X58 - Project SNSO

[D4C]

Project SNSO - Something New Something Old

An X58 Xeon Build made with an older Dell workstation motherboard.

The impetus for this build was my i7 920 processor a first gen low end processor. By the end of 2017 it was starting to show its age and a upgrade for it became a priority; from that beginning the rest of the system grew.

 

This build is already done and I wanted to document it but I do not wish to tear it down and build it back up to take photos, photos will be either stock images or photos that I had already taken earlier.

The Processor

 

The processor I chose for this build was an Xeon W3680 a Westmere-EP workstation chip, unlike the X56XX processors the W series comes with a unlocked multiplier and a single QPI link so it was only useful for single processor systems.

[EDIT: The 5600 series also has unlocked multipliers, thanks again WhisperingKnickers :)]

The original plan was to put this processor into the motherboard of my first system, a Dell 435mt(R849J), the motherboard had long since been transplanted into a Antec 300 case as the Dell case was an eyesore for Lan events.

 

The processor was bought on ebay from a Chinese re seller for $100, comparing it to the i7 920 it is a massive improvement with 2 more cores and 4 more threads and a 3.33ghz base clock over the i7 920s 2.66ghz.

The original plan didn’t work out how I had hoped however, with the Xeon processor the system failed to post and was a complete disaster, Dell had no bios updates that would resolve this issue and rather than just chalk it up to a misadventure I decided to double down and work through the problem, leading me to phase 2.

The Motherboard

 

With the R849J refusing to post with the W3680 I had to get a new motherboard, but acceptably priced x58 motherboards didn't really exist with prices placed around $150, while Shenzhen copy brands of x58 motherboards did exist, I wanted a more reputable board than that considering even their prices were still hovering around $100.

It was at this time I came across the XCMR X58 discussion thread on the Linus Tech Tips forums where the discussion of the Dell T3500 piqued my interest, after getting a hold of the model number of the T3500 motherboard(09KPNV) I was able to find a well priced option at $15.

This raised another problem though, there was zero chance this motherboard would fit into a Antec 300 case so on I went to phase 3.

 

 

The Case

 

With the Antec 300 being incapable of holding a T3500 Motherboard I had to find a new case for the build, From the measurements of the board from the ebay listing I figured the board to be a eATX board and decided to buy the Phanteks P350x.

The case came first having been bought retail domestically and I was happy with the aesthetics, I originally had not planned for RGB and tempered glass, but with the case being priced at $99 and supporting eATX I wasn't going to find a better deal very easily.

After the motherboard had arrived I tried to install it when I found a big problem, the motherboard would not fit inside.

In the ebay listing the motherboard had been measured at having a width of 330mm, this was correct but was incorrectly measured at the smallest width.
 

I had to do some work to make the motherboard fit now, the area circled in the photo below was blocking the board from sitting flush, so I bought a pair of shears and got to work.
 

 

After measuring and cutting away the metal I needed removed I placed some non-conductive foam on the edge so the the motherboard could not touch the back of the case.

 

During this I had noticed one problem with the case however, There was a hole in the front panels mesh.

 

 

Inside the front panel a square piece of the mesh was missing and was not picked up in QA. I couldn't very well send the case back to where I got it from now that it had been modded, left with no choice I sent an email to Phanteks support explaining the situation.

I quickly received an answer back from Phanteks RMA and was told a replacement right front dust filter was being sent my way courtesy of Phanteks Asia.

 

The Cooler

 

The motherboard now fit into the case and the processor was now inside the socket, but cooling the CPU wasn’t going to be straightforward either, the fan connectors for the T3500 were proprietary Dell 5-pins and were not going to fit the cooler from my 435mt so I bought a new cooler, a Hyper 212x.

A budget CPU cooler of Cooler Master fame, I expected this cooler to work very well, buying a pair of High CFM Thermaltake Riing fans for airflow and adding some RGB accentuation's these were plugged directly into the power supply.

 

The T3500 motherboard still had surprises for me however, the CPU mounting plate was built into the board, had screws pointing up and could not be removed, I had to buy spacers so that I could mount the cooler onto the board.

 

Memory

 

My 435mt had 8gb of 1066mhz ram in triple channel mode, and by this stage I knew I was going to be selling off that old PC, while my new system was now operational using that 8gb kit I needed a new kit so I could sell the old kit with the old system.

 

I went back to ebay to hunt for memory, and I was disappointed with the prices to say the least; unmatched kits and prices from $120 - $150, I eventually found a 12GB 1333mhz ECC unbuffered kit for $50 and bought it immediately, after plugging it in and making sure it worked I decided to pretty it up with some plastidip.

 

 

SSD

The SSD I used at this time was an old workhorse, a 60GB Patriot Pyro Async drive. It wasn’t the best performer but did make the system feel a lot snappier, but 60GB isn't very much space; I needed another drive.

I wanted a nvme drive, the phenomenal speeds, the low latency; An added benefit was that the Dell motherboards did not have Sata 6Gb/s and using Sata 3Gb/s I would never get the best speeds, with a Pci-e connection there was much less bottle necking.

I bought a adapter off ebay that had been manufactured in China, with how nvme is pci-e with a smaller footprint, I felt safe in assuming that this adapter would work perfectly.

 

The drive itself was a 256gb Intel 760p m.2 drive, it fitted into the adapter and the adapter fitted into the motherboard, a boot to windows and everything worked perfectly.

 

The Motherboard does not support nvme boot, using some software trickery it was possible to boot from it by having the motherboard boot a precursor os and then having that os boot windows, but i felt that it was a lot of work and there was no time savings to be had.

