But first!  Some BIOS screens.  The ASUS Rampage II is a super easy motherboard to use, even though it's crammed with a lot of features. The Republic Of Gamers (ROG) did good, real good. To overclock the easy way, it's really just a single setting, and the BIOS does the rest.

Now, this is just a brainless overclock.  The Neptune came clocked at 3.9GHz, which ran great, but then it refused to boot a few times.  I emailed SmoothCreations and notified them.  Their answer: just set it to Crazy--can't miss it.  After setting it to Crazy, it booted fine.  I am used to dealing with soundcards here at Guru3D, so, I'm dumb as a sea cucumber when it comes to overclocking.  You could get a lot more out of the Core i7 965 CPU with the Rampage II if you spent some time tweaking.

Since I'm not a very adept overclocker, I pretty much tested the Neptune at this speed.  The RAM is ready and willing, but the Rampage II settled on running the RAM at 616MHz, at 4-8-8-20 timing.  The Corsairs will also do 8-8-8-24 at 800MHz (1600 MHz) or anything up-to roughly 2000 MHz really.  So, there's just a lot of headroom left in the system. Whatever floats your proverbial boat will work out fine for you.

Here's the CPU-Z (1.50) for the OC:

And the memory settings:

Good stuff.  For DDR3, that's really pretty good. Of course you can go extremely high on frequency with higher latency timings as well, flexibility is key here and you can tweak to infinity (well .. and beyond really).

SmoothCreations installed 64-bit Vista Ultimate on the Neptune.  This machine should run nothing less.

I'm sure this will surprise you, but here's the ever present Windows Experience Index.  Nothing but 5.9's for the Neptune.  I mean, golly, that Vista sure is tough on hardware. 

Here's a tribute shot of the Task Manager.  It's good to see all these cores. 

So the Neptune is crazy fast in 64-bit Vista.  In fact, it was downright scary.  Open a window, it's there.  Open a program, bang, it's there.  Installing software?  Done.  Zipping, unzipping--done.  The Neptune ripped my Bluegrass CD, a long 1 hour 13 minute CD, to 768kbps FLAC in 8 minutes and 22 seconds.  This takes about 20 minutes on my home machine, a Q6600 using an identical CDROM drive. 

The encoding to FLAC took less time than the DOS window to pop up and fade away.  Another test I ran was to render a 1hour 24minute 720p movie to MPEG2.  The Neptune accomplished this feat in about 15 minutes.  The same Q6600 takes about 40 minutes, more than 2x slower.

Now for something really fun.  What do you do with 12GB of RAM?  Let's try world domination.  Since the Core i7 is a 'workstation' chip (the Core i5 will be the 'desktop' chip), it has built-in features for virtualization.  I used VirtualBox and started 8 instances of Windows 7.  The Neptune kept on chugging, even though it was nearly out of memory.  As they say, post a picture, or it didn't happen:

That's pretty sick.  8 VM boxes, each with 1GB of memory and 20GB of disk space.  The Neptune hovered around 30% CPU and 11.7GB of memory used.  This really makes a case for having as much memory as you can afford in your next build.  Or at least reconsider that blade server, which would cost more than twice as much!

That's it for the system part.  Whew.  Glad you made it this far.  Recap: The Neptune is a fucking godly machine.  I apologize to our younger audience.  Let's see how it fares in the benchmarks.