General Intel HEDT Xeon/i7 Discussion

[Zando_]

17 minutes ago, Vacras said:

Wow reading through this I realized that the x58 platform actually has a northbridge

(I feel so noob).

I'm more noob, I still have no idea what a Northbridge is.

[Vacras]

2 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

I'm more noob, I still have no idea what a Northbridge is.

Haha

just google it it’s not that hard to get a basic understanding of what it does

[NoxiousOdor]

If I had more that one EVGA SR-2 available would anyone be interested in buying one? I wouldn't charge out the nose like some other people do but they would still be slightly pricey 

[Zando_]

59 minutes ago, WhisperingKnickers said:

If I had more that one EVGA SR-2 available would anyone be interested in buying one? I wouldn't charge out the nose like some other people do but they would still be slightly pricey 

Me buy one! (But you already know that)

 

And for those who don't know, the EVGA SR-2 is basically the SR-71 Blackbird of mobos. Looks like it, has the same level of performance, and is almost as rare. 

[NoxiousOdor]

20 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Me buy one! (But you already know that)

 

And for those who don't know, the EVGA SR-2 is basically the SR-71 Blackbird of mobos. Looks like it, has the same level of performance, and is almost as rare. 

Additionally it is a dual socket board that allows overclocking of both xeons

[Zando_]

41 minutes ago, WhisperingKnickers said:

Additionally it is a dual socket board that allows overclocking of both xeons

Yep. Basically it is the best board ever EVGA should remake them and sell them so we can all get one.

[Ordinarily_Greater]

hi

[Đỗ Đức Huy]

Asus Z8D6 mobo are the best dual LGA 1336 mobo to build in. ATX foot print, single 8 pin EPS connector right next to the 24 pin ATX connector and SAS support. Me like

[Zando_]

15 hours ago, Ordinarily_Greater said:

hi

Howdy!

[Ordinarily_Greater]

3 hours ago, Zando Bob said:

Howdy!

so how is the thread going?

[Zando_]

5 hours ago, Ordinarily_Greater said:

so how is the thread going?

Pretty good. You still set on an X79 Xeon? You could always take a look round and see if X58 ones are cheaper. Also, X58 Xeons generally overclocl quite well, IDK about X79 ones. 

[Ordinarily_Greater]

21 hours ago, Zando Bob said:

Pretty good. You still set on an X79 Xeon? You could always take a look round and see if X58 ones are cheaper. Also, X58 Xeons generally overclocl quite well, IDK about X79 ones. 

yeah but i still like the X79 platform, i am searching for a good motherboard than my current one

[Ground]

22 hours ago, Zando Bob said:

Pretty good. You still set on an X79 Xeon? You could always take a look round and see if X58 ones are cheaper. Also, X58 Xeons generally overclocl quite well, IDK about X79 ones. 

 

 

 

X79 Xeons, except for the e5 16** (v2) versions, don't overclock more than a couple MHz. An x58 6 core at 4.4 GHz is roughly comparable to an e5 2660, but obviously, uses lots more power while at that. 

 

Placed a bid on 10 e5640s, doubt I'll get them for the 25€ I bid, but if I do that'll be an interesting weekend, as those should probably do ~4.8 GHz with my board. I think if I don't get them I'll probably order a single one some time next year just to have it - the e56** CPU with the highest multiplier.

[NoxiousOdor]

5 hours ago, Ordinarily_Greater said:

yeah but i still like the X79 platform, i am searching for a good motherboard than my current one

You could make the switch to the dark side x58 platform, I have a dual socket board for sale

[Zando_]

1 hour ago, WhisperingKnickers said:

You could make the switch to the dark side x58 platform, I have a dual socket board for sale

Come to the Dark Side, we have cookies more cores and can OC better.

 

(If you really need them, we can provide cookies as well...)

[Zando_]

On 10/21/2017 at 9:21 AM, Đỗ Đức Huy said:

Asus Z8D6 mobo are the best dual LGA 1336 mobo to build in. ATX foot print, single 8 pin EPS connector right next to the 24 pin ATX connector and SAS support. Me like

-snip-

How's the OC support? That looks like a pretty dope board. Dual socket as well?

[Đỗ Đức Huy]

8 hours ago, Zando Bob said:

How's the OC support? That looks like a pretty dope board. Dual socket as well?

Dual socket, not too sure about OC support since this is more of a server/workstation board

[Ground]

Hmm... I‘m tempted going on ebay again, there are currently 2x10 e5640s, the last pack of 10 went for 20.50€ - I bid 20 -.-

besides that there are also 2 triple channel packs of Corsair Dominator triple channel kits; those are probably a bit better than my current DIMMs, at least for OC...

