General Intel HEDT Xeon/i7 Discussion

[Zando_]

9 minutes ago, vinyldash303 said:

I just watched the old NCIX tech tips video on X58 overclocking video and..... hoooooo boy its nothing like x68 or x79. This is going to be a cliff of a learning curve. Right now I've got a 6 heat pipe 92mm heatsink on it with a high rpm ball bearing fan of some sort. This whole system as is save for the power supply came out of a medical computer and I've put no money into the build so far. This weekend I'm pulling a case I got in a bundle out of storage, and I have an EVGA 750 watt power supply for it.

 

Quick googling will show that a 970 will work with latest BIOS- so thats what I'm going to take care of tonight, and then I'll order either the w3690 or the i7 970 after the bios is up to date.

 

I'll get the xeon if they overclock just the same as the i7s do. How far do I want to push it? On the 970 if that's what I get I'd like to do 3.8 or 4 Ghz, on W3690 I'd like to do 4.3

 

The W3690 is about $90 on ebay and the i7 970 is about the same but as far as I can tell the W3690 is an i7 990X with a different sticker- so if the xeons aren't locked down in any way for overclocking I'd much rather get the xeon.

Yep, I don't know of a single X58 Xeon that's locked. If your board supports dual QPI link CPUs, go for an X5675. Those are usually the best binned 6c/12t Xeons, along with the X5890 but that's usually overpriced. They're usually slightly better binned i7s with different base clock speeds and multipliers. If you get something like an X5650 with a lower multiplier you have to rely more on the BLCK to up clocks, vice versa for ones with higher multipliers. I forget the multiplier on the X5650, IIRC mine maxed at 20 or something, my i7 950 and higher clocked Xeons go to 23 or so, then you up the BLCK and such for moar GHz. X5675 is pretty much the best price/performance CPU you can get. the W3670 should be a good choice too if your board doesn't support dual-QPI Xeons (X and E ones), the W ones are literally just i7s but usually cheaper. I got mine for $40, so not that bad at all. Can't wait to see how it OCs tonight. 

[Zando_]

4 minutes ago, vinyldash303 said:

Good to know. Googleing around doesn't seem to show the X series xeons as supported for this motherboard so I'm probably going to get a W3690

Bois seem to run X series Xeons on them: 

https://www.overclock.net/forum/5-intel-cpus/1635374-overclocking-help-xeon-x5660-msi-x58-pro-e-mobo.html

 

Though apparently they don't OC as well as the E series ones, IDK about the Ws but they're just an i7 branded as a Xeon so I assume they'd OC the same as any 6 core i7. 

[bimmerman]

6 hours ago, Dreadnought IX said:

I found this combo, Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R + i7 930 for $100. I'm planning to swap the cpu to Xeon X5650/5670/5675, and OC it to 4+GHz. Is it a good mobo for overclocking?

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-X58A-UD3R-rev-20#ov

Yep. I have that board with an X5675 and have gotten 4.7ghz stable on an AIO liquid cooler (i.e., no custom loop).

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 hour ago, vinyldash303 said:

Oddly enough it came out of a medical computer but I won’t be elaborating on that any further.

Stealing from hospitals?

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, vinyldash303 said:

@Crunchy Dragon What I will say is that this computer led a very VERY interesting life before I yoinked it. What it was being used for was automated CAD/CAM. Needless to say its woefully underpowered for what it was doing. The company that sells the whole ecosystem designed them to go by model year and not by actual specs, which is fine, but the previous systems were i7 920s and 250GTS's and holy balls. If THIS computer was as slow as it was for the software they were running I don't even want to know how it was on the 250 GTS and the 920, let alone the model before that one with the Core 2 Quad and 8800 GTS. AFAIK last I checked the current systems that company was pumping out are X99 and have a Vega 56. much much faster.

I have a GTS 250, I wouldn't dare run anything more than a display off of it in this day and age.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, vinyldash303 said:

Part of me wants to leave the 450 GTS in it and the other part of me wants to put a 290X I have sitting around in it. 

I'd roll with the 290X personally.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, vinyldash303 said:

That's what I'm thinking. I like blower style cards better anyway.

Agreed.

 

Although most of AMD's blower cards don't look that good...

