FX-6350 to Dual Xeon X5660 Upgrade

[Pyroven]

It's all in this Imgur album I've made.

 

Basically for £100 I bought two Xeon X5660 and a Tyan S7012 Motherboard to replace my FX-6350.

 

The interesting part about this is the overclocking and I'm sorry to say that due to a lack of webpages about overclocking dual xeon X5600 Series processors I just had to make a call on which I thought looked the most likely to support it.

 

Thankfully the CPU multiplier was unlocked up to a maximum of 21x, which meant I could set the base frequency to 2.8 GHz up from 2.4GHz rather than that being the turbo frequency, and the turbo went up to 2.9GHz, so that's cool. Unluckily however the Base Clock could not be altered, so this is the limit it will go to on this motherboard. May other curious googlers learn from this thread.

 

I could've learned that had I read the PDF manual properly before buying. I was far too excited to sit still through a whole manual though, but I'll know for next time.

 

So what's the performance like? Pretty much the same for gaming as before, but now rendering a video takes 20% CPU usage rather than the previous 60% and I think Minecraft got a big boost but it's impossible to benchmark that game reliably so who knows.

 

The GPU is definitely the bottleneck in this build