We would like to thank the following companies for supplying and supporting us with our test system hardware and equipment: GIGABYTE, ASUS, Intel, Corsair and Sceptre.

The new 1155 socket CPUs are interesting to work with. Dropping them in, you can see a pretty healthy boost in performance over some of the existing CPUs right out of the gate. But then again, that is to be expected when you are looking at a new CPU design. In fact, we would be slamming Intel right now if there was no performance gain to be seen.

Of course, there is more to the story than just the CPUs. As we have talked about in early coverage of the new chipset, we are seeing a few nice features added into the P67 chipset. It is these in combination with the 1155 CPUs that are responsible for the performance increases. But, there are some draw backs.

Our test platform (the GIGABYTE P67-UD7) seemed a little immature as far as the BIOS went. We also noticed that we had memory issues when we ran our Corsair DDR3 memory at over 1.62 volts on many of the P67 boards we have in the lab. These are items that will be resolved in time with work on the BIOS' that control these boards. But for now, they are something to be aware of.

As for overclocking, we have already told you that we had to use the multiplier to get the speeds we did. We had to re-learn to overclock with these new CPUs. Thankfully, they are very easy to OC. After all, in a little less than 30 minutes per CPU we had them running at 4.7GHz. In all we hope to see some improvements on the platform to take advantage of the speed and performance potential of the Sandy Bridge CPUs.