[Zando_]

AMD's Vega 64 Limited Edition, and Vega Frontier Edition coolers are some of the nicest I've ever seen though. I had a Vega FE before, freaking gorgeous. @Troika has it now, I have a Radeon VII (using my 1080 Ti rn though since the assassin's creed games crash with my RVII for some reason, will move the RVII back once I finish my custom open air build). 

[Zando_]

Just now, vinyldash303 said:

I was running a 580 SLI system for a while open air and loved it. Had custom bios all done up. If I had more space in my room I'd ne very tempted to do 580 sli again with this X58 system. Would be nice.

oooo that'd be nice. I'd love to SLI some classic cards on a rig that's not my main and just fiddle with them. I tried SLI 1080s and they never really played well with my games, other than Battlefront 2015 which is probably the most well made game I've ever played for just performing well on all sorts of hardware. Even aaaalmost got it running on a laptop i5's iGPU once, couldn't get a steady 30fps though.

[bcredeur97]

9 minutes ago, vinyldash303 said:

 @bcredeur97 and I have systems within margin of error- 3960X's at 4.3Ghz and 1080 Ti's. His is a tripple fan cooler and mine is a founders. We got within a few points of eachother with the Unigen Superposition benchmark at max 4k settings. His vram is better and my core is better.

I can confirm this. His is def better though considering how hard I worked for the scores I got and iirc he just kinda tried a few things and was able to beat it slightly pretty easily.

 

I do like how quiet my EVGA cooler is though.

[bcredeur97]

3 minutes ago, vinyldash303 said:

Yeah you were fiddling with gpuboost curve. I kinda just maxed all the fans in my system, pulled the side panel and opened my window- kept moving the slider up. Had to let the card cool down to 31*C between each run though or it would throttle. That was making me chuckle.

Was totally sandbagging the entire time. I had the winning score like three crashes in advance until you took another 20 min to beat me by like- 20 points or something like that after I had already buttoned up my rig and shot the window. Super interesting how much better your vram is.

I also had my side panel off and a box fan XD

[Slayer3032]

5 hours ago, vinyldash303 said:

Goody. I'll stay away from the X series xeons and just nab one of the 3690s. Ballin with dat extreme edition on a budget.

If you're scared about a X series not working, try a E5649. They're a multiplier locked westmere with 2 QPI's for $8.99 shipped on ebay, functionally the same as any X series. UD3R's are pretty common boards and I'm sure there's hundreds of westmeres running on them just fine. You'll probably have better luck trying to bin yourself a good overclocker out of X5675's for the same price as the later production cpus tend to do better.

 

I get 4.6ghz@1.4v 200x23 out of my X5675 on my X58A-UD5 which if I recall correctly has the same power phases since I have the Rev.1 board. The Gigabyte labels are just glued to the tops of the heatsinks, if you want a little better VRM cooling they should come off with some effort too.

 

 

[Crunchy Dragon]

5 minutes ago, vinyldash303 said:

Oh and repasting the north/southbridge heatsinks. That shit is gonna be crusty. However, the heatsinks on this MSI mobo are very nice and large with lots of fins. That's something I really dont like about modern motherboards, yeah the big heatsinks are good and all, but they're just lumps of metal. No surface area. I'd be tempted to pull them off and take a band saw to them and make a bunch of little thin cuts almost all the way through a lot of them.

It's really sad that companies can't make functional northbridge and VRM heatsinks anymore.

 

If the VRM design overall isn't garbage, the heatsink design tends to be. Makes finding and choosing a good board a lot tougher than most of us would like.

[Zando_]

3 minutes ago, vinyldash303 said:

Whoops. Just paid $70 for a W3690. I'm not trying to go for competitive overclocking so much as have a decently quick x58 system. 

We'll see what happens. Supposed to be here by next week so I'll have some fun tomorrow slapping the system together and then next week I'll upgrade the cpu. I don't know if I'll have any time tonight but if I do I'll see if I can even find any of the settings in the BIOS that are related to the NCIX X58 OC video. 

 

Oh and repasting the north/southbridge heatsinks. That shit is gonna be crusty. However, the heatsinks on this MSI mobo are very nice and large with lots of fins. That's something I really dont like about modern motherboards, yeah the big heatsinks are good and all, but they're just lumps of metal. No surface area. I'd be tempted to pull them off and take a band saw to them and make a bunch of little thin cuts almost all the way through a lot of them.

