Intel X25-M 120GB SSD Review

Thanksgiving is right around the corner and most of us are probably getting out our Black Friday lists and hoping that the electronics we want become really cheap. For most tech upgrades you can already see Newegg and Tiger Direct advertise November sales even before Black Friday as well. Well if you are still running a regular hard drive in your system and are too cheap to upgrade to an SSD. We have a great product that will allow you to upgrade your PC and not break your bank.

The Intel X25-M 120GB SSD is one of the older Solid State Drives but it still packs a lot of performance with a good amount extra space as well. And as always with SSDs, your computer will turn on much faster and applications will load faster even if they are installed your secondary hard drive. Unlike the Kingston KC100 SSDNow we reviewed previously, the Intel X25-M 120GB SSD is geared towards average consumers and will not cost that much. Now let’s take a look and see what comes inside the box with this great product from Intel.

Package Contents

• Intel X25-M 120GB SSD
• 2.5’’ USB Enclosure
• 3.5’’ Brackets and Mounting Screws
• SATA Power and Data Cable
• Intel SATA Solid State Drive Warranty and Installation Guide CD
• Speed Demon Sticker

f you have purchased an SSD or did your homework on them, you’ll know they pretty much look all the same. A 2.5’’ form factor with 3.5’’ brackets and SATA connectors to connect it to your motherboard. The nice attribute that first gen SSDs have is that since the transfer rates aren’t as high as the newer ones, you can still install it into your SATA 3Gb/s port or Marvell port and it will run fine. While running a Kingston KC100 SSDNow or HyperX will have a limiting transfer speed compared to its full potential.

It also comes with an Intel SSD Toolbox with Intel SSD Optimizer which provides a set of applications to easily manage the health and optimize the performance of your Intel SSD. The toolbox includes a powerful set of management tools, information, and diagnostic tools. The Intel SSD Optimizer utilizes the new ATA Data Set Management Command (Trim Attribute) to help maintain your SSDs performance and extended use of the drive. This will help it retain its out of the box speeds even after months of use.

X25-M Performance

Now it comes to the big question for SSDs, is it worth my hard earned money upgrading my old computer with an SSD drive. In my opinion it’s a definitely going to be a great increase in performance in any computer your install it in whether it becomes a boot drive in a desktop or just replaces your old hard drive in your laptop. Your computer will definitely turn on much faster and load applications quicker. Solid State Drives also have Trim which allows them to retain their disk space even after extended use. Just make sure you don’t go defragging your SSD because this will actually lower the amount of space in your SSD.

As you can see in the performance charts, this drive just completely obliterates the Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive in transfer speeds and boot time. Of course SSDs are optimized for this types of situations but it’s definitely an amazing upgrade when you experience it in person. Just watching your computer turn on and be usable in 30 seconds or less is pretty sweet. And you can also see that even though the Kingston KC100 SSDNow has a much faster transfer speed, it had around the same amount of boot time as the Intel X25-M SSD. This would benefit many people that just want to purchase a SSD for a boot drive in order to turn on their computer faster without having to spend a lot of money to do it.

I would definitely recommend only installing your OS on the hard drive because 120GB is still not much space to play around with. After installing Windows 7 Ultimate and updating all the drives I only had about 75 GB left of free space. And overtime as there are more updates it will get smaller so it’s not good to overload the boot drive with unnecessary applications. However, if you plan to install the select few programs that you want to load faster, you will see a great improvement of speed. Whether it’s on the SSD or being loaded from the extra hard drive, the boot up time for applications is increased regardless. I think that’s definitely another great reason SSDs are a great way to upgrade your computer.

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AMD 8 core 8120 FX Processor Review

This is the much anticipated 8 core processor from AMD. This thing has been delayed more than a Tom Cruise movie. Despite AMD’s best efforts there have been quite a few “leaked” benchmarks and reviews regarding its performance. We are going to see if this new chip is worth the hype or if it falls flat on its face. The stage for this epic battle has been set for quite some time and Intel has been the reigning performance champ for many years now.

Gone are the glory days of the AMD Athlon 64 that completely trounced the Intel Pentium. This is AMD’s chance to take the crown back and show how they’ve used this time to come up with a processor that can finally dominate the performance market again.

This processor is based on the all new Zambezi architecture that features their new 32 nm manufacturing process. These processors have an amazing 16MBs of cache. That comes to eight Megs of level 3 cache and eight Megs of level 2 cache. This sounds pretty impressive, but it will depend on how the cache is accessed by the processing unit to boost performance.

These processors also use the new AM3+ socket that is featured on AMD’s new 9 series chipset motherboards. These boards have been out for a while now and have shown to not have much of a performance boost over the previous 8 series chipset. With the new chipset you essentially get an increase of memory frequency and size support along with NVIDIA’s SLI support. Aside from these additions to the chipset they really aren’t much different from the 8 series.


AMD’s main feature that sets these processors apart it is that they now have a full set of 8 processing cores. This makes these the first commercially available 8 core desktop processors. This is no small feat for a company like AMD. AMD has been the go to brand for entry to mainstream level processors. With Intel now starting to really make headway in this market, AMD needs to step up their game and prove that they can still compete at the higher end of the spectrum. That is exactly what these processors are meant to do. This is why AMD has always made their latest chipsets backwards compatible with their previous socket of processors. AMD customers have come to expect this from their AMD chipsets and their new 9 series is no different.



8120 FX Performance

Testing Methodology

To test this new processor we paired it with a new ECS A990FXM-A motherboard with the latest BIOS update to support this new 8 core processor. We also paired it with an XFX AMD Radeon 6950 video card and four gigs of Kingston DDR3 1333 memory. We used a Western Digital 2 Terabyte Caviar Black SATA 3 hard drive and a Silverstone 1000 watt modular power supply to power it all.