Though if I wanna go any further on the BCLK I need to raise the PCIe beyond 110 which I‘m not too comfortable doing with a PCIe GPU. Might pick up a PCI GPU while I‘m at it...

[NoxiousOdor]

5 hours ago, Ground said:

Hmm... I‘m tempted going on ebay again, there are currently 2x10 e5640s, the last pack of 10 went for 20.50€ - I bid 20 -.-

besides that there are also 2 triple channel packs of Corsair Dominator triple channel kits; those are probably a bit better than my current DIMMs, at least for OC...

Though if I wanna go any further on the BCLK I need to raise the PCIe beyond 110 which I‘m not too comfortable doing with a PCIe GPU. Might pick up a PCI GPU while I‘m at it...

Hey, in the spirit of buying/selling I might be selling my evga SR-2

 

[Ground]

34 minutes ago, WhisperingKnickers said:

Hey, in the spirit of buying/selling I might be selling my evga SR-2

 

Haha, no way I could afford that  I‘m gonna stay single socket for now, just hoping for a couple good chips in that batch (if I get it, that is)

[NoxiousOdor]

1 hour ago, Ground said:

Haha, no way I could afford that  I‘m gonna stay single socket for now, just hoping for a couple good chips in that batch (if I get it, that is)

If you don't want to buy a ton of chips I have some for sale. I pretty much have some of everything for sale lol

[panther420]

Just discovered this thread. I love the x58 platform and the xeons that go with it, so I will probably hang around here a lot. I recently bought a Lenovo Thinkstation 1366 board off of ebay, turns out the connectors are proprietary and so is the cooling mounting so I sadly cannot get it working with the x5650 that I bought for it, however, I do plan to buy a gigabyte ex58 extreme from my local freegeek. I will give that to my sister, since I have a ryzen 5 system and do not need it. 

On 10/20/2017 at 2:28 PM, Zando Bob said:

Yep. Basically it is the best board ever EVGA should remake them and sell them so we can all get one.

Actually, there is hope for dual socket Xeon overclocking. Not sure if any of you watch Awesome Hardware, but they recently discussed on their livestream an Asus dual socket LGA 3647 board supporting Xeon Phi and Skylake-EP/EX processors with overclocking, very similar to the EVGA SR-2. 

https://wccftech.com/asus-ws-c621e-sage-dual-xeon-workstation-motherboard/

Very exciting to see boards like the SR-2 making a comeback. Also it sucks that EVGA got rid of the overclocking for the subsequent SR-X for lga 2011, would have been nice.

On 10/20/2017 at 9:41 AM, Zando Bob said:

I'm more noob, I still have no idea what a Northbridge is.

The northbridge in the traditional sense was a chipset usually slightly below the cpu with a big heatsink on it. The last platform to use a *normal* northbridge was LGA 775 for intel (assuming intel chipsets, nvidia's nforces worked a *little* differently), and am3+ on the AMD side. Before Athlon 64 for AMD, the northbridge typically housed the pci(e) and agp as well as memory controller, part of the reason it required heavy cooling. Same for intel leading up to the LGA 775 platform, where the memory controller was moved on to the die like the Athlon 64. So for the aforementioned final platforms to utilize northrbridges would usually just have PCIe controllers and a DMI link to the southbridge, basically the thing that "handled the rest of the crap."

 

Now, the x58 platform is a little weird in terms of chipset topology, or whatever words you want to use to describe the layout of most motherboards. X58 and the i7 processors introduced with it brought along QPI, which linked the processor to the northbridge instead of the traditional FSB interfaced used from the Pentium 4 days up (maybe pentium 3, I forget). QPI also linked two processors together in a dual socket system, and still does. The thing that makes X58 (and intel server 5520/5560 chipsets) is that they were the only platforms to expose the qpi (excluding dual socket) on the motherboard. Nowadays, since the LGA 1156 platform, the QPI is only used for dual socket and to communicate between the core and the "uncore" (memory controllers, pcie controllers n' stuff.) So, to summarize, the traditional northrbridge on X58 was actually what intel called the I/O hub, and it housed the pcie controller. That's pretty much it for the IOH. The IOH was connected to the CPU via a QPI link, the speed of which could be changed in the bios, and was connected to the southbridge via a DMI link, which existed for a while. Intel had been calling the southbridge the I/O *Controller* Hub for a while, making things even more confusing in the case of X58. The ICH handled "all the other crap" like southrbridges tend to do.

