Introduction

The King is DEAD. All hail the new KING!

That's right guys, the rein of Bloomfield is over and the age of Gulftown closes in.

I've been chomping at the bit to have an opportunity to torture this latest offering. With whispers of massive headroom for overclocking, more tolerance for extreme cooling and performance to die for, it's enough to get any tech-head excited.

For this article we will be torturing this latest offering from Intel over a variety of multi-threaded applications at pre-determined speeds as well as seeing how much further we can push the cooling before we start hitting cold bugs (most Bloomfields stopped operating around -90 to -100 degrees celcius).

Before we get into the testing, let's take a closer look at the hardware that we will be utilizing.

The Gulftown processor will be cooled with a Kingpin Cooling F1 Extreme LN2 Pot.

From GIGABYTE we will be using their new flagship motherboard, the EX58-UD7 as the platform for this article.

The graphics will be taken care of with a MSI reference 5870 cooled with a Kingpin Cooling Tek9 3.0 GPU Unit and one or two mods.

And powering all this is the new monster from Antec, the TPQ-1200-OC.