With that being said we also used Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit and several benchmarking utilities to put through the gauntlet. PC Mark 7 is a great benchmark for giving an overall system score and stresses every major component of the system. 3D Mark 11 is a great graphical benchmark that also has physics built into it to stress the processor. We use Cinebench and SiSoft Sandra to target the CPU specifically. This is where we get to see how well the processor is able to really handle stressful applications.

Benchmarks

Well where do I start? This has been one of the most underwhelming products that we’ve had here in quite some time. When you take into account the amount of hype that AMD produced for this new processor you almost had to expect it to perform well. This is sadly not the case.

In nearly every benchmark that we ran the Intel i5 2500k was able to beat this new processor. You have to remember that both of these units are available for roughly the same price. This makes AMD look really bad at this point and you have to wonder what the heck they were doing when they were delaying the launch. There was some news in the early part of the summer that this processor just didn’t have the power to live up to its hype. This processor though doesn’t even outperform their previous chips. We’ve ran many tests using their Phenom II x6 1090T and this new processor can’t even compete with it. I really don’t have the words to convey my disappointment.

We really did have high hopes for this new architecture. Without competition Intel really doesn’t have a reason to continue to push the envelope. AMD is the company that is supposed to provide that competition and they fall really short of the mark with their new Zambezi processors. This processor isn’t the 8150 that we would have liked to have tested, but this processor should at least compete with the i5 2500k for the price that they are asking for it. There is just no way that this processor is able to do that. In the Prime 95 test that we ran the Bulldozer was able to stay cooler than the i5, but I’d like to believe that this is probably an anomaly in the way that Prime 95 was utilized by the AMD processor. The reason I feel this way is because we did see higher temperatures on the Bulldozer when we ran other tests.

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Biostar X79 TPower Motherboard Review

Today we are going to be taking a look at Biostar's X79 TPower motherboard. This board supports the latest Intel 2011 processors and also features their latest X79 chipset. Biostar has earned a well-deserved reputation for producing very powerful products that come with a very reasonable price tag. This board shouldn't be any different. It currently retails for about $230 dollars. This puts it in the lower range of pricing for a board like this and it's actually one of the cheapest options for this new chipset from Intel at the moment.

For those that want a detailed analysis of what this new chipset has in store, please read the previous reviews that we've written on other boards of this type here on this website. This new chipset is meant as a replacement for the venerable X58 chipset that was extremely popular with the enthusiast community. It offers several enhancements over the previous generation that include support for Intel's latest 2011 processors and PCIe 3.0. With that being said, let's now have a look at this new board from Biostar and see what they've done to enhance Intel's design.

When you first get this board out of the box, the first thing that you'll notice is that this board is very well laid out. It has a somewhat more basic design than some other boards. It only has four DDR3 memory slots where many of the other X79 boards have all eight. One thing that does stand out though is that this board has two 8 pin CPU power headers. This should supply ample power for overclocking. This is something that will help to put this board near the enthusiast level in terms of performance.

his board also features all X. D. C. solid capacitors and two ounces of copper in the PCB. It also has a 9 phase power design and support for 3-Way graphics. This board also features THX audio support through the Realtek ALC 898 audio codec. These features are usually only featured on enthusiast level boards and this shows that Biostar is committed to providing the very best features at an affordable price. For this board to have these kinds of features is just amazing and should help to make this a very popular board for those that are looking to get in on the new 2011 platform.

Biostar has also added support for their new GUI BIOS interface. This is one of the easiest of this type of BIOS to use that we've seen so far. It isn't the flashiest that we've seen, but it sure is one of the easiest to navigate. Everything is laid in tabs at the top of the screen. Just pick the item that you want to adjust and make your adjustments. Your mouse is fully enabled through this BIOS and this sure does make using it and adjusting your settings so much easier than it used to be. This is a TPower board and therefore is geared for overclocking. This will make pushing your hardware through voltage tweaks and clock adjustments very simple to do. These are the kinds of features that help to set a board like this apart from the competition.

Right on the board itself are the power, reset and clear CMOS buttons. These are also located near a post LED that will allow you to troubleshoot boot errors by using the codes from the user's manual. to have these buttons and the post LED is just another sign of how Biostar is trying to show their dedication to the enthusiast community. These features are incredibly helpful to those that are really trying to get the most out of their hardware. This board also has three SATA 2.0 and two SATA 3.0 connectors that are provided by the Intel 2011 chipset. There are also two SATA 3.0 connectors provided by an ASMedia controller. These fully support AHCI and RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10.  There are also two USB 2.0 headers and one USB 3.0 header for all of your connected devices. On the rear I/O there are two USB 2.0 ports and six USB 3.0 ports, along with your standard 7.1 audio ports. There is also an optical coaxial port, an eSATA port,  a LAN port, and a single PS/2 port. This board actually has the highest amount of available USB 3.0 ports that we've seen so far on the rear I/O panel.

Biostar has also included support for some of their best of their best software and hardware based features. These include a 90 day free trial of BullGuard Antivirus and Internet Security software. It also comes with support for their BIO-Flasher software to make BIOS updates and flashing easier. BIO-ReLife is also included to help to recover a crashed BIOS. There is also support for Biostar's BIO-Remote 2 technology that allows users to access and control their PC remotely from either an Android or Apple based device. This is great if you're planning to use this board for a home theater type of setup. There is also support for Charger Booster that has the ability to charge your connected Apple devices up to 42% faster. There is also support for Biostar's Puro Tone 110dB lossless HD playback. This is one of the very best audio reproduction technologies for HD audio quality. As you can see Biostar has put a lot of effort into making this board as feature-rich as it could possibly be.

X79 TPower Performance

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