Xeon performance

[artantaaa]

The board arrived, and it detected the X3440 without even updating the bios. It's working pretty well, but I didn't get much of an increase in Dolphin performance compared to the E8400. I overclocked the X3440 to 3.6Ghz and if it's going any faster than the E8400@3.6Ghz, I can't tell. I got a used arctic freezer 7 and it keeps the temperature around 50c while running dolphin. Prime95 on all 4 cores gets it hotter though, like 70c. The ram is awfully close to the cpu cooler, and I had to slide the fan bracket upwards to clear it. Hopefully when I get a thinner fan that can blow on the entire cooler, the temperature will come down a bit. Right now the fan sticks up above it. Overclocking this new cpu is completely different than the old one, so perhaps I'm not doing something right, but it seems that the performance per core is the same for both cpus. Not that I'm complaining about that, because now I have twice as many cores. I can record dolphin without any slowdown, and do all sorts of things I couldn't do before. The one thing I will complain about is that the built in Realtek ethernet needs firmware to work, which is difficult to download without an ethernet controller. It has to be loaded every time it boots too, and that adds a few seconds. I'll just put in a pci ethernet card and turn that thing off though. I think this thing will keep me happy for a while.