 

Still confused? I know I was for a while. Wikipedia and block diagrams are your friend, they explain it better than I do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_X58

[NoxiousOdor]

19 minutes ago, panther420 said:

Just discovered this thread. I love the x58 platform and the xeons that go with it, so I will probably hang around here a lot. I recently bought a Lenovo Thinkstation 1366 board off of ebay, turns out the connectors are proprietary and so is the cooling mounting so I sadly cannot get it working with the x5650 that I bought for it, however, I do plan to buy a gigabyte ex58 extreme from my local freegeek. I will give that to my sister, since I have a ryzen 5 system and do not need it. 

Actually, there is hope for dual socket Xeon overclocking. Not sure if any of you watch Awesome Hardware, but they recently discussed on their livestream an Asus dual socket LGA 3647 board supporting Xeon Phi and Skylake-EP/EX processors with overclocking, very similar to the EVGA SR-2. 

https://wccftech.com/asus-ws-c621e-sage-dual-xeon-workstation-motherboard/

Very exciting to see boards like the SR-2 making a comeback. Also it sucks that EVGA got rid of the overclocking for the subsequent SR-X for lga 2011, would have been nice.

The northbridge in the traditional sense was a chipset usually slightly below the cpu with a big heatsink on it. The last platform to use a *normal* northbridge was LGA 775 for intel (assuming intel chipsets, nvidia's nforces worked a *little* differently), and am3+ on the AMD side. Before Athlon 64 for AMD, the northbridge typically housed the pci(e) and agp as well as memory controller, part of the reason it required heavy cooling. Same for intel leading up to the LGA 775 platform, where the memory controller was moved on to the die like the Athlon 64. So for the aforementioned final platforms to utilize northrbridges would usually just have PCIe controllers and a DMI link to the southbridge, basically the thing that "handled the rest of the crap."

 

Now, the x58 platform is a little weird in terms of chipset topology, or whatever words you want to use to describe the layout of most motherboards. X58 and the i7 processors introduced with it brought along QPI, which linked the processor to the northbridge instead of the traditional FSB interfaced used from the Pentium 4 days up (maybe pentium 3, I forget). QPI also linked two processors together in a dual socket system, and still does. The thing that makes X58 (and intel server 5520/5560 chipsets) is that they were the only platforms to expose the qpi (excluding dual socket) on the motherboard. Nowadays, since the LGA 1156 platform, the QPI is only used for dual socket and to communicate between the core and the "uncore" (memory controllers, pcie controllers n' stuff.) So, to summarize, the traditional northrbridge on X58 was actually what intel called the I/O hub, and it housed the pcie controller. That's pretty much it for the IOH. The IOH was connected to the CPU via a QPI link, the speed of which could be changed in the bios, and was connected to the southbridge via a DMI link, which existed for a while. Intel had been calling the southbridge the I/O *Controller* Hub for a while, making things even more confusing in the case of X58. The ICH handled "all the other crap" like southrbridges tend to do.

 

Still confused? I know I was for a while. Wikipedia and block diagrams are your friend, they explain it better than I do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_X58

Welcome to the club! Thanks for the info and that is really exciting if the do release more dual socket boards that allow overclocking. I am looking forward to seeing that. I have the SR-2 though I Don't think I will keep it. It is cool but I don't really need it though I would like to consider using one or similar in the future

[panther420]

Just now, WhisperingKnickers said:

Welcome to the club! Thanks for the info and that is really exciting if the do release more dual socket boards that allow overclocking. I am looking forward to seeing that. I have the SR-2 though I Don't think I will keep it. It is cool but I don't really need it though I would like to consider using one or similar in the future

Thank you! I appreciate it.

 

On the SR-2, if you want to make a quick buck (I say quick buck, it's more like quick $500+ bucks), sell it on ebay. Even if you sell it for $500, people will think it's a STEAL, as most of the other people are selling it for $1000+ (and there's only like one or two people who even have it). That's enough money to buy a full Ryzen 7 + motherboard + ram combo, or maybe even a high end X299/X399 motherboard if that's more your thing. Good luck with your selling. Only thing I would recommend is that you do not sell it for under $350, you are really losing money in that case, as it is much more valuable than that.

[NoxiousOdor]

3 minutes ago, panther420 said:

Thank you! I appreciate it.

 

On the SR-2, if you want to make a quick buck (I say quick buck, it's more like quick $500+ bucks), sell it on ebay. Even if you sell it for $500, people will think it's a STEAL, as most of the other people are selling it for $1000+ (and there's only like one or two people who even have it). That's enough money to buy a full Ryzen 7 + motherboard + ram combo, or maybe even a high end X299/X399 motherboard if that's more your thing. Good luck with your selling. Only thing I would recommend is that you do not sell it for under $350, you are really losing money in that case, as it is much more valuable than that.

In your opinion should I include anything with it? It came with two heat sinks that didnt even mount properly and it came with two E5645s. I have other xeons I could exchange them with though