Facts, most X58 mobos have good heatsinks. My XL-ATX and EATX EVGA boards actually have freaking beefy Northbridge heatsinks with fans (my EATX's fan is missing tho), and they're got proper finned VRM heatsinks too. The MSI Big Bang board I had had fins as well, but I didn't them as much as the more traditional heat pipe + fins on the ASUS Rampage III Formula. 

 

As far as OC videos go, Tech Yes City has one I'll bet is a lot more recent: 

 

[Zando_]

Large oof. Apparently the W3670 is Westmere-EP whereas the i7 970 is Gulftown, both are 32nm, same clocks, everything. But my V1.0 Classified boards won't work with it unless I short two sets of two tiny pins, but I can't figure out how the hell to get them soldered. Guess I head to Lowe's to get a smaller soldering iron? Or probs Hobby Lobby if they're open, they'd have teenier ones.

[Zando_]

57 minutes ago, vinyldash303 said:

@Zando Bob the W3690 is a gulftown processor according to Intel Ark. 

 

but the W3670 is Westmere. Even though its also in the same W36xx sku. This being my first time in the X58 world, Intel seems like they were all over the place. 

 

45 and 32nm i7s, two flavors of Xeon, and like 3 or 4 different archetectures. 

Yep, it's really weird. Assumed the W3670 would be the same as the i7 970 due to having the same clocks and both being 32nm, but no. Then weirdly the W3690 is the same as the i7s? Rather confusing, lol. Intel has never really had a clean lineup though.

[Zando_]

Should be able to push to 3.9Ghz or so at 1.4v, that’s what my i7 950 did. 

[NineEyeRon]

So sad I killed my x58 board last Feb when my AIO emptied all over it.

 

I just couldn’t get it back and had no parts to see what was broken.

 

My fault really for not changing out the AIO as aircoolers got better and cheaper. One AIO for 9 years is NOT a good idea.

 

I got that i7 920 and MoBo in Jan 2009 and it ran at 3.8 for 9 years!

 

Still makes me sad it ended that way.

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 hour ago, vinyldash303 said:

So base clock OC’s the PCIe frequency too right?

BCLK changes everything.

 

 

[Zando_]

Oooooo 528 in cinebench at 3.9GHz/1.4v w/vdroop, vs 388 at stock on my i7 950. Nice improvement there.

[Ground]

1 hour ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

BCLK changes everything.

 

 

...How about knowing what you are saying before talking? BCLK on this platform doesn't touch PCIe. As for that matter, touching PCIe is relevant after ~221 BCLK, but thats irrelevant for 99% of people overclocking this platform. Only things it changes are RAM, CPU, Uncore and QPI. 

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

i found a listing for an EVGA SR2... it's too much money for me but some of you might be interested. 

it's in the netherlands though... 

 

https://www.marktplaats.nl/a/computers-en-software/moederborden/m1371382593-moederboard-evga-classified-sr-2-met-64gb-sdram-en-2x-xeon.html?c=be2da871b0d84f75c3056cc6db858f31&previousPage=lr

[Pasi123]

I just upgraded my RAM from 16GB to 24GB. Previously I had 2x 4GB Kingston 1333MHz ECC and 4x 2GB Corsair Dominator 1600MHz non-ECC sticks. I upgraded the 4x2GB Dominators to these:
4x4GB Corsair XMS3 1600MHz

Spoiler

 

 

 

[XR6]

2 hours ago, firelighter487 said:

i found a listing for an EVGA SR2... it's too much money for me but some of you might be interested. 

it's in the netherlands though... 

 

https://www.marktplaats.nl/a/computers-en-software/moederborden/m1371382593-moederboard-evga-classified-sr-2-met-64gb-sdram-en-2x-xeon.html?c=be2da871b0d84f75c3056cc6db858f31&previousPage=lr

If only it wasn't €650. I'd go to the Netherlands and pick it up if it was cheaper.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

Just now, 1kv said:

If only it wasn't €650. I'd go to the Netherlands and pick it up if it was cheaper.

if it wasn't that expensive i would have bought it already