Introduction

Every once in a while I take the time to go over my testbeds and see if anything can be changed to make them better. Earlier this year my main video card testbed went from a GIGABYTE X58 and i7 920 setup to an ASRock X58 and i7 980X. At about the same time I started to test more and more memory kits and a ASRock P55 system came into the mix along with an i7 860.

Recently I looked at the G.Skill Flare series kit which was designed to work on AMD X6 systems and thought it was the perfect opportunity to build a third testbed while also taking the time to see if some modifications could be made to the others.

As soon as some new hardware upgrades come into a test system it renders previous results really useless, so I also took the time to look at the benchmark line-up and see if some new games could be added.

Ultimately what you're looking at today is a rundown of the parts I've chosen, why I chose them and a little look behind the scenes of how everything runs here in the West Australian TweakTown lab.