 

Graphics Card

 

The graphics card I had was a R9 270x 2GB from Gigabyte, it had done me well for a few years but was starting to become a pain in the neck with newer games, especially with its lower amount of VRAM.

After price hunting I found a deal on ebay for a Gigabyte RX 570 4GB for $200, this seemed perfect and a decent price. I payed for, it received it and installed it then, nothing.

The system wouldn't post, was it the computer? I tested it in many other machines, nothing.

I decided to take a good look at the card, there was warping on the heat sink where the shroud was removed and screwed back in and there was liquid metal pooled around the back plates copper insert.

 

I asked the seller about it and he said that the card was bought at a flea market and that he had never taken it apart, I asked for and got my refund.

 

I decided the next time to buy new, I found a deal for an RX 580 8gb ROG Top card at $350, I got the card and had no issues running it but the RGB on the card wasn’t working properly, the colors on the front and the backplate were different; the color blue isn't showing on the front.

 

I wiggled the cable around until the color was fixed, but then it felt like a shame to have a card like this and not show it off properly never mind the fact that it was so heavy that it was sagging like crazy, so I bought a Cooler Master vertical GPU bracket.

 

Extras

In addition to that I bought some sleeved PSU extenders from Cablemod for style points and a front panel usb 3.0 to 2.0 adapter so that I wouldn't have any useless ports.

 

 

Overclocking

 

The next obvious step is to get some extra bang for the buck, so I decided to overclock the processor and the graphics card.

 

Processor

Overclocking the W3680 is pretty straightforward usually, it has an unlocked multiplier but the Dell bios doesn’t have any overclocking support so I downloaded and installed Throttlestop, I chose Throttlestop over Intel XTU because I can have Throttlestop automatically apply overclocks at boot and it is made by a pretty cool guy.

The only options I have for overclocking are multipliers and not any power control, I got the multipliers for all cores to 31 x 133.334mhz or 4.13ghz.

 

 

Graphics Card

 

I took a look on HWBot initially and got a rough idea of what I could expect and started my overclock at 1460/8100, bringing it up bit by bit and running Unigine Heaven as a stress test, I got the overclock stable at 1500/8600 over the reference 580s 1340/8000.

 

 

Benchmarks

 

Firestrike Demo

https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/29478108?

 

 

Unigine Heaven Extreme Preset

 

 

UserBenchmark

http://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/11470674

 

CrystalDiskMark

I tested just my Patriot Pyro and Intel 760p drives with the 1GiB file size.

 

Intel

 

Patriot

 

Cinebench R15

 

During the Cinebench run the processor maxed out at 53 Celsius.

A few benchmarks including Cinebench dont recognize the overclock, benchmarks like Firestrike do.

 

Rainbow Six Siege Ultra Preset

 

 

Metro Last Light Redux

 

 

Farcry 5 Ultra Preset

 

 

Strange Brigade Ultra Preset

 

 

Final Price

 

The total price for this build came to $980 AUD which is roughly $700 USD, if the price that I sold my old computer for is factored into the final price the build cost $610 AUD, as far as value for money goes I am very happy with this build and can see it lasting me as long as my previous computer with a few GPU upgrades.

Problems

This build is by no means perfect and I am including the problems that are irreparable either for the amount of effort I'm willing to put in or are fundamentally unresolvable here.
1. No USB 3.
2. Unaddressable RGB.

3. Unskippable bios warnings on every boot.

4. No IO shield for the motherboard.

5. No front panel audio connector on motherboard

6. Coil whine from motherboard vrms, mitigated somewhat by the cpu coolers fans.

 

Special Thanks

 

Uncle Webb - Throttlestop developer.

SansVarnic - Moderator, for moving my ill placed help thread.

Timotheus2 & Whispering Knickers - For replying to same thread.

Phanteks Support - For the excellent customer service in my RMA request.

And everyone from the XCMR.

 

 

[NoxiousOdor]

That is an awesome build and it looks like it was fun to build! It reminds me of the build I did where I crammed a big supermicro board into the NZXT S340. I had to do some similar mods to your build here. Very cool build thanks for sharing, it always brings joy to my heart to see x58 systems. 

 

Spoiler

Also the 5600 series also has unlocked multipliers

 

[D4C]

Thanks for pointing that out.

[bimmerman]

Awesome build!

You can solve the USB3 issue though, if you have PCIe to spare. Best buy / online stores sell PCIe USB3 cards. I have one in my X58 machine and it's so much better than the built-in "USB3" that my mobo has.

[NoxiousOdor]

21 minutes ago, D4C said:

Thanks for pointing that out.

Yeah like for example I have two of the x5690 and they both have unlocked multipliers. I think you will be hard pressed to find an x58 chip that isn't unlocked.

[D4C]

9 minutes ago, bimmerman said:

Awesome build!

You can solve the USB3 issue though, if you have PCIe to spare. Best buy / online stores sell PCIe USB3 cards. I have one in my X58 machine and it's so much better than the built-in "USB3" that my mobo has.

That's true, but I don't really have any spare pci-e slots now with the vertical GPU, it was hard enough finding that adapter which was small enough; I suppose I could get a riser cable.

[Pasi123]

On 10/17/2018 at 7:39 PM, WhisperingKnickers said:

Yeah like for example I have two of the x5690 and they both have unlocked multipliers. I think you will be hard pressed to find an x58 chip that isn't unlocked.

Does it really have unlocked multiplier? At least my X5670 doesn't have, 24 is the highest multiplier that I can set. I've always though only higher end LGA1366 i7's (980x, 990x) and W Xeon's (W3680x W3690) have unlocked multiplier.