Excellent card perfect for your Z68 board
Pros: Fast. 8 threads. High stock clocks. LOW temps
Cons: Retail price compared to FX 8350 kind of sucks
ON STOCK settings IDLE temps are around low 20s and Highest temp was 53 on one core. others were around 50C. This is all done with a 212 EVO cooler, forgot to mention I polished the surface of the cooler as well.
Have not tried overclocking as I dont trust my "cheap($130)" Gigabyte mobo. Other than that gaming has been a joy. If you are no fan of overclocking this is a very good cpu to have. Compared to 2500k you will not notice much difference but loading is quicker in some instances and cpu heavy games and applications take advantage of the extra threads very well. For now I do not think we need to grade microprocessors all that much. With the development of FPGA chips and Graphics chips, microprocessors wont live to see the light of the day for much longer (unless of course Intel Monopoly). This cpu is a great daily driver and I have a core i3 sandy bridge laptop and switching from 4 "low power" threads to 8 "SUPER THREADS" is really amazing. I will post the temp benches soon enough when I get my gpu in order and replace the thermal paste with something better than arctic silver(temps went bad all of a sudden).























