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

When it comes to the testbed side of things there's nothing that out of the ordinary as we haven't changed our main components that round out our testbed. The only difference is now we're using the Ivy Bridge based i7 3770k in all our LGA 1155 based motherboards here on out.

Before we get into the performance side of things, though, we need to see what's going on at the overclocking front. Not all that happy with what our Intel 3770k was capable of, I swapped it out for one of our earlier chips we obtained.

In our original Intel i7 3770k launch review we managed an overclock of 4.59GHz on that chip using this board. Looking below, though, you can see we managed to run a bit higher with our other 3770k CPU that we had handy.

We ended up running at 4.74GHz via a 46x multiplier and 103 BCLK. This is of course a stronger overclock than our other chip which was supplied to us directly by Intel, but still far off from the 5GHz+ clocks we were able to achieve on our 2600k chips.

Still this should yield with it some nice performance gains over the reference clock speeds and we'll find out in just a moment the kind of performance boost we're able to get.

Let's get started!