How to Do a Motherboard Swap - Upgrading My Test Bench Linus Tech Tips
How to Do a Motherboard Swap - Upgrading My Test Bench Linus Tech Tips
2011-01-05
okay guys so it is finally time for me
to upgrade my trusty test platform so
I'll take this episode to sort of spend
some time talking about what I used to
be using versus what I will be using now
so I'm just going to sort of yak at you
guys while I disassemble this so I've
actually had a lot of people ask me
about my test bench here it is a high
speed PC tech station just so you guys
know you can buy them from NCIX or a
variety of other places so I'm taking
off my graphics card here you can see
the motherboard I was using before was
actually in a soos p7p 55 de premium
motherboard so that is a p55 board I had
been questioned a lot of times also
about my use of a p55 board even in dual
graphics card testing and I can tell you
guys with much confidence that in my
experience dual 8 X graphics slots does
not adversely affect performance versus
using - 16 X slots so I will be
upgrading my platform from AP 55 one
with an 8 7 5 K and 4 gigs of ram 2 AP
67 platform and this is going to be with
a core i7 2670 7 motherboard now P 67
has some similarities and it has some
differences when you compare it against
the old p55 platform so let's start with
the similarities similarities is that it
has support for quad core sockets are
quad core CPUs
so just like p55 p67 has no 6 core
processors enabled for the platform at
launch and p55 will never be getting any
6 cores six cores are going to be
exclusively the domain of 1366 and then
future sockets from Intel another
similarity
I mentioned before is that they both
have dual 8x graphics support and no
support for dual 16x now you will have
some other board manufacturers that are
releasing boards with an NF 200 chip or
some other kind of workaround in order
to enable to 16 X slots but I mean
whether or not it actually adds any
bandwidth to the system is pretty
debatable I would say okay so I'm taking
off my back plate here now this is
something that I wanted to mention you
know I'll probably do a separate video
about this concept but the mounting
sockets the mounting holes for LGA 1156
and LGA 1155 are identical so I've
actually taken my LGA 1156 cooler and
I've thrown it right on to my LGA 1155
motherboard just like that so that's all
I had to do now I can take that throw it
on my test platform and I have upgraded
to the 2600 K now one of the things I'm
going to have to do is see what kind of
an overclock I can get out of my 2600 K
here and that is what I will look at
that that was close and that is what I
will be using to give you guys
performance results whenever I do any
graphics card testing or anything like
that so this is a bit of a quick and
dirty motherboard swap so I'm just going
to use some TP clean off the CPU use
some TP clean off my heat sink over here
this is a heat pipe direct touch
heatsink so I'm actually going to use
quite a bit more thermal compound than I
normally would because there are these
large grooves that thermal compound can
settle into so if you have a flat
bottoms heatsink you wouldn't want to
use quite as much memory on the cameras
in the wake you wouldn't want to use
quite as much thermal grease as I'm
about to use so there we're going to
call that clean enough like I said this
is not necessarily the correct procedure
for any of the things that I'm doing but
this is kind of what I need to get
things done in a hurry in a mug camera
so that is like gobs more than I would
normally use alright so go ahead and
throw the heatsink on there there we are
then I have my little washers so in
terms of memory we haven't actually seen
any changes from that previous platform
LGA 1156 to the new one so I'll be using
my same kingston ddr3 2133 modules these
are their HyperX h2o modules these are
oh sorry pardon me ddr3 mm so these are
high performance modules whether you're
running them with the water cooling that
they do support or whether you're not
bothering doesn't really matter they'll
still perform really well and I'm just
going to carry those right over to the
new platform I'm going to be carrying
over my old power supply so that was
that's a cougar 80 plus silver power
supply with the funky snake looking
wiring
okay we have our heatsink installed now
I'm going to go ahead and plug this into
the CPU fan header knocked well fans are
not PWM enabled but that's okay because
they're quiet anyway so throw that on
there and then I'm using my noise
dampening mounts here to plug in here
and here in case you guys are ever
wondering how to mount a fan using these
noise dampening rubber mounts this is
how to do it just position them in place
then pull them all through and then your
fan will not make any vibration noises
against the heatsink I think they're
great I remember when they first came
came out it was like amazing it's like
wow we have a way to mount fans it
doesn't involve like bolting them
directly to things so that it's noisy
now like LGA 1156 you have to make sure
that you install the memory
in the first slots so hmm I'm actually
guessing on this board right now because
I haven't used this board yet although
it's labeled one two three four that
doesn't seem right because typically
what I've seen in the past can you see
those labels there yeah there you go
typically what I've seen in the past is
that the primary slots tend to be the
two that are a little bit further away
from the motherboard socket are from the
CPU socket in order to enable the use of
larger coolers that overhang tall memory
modules although it looks like we're not
going to run into any problems with this
configuration so I'm going to go ahead
and so if it doesn't post I'll know what
to try right away and I will take those
modules and I'll move them over to the
next slots over so I'm going to go ahead
and plug in my four pin CPU chapter over
here so that's one thing that hasn't
changed at all 24 pin 4 pin that's all
fine you can see at the back we have
some some new slots so instead of
running only two USB 3.0 ports on the
back panel we actually have two on the
back panel and two
on an internal header so that's one
change that will be made to my test
platform here I'm also going to be
changing the way I plug in my state a
cable for my DVD drive apparently
because this isn't going to reach to
where I had it plugged in before so
we've actually that's another thing
that's changed we've got to say two six
gigabit per second ports or rather two
banks four SATA 6 gigabits per second
ports and four SATA 3 gigabit per second
ports so I'm plugging that into a SATA 3
gigabit per second pour it on there and
actually here why don't we plug in here
I found another video card we're going
to plug in a GTX 580 so I had a 460 on
there before but we're going to go ahead
and throw the highest performance
graphics card I have on hand onto the
test platform for my upgrade and from
now on all the results I provide to you
guys will be using the LGA 1155 Sandy
Bridge platform versus the older LGA
1156 Linfield platform so find out what
kind of an overclock I could get it I'll
let you guys know and then we will go
from there
so my upgrade is complete that is how we
do a motherboard swap in however many
minutes or less there's our old board
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