The Testbed Setup

As we just mentioned, the main components used here today include the Sapphire Pure Platinum A75, AMD A8-3850 and G.Skill Flare kit. The exact model of the Flare kit is F3-16000CL7D-4GBFLS. The bad news is that you can't get this kit anymore. The CL7 2000MHz DDR kit was on a really limited run and it's just impossible to get unless you hit up the second hand market. You can still buy the Flare series from NewEgg, but the current 2000MHz DDR kit listed at $89.99 US follows a 9-9-9-24 setup. It would still be a great kit, but don't expect to see the kind of speeds we're going to achieve today.

Of course, we use a lot of other quality components today that make this overclock possible and they include the amazing AX1200 PSU from Corsair. The AX series of PSUs from Corsair are just simply fantastic. If anyone ever asks me what kind of power supply they should be buying, I won't hesitate to say the highest end AX series PSU you can afford.

The next big important piece to the overclocking puzzle is of course our CPU cooling and that includes the Corsair H60 All-in-One water cooling kit. This is also another great piece of equipment from Corsair and since testing the P67 / Z68 platform, it's helped us achieve some amazing speeds.

On the video card front we have our Sapphire HD 6970. To be honest, though we didn't use it much today and at one point pulled it out and just used the onboard video to see if it helped us achieve a higher overclock. We've also got our Kingston SATA II 120GB SSD and everything fits nicely in our Lian-Li PC-T60 TestBench case.