How to turbo a Xeon server cpu?

[tanjackson]

I see no option in the BIOS. Xeon 8160. Thanks all.

[da na]

As in overclock? Yeah that's because these CPUs were never built to be overclocked and server hardware does not have those options in the BIOS.

There are a few weird motherboards from China and Russia that allow you to overclock Xeons, but you cannot adjust that chip's multiplier, just its frequency. If you have one of those particular boards you could overclock it. But as you don't have the BIOS option, your board does not support OC.

 

If this was a Xeon X from the Core 2 era, you could use SetFSB to adjust the frontside bus speed from within Windows, regardless of motherboard. But that won't work on a Xeon Platinum chip with the FSB being on the processor itself rather than the motherboard.

 

I doubt many if any sketchy motherboards exist for Xeon Platinum series yet. Most of the piecemeal boards out there are for Xeon E5.

[Tetras]

Wikichip have a table of the turbo ratios, it should achieve 2.8 Ghz with all cores active, 3.4 Ghz with half the cores active and 3.7 Ghz with two cores active (excluding AVX). Is it not reaching these clock speeds?

[tanjackson]

1 hour ago, da na said:

As in overclock? Yeah that's because these CPUs were never built to be overclocked and server hardware does not have those options in the BIOS.

There are a few weird motherboards from China and Russia that allow you to overclock Xeons, but you cannot adjust that chip's multiplier, just its frequency. If you have one of those particular boards you could overclock it. But as you don't have the BIOS option, your board does not support OC.

 

If this was a Xeon X from the Core 2 era, you could use SetFSB to adjust the frontside bus speed from within Windows, regardless of motherboard. But that won't work on a Xeon Platinum chip with the FSB being on the processor itself rather than the motherboard.

 

I doubt many if any sketchy motherboards exist for Xeon Platinum series yet. Most of the piecemeal boards out there are for Xeon E5.

 

So if I  buy new server cpu for single core speed and turbo, I will need to search for a x99 Motherboard, right?

Are the Intel base clock speed safe to compare the performance between server cpu? 

I want to do medium gaming on it too.

[da na]

8 minutes ago, tanjackson said:

 

So if I  buy new server cpu for single core speed and turbo, I will need to search for a x99 Motherboard, right?

Are the Intel base clock speed safe to compare the performance between server cpu? 

I want to do medium gaming on it too.

Don't buy a server CPU for gaming to start with. If you aren't satisfied with a Xeon Platinum, you won't do any better by buying a 10 to 15 year old CPU.

Get yourself an AM4 platform, they go for like $300. Will hold up a good deal better for vidyagames. I'll say my dual Xeon workstation with 72 threads performs worse in single threaded applications than my mobile workstation's 3rd gen i7.

And about your clockspeed question, it's not just clock that matters. Even CPUs of the same generation shouldn't be compared just by clock if that means ignoring core/thread count, cache, single AND multicore boost ratios, and QPI speed (if using more than 1 CPU). You'd also have to think about ECC RAM or not, and RAM speed, when picking parts to pair with the CPU. 

[thrasher_565]

some xeon will work in desktop mb that have ocing but only some are unlocked. some only can be oced by there turbo ratios. and some need 3 party programs to do it or hacked bios and stuff.

[Kilrah]

3 hours ago, tanjackson said:

server cpu for single core speed and turbo

Those don't go together, server CPUs favor multicore perf. A cheap low end modern part will run circles around a server CPU from the X99 era.