. He’s gunning for a 70s porn tasche so it should be quite spectacular when completed.

Why am I not competing? Because I’m still a young twink who can’t grow more than a bit of peach fuzz there. That’s probably why I always get ID’d.

Hit the link below to visit the donation page.

Winners

Thanks to everyone for entering this competition, it’s been hard choosing between the heart felt pleas and the humourous requests for an upgrade. It’s a shame it had to be whittled down to just five as I could easily have picked 10 or more of you.

However, five is the magic number in this instance, so please ladies and gentlement, put your hands together for our winners:

Steve Q
ET3D
Curis Golen
Jordan
Balazs

I hope you all provided legitemate email addresses with your entries. I’ve sent out confirmation emails of your win(s). Please send over your addresses and I’ll get the prizes out to you as soon as possible.

As to the rest of you, thank you once again for entering. We hope to have another competition soon so watch this space.

Update: This competition is now closed

Are you desperate for a GPU upgrade? Still languishing with a 2XXX series ATI card? perhaps an 8 series nVidia? Well, today HIS and XSR are here to help. While we don’t have anything monumentally powerful up for grabs we do have 5 GPUs to give away. That’s right, 5 opportunities to win a monstrous, passively cooled HIS 5550 1GB edition. Yea man. Now we’re playing with power.

Jokes aside, these passively cooled cards have a decent ammount of memory, they support DX11 and with their passive cooling, would be great for a media centre of HTPC.

So what do you need to do to win one of these cards? Simple.

1: “Like” us and our kind sponsors on Facebook using the buttons below.

2: Post here, stating the reason you need an upgrade so badly, you want a 1GB passively cooled 5550.

As long as you do the above 2 things, you’re in. This competition will run from 3 weeks starting today, culminating on the 24th of November. The winners will be those who post the most, creative or legitemate reason for needing one of these cards. Perhaps your own GPU is too old? Perhaps your PC is broken without a new card? Whatever the reason, post it here and we’ll select the top 5 answers to win one of these fine GPUs.

All you need do is answer a simple question and hit the like button for each of us. There’s a headset and PSU available.

Let me paint a picture. You ring through, you press the button that sends you to the server support team. A pre-recorded message tells you you’ve got about 10 minutes to wait in the queue. From there, no hold music, just silence for about 20 minutes. At that point, you get a ringing sound for about 20 seconds followed by:

I’m sorry, all our support staff at busy at the moment. Goodbye

At which point you’re hung up on. Needless to say, I think it’s time to look for a new hosting company. If you happen to run a firm with affordable cloud servers available, please give me a shout, I have some money for you.

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So I need to issue a quick thank you to BeQuiet. They’ve been kind enough to send us over this Stingray DS1M12 Oscilloscope. That means that in the future (hopefully near future if I pull my finger out) we’ll be having some PSU reviews back on XSReviews.

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I know we’ve done a few previews/unboxings recently, but I’m talking some actual testing once again. We of course still don’t have the equipment to do full load testing – that costs way too much – but we can now test noise and ripple for PSUs.

So thanks again to BeQuiet, and here’s to some decent PSU reviews.