iBUYPOWER: 4.0GHz QX9650 and 3-way SLI 8800 Ultras

Interior

Here are some shots of the interior.

This truly is a mammoth case. You can see there are even more case fans on the bottom beneath the video cards. The final tally is eleven: Four in the side panel, one in the front, two in the back, two on top, and two on the bottom. All are 120mm, and seven (side, front and back) are lit with blue LEDs. Despite the difficulty of routing that many power connectors, iBUYPOWER does an adequate job of keeping things neat with cable ties and lots of daisy chaining. Power to the video cards is reasonably neat as well.

Setup and Startup

First, let's look at the BIOS.

It's clear that iBUYPOWER put some thought into tweak the system. The CPU and memory voltages are higher than stock and the memory timings have been adjusted. The result is an overclocked 4.0GHz setup out of the box.

So what are we greeted with at first boot?

Gah! The desktop is relatively clear of icons, but 50 processes running at "clean" startup is very high. (For reference, a more typical starting point for Windows Vista is 30 to 35 running processes when running only the typical graphics and sound drivers.) It's counterproductive to tweak system hardware for maximum performance and then put forth no effort when it comes to trimming down the operating environment. This, by the way, is without an anti-virus suite, which did not come installed on the system.

The video card drivers were up-to-date at the time of shipping (169.25), and we installed updated 169.28 drivers before beginning our testing for this review. As the EVGA motherboard is nForce-based, we can see a wealth of information in the Control Panel.

Now let's move on to actual performance.

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