Testing and benchmarking

So what does this all mean in terms of performance for us? Well, let me show you a couple of benchmarks.

Queen

Here we see the processor solving the queen (chess) dilemma. I've simply inserted all common processors on modern motherboards. And then in red our Core i7 965 at default, and the two additional overclocked modes.

Mind you that we are looking purely at CPU performance here, not overall system performance. The results with overclocks like these are always astonishing. So never underestimate the importance of cooling if you plan to overclock. On a regular air-cooler even 3600 MHz would be a hard thing to accomplish.

Dhrystone

We make use of a multi-threaded Dhrystone test from SiSoftware Sandra, which is basically a suite of arithmetic and string manipulating programs. Again we see overclocking scaling that is insane.

3DMark Vantage

Some hate it, some love it, here are the 3DMark Vantage score results. We start off with the standard test run, above you can observe the P (performance) score. The results are all done with an eVGA GeForce GTX 285 graphics card. As you can see, the CPU matters only so much. Judging from the CPU score (performance test mode) we gain heaps and heaps of power.

The GPU score of course remains the same. But when you combine everything and look at the overall P score and then compare in-between 3300 MHz and the 4.0 GHz overclock, the difference really is 400 points :)

Everything is relative you guys. Alright, I think it's the first time ever that a website used benchmarks in a CPU liquid cooling block review, but sure, I am weird that way :) Anyhow, it's time to move onwards to the conclusion.