Intel Z68 Sandy Bridge As It Was Meant To Be

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Intel Z68 - Sandy Bridge As It Was Meant To Be

At the beginning of 2011 Intel introduced their 2nd generation Core family of processors and associated chipsets known as “Sandy Bridge”. This technology has been remarkable in terms of processing power and value. Marketing as a mid level processor the Core i7 2600K can beat all other Quad and many Hex Core processors in almost every performance test. On reviewing our Sandy Bridge based system, the Nimbus, Martin Walker from Sound On Sound magazine said “..this machine is simply stunning, beating the 980X Extreme at all but the lowest, 32-sample, buffer size. I can now see why there’s been so much fuss about Sandy Bridge”. Subsequently our Sandy Bridge Nimbus has been our best selling system to date.

But Intel was holding something back. There are two key elements in the Sandy Bridge technology – Turbo Boost unlocking and integrated HD video but the chipsets around which motherboards are built seem to only cater for one or the other. The H67 chipset utilised the integrated graphics but didn’t allow for unlocking the Turbo Boost, whereas the P67 chipset gave you masses of unlocked power but prevented access to the integrated video. The unlocked potential of the P67 chipset formed the basis of our Nimbus system with great success but it seemed a shame that there was all that video technology going to waste. Not any more. The new Z68 chipset gives us both the unlocked performance and access to the integrated video in new and interesting ways - and a bit more.

Unlocked Turbo Boost

As with the P67 chipset the Z68 lets us increase the Turbo Boost potential taking the processor speed safely into 4GHz and beyond when under load. This is dependent on using a Core processor with the “K” suffix; the i5 2500K and the i7 2600K are the ones for the job. To allow for the higher speeds all sorts of other adjustments are needed in terms of voltages and speeds of other components. It takes a careful balance of settings to achieve a stable overclock and more than adequate cooling. Get it wrong and it could result in the system crashing unexpectedly or failing to boot. We work on a relatively conservative overclock of 4.3GHz-4.4GHz to ensure absolute stability with startling performance.

Integrated HD Video

2nd generation Sandy Bridge Core processors have either HD2000 or HD3000 (K series only) integrated graphics. This is equivalent to any half decent entry level video card, just like the sort of cards we would have included with our earlier Nimbus models. But there’s more than that on offer. Intel’s Quick Sync video technology works exclusively on the transcoding of video and media files rendering up to 2.5 times faster than the last generation of processors. This was already available with the H67 chipset. The Z68 chipset allows for something quite clever. Normally with integrated graphics on a motherboard if you add a discrete video card the integrated side is ignored – with the Z68 you can continue using both. What this means is that you don’t lose the Quick Sync technology when you plug in a workstation video card. The magic is handled by Lucid’s Virtu GPU Virtualisation software which “will dynamically balance the advanced power-efficient, built-in media features of Intel Core processor graphics with the high-end, DirectX 11 3D, anti-aliasing and performance features of discrete GPUs, while significantly reducing the power drain of traditional entertainment desktops”

Side Caching SSD’s

There’s another technology that’s less talked about but becoming increasingly cool as prices of SSD drives are getting more reasonable. Side caching is where you can add a small, super fast SSD drive, up to 60GB, which acts as a dynamic cache for the main regular SATA system drive. The result is that your system gains much of the performance advantages of running on a SSD drive without the expensive of fitting it all on a large one. Boot times are faster, regularly launched programs get cached and so launch much quicker next time, overall the system appears nippier and snappier to use. It uses RAID technology and Intel’s Fast Response management software and is an option worth considering when looking at our Nimbus Z.

This block diagram shows the interconnectivity of the Z68 chipset.

The Nimbus Z

Housed in this excellent chassis from NZXT the Nimbus Z is a handsome beast. In use the Z68 platform is perfect for the ambitious manipulator of sounds. The side chained SSD makes it feel so nippy, so eager to get on with job. The unlocked processor, particularly the i7 2600K, lets your projects stretch out much further and deeper than any previous system. There’s bags of headroom so you can unfreeze those tracks and work more efficiently and effectively. The 2600K also includes the HD 3000 graphics (also in the 2500K) which really are stunning. More than enough for multimedia applications, BluRay playback and even 3D gaming. It’s all cooled and kept super stable by a CPU watercooler and some large diameter, slow moving fans meaning that noise is rarely an issue. Martin Walker from Sound On Sound remarks on the original Sandy Bridge which had the same cooling system “I was impressed with the low noise of this water cooled system... This system has also been finely tuned: idling temperatures sat at a conservative 35 degrees Celsius, but no CPU core temperature rose higher than 60 degrees during my 100 percent CPU torture tests.”

Z68 – Worth waiting for?

Although there are no revolutionary gains to had over the P67 Sandy Bridge chipset the Z68 does bring some nice features to the table which brilliantly compliment the existing performance of the processors. It should have been there from the beginning really, but now it’s here, there’s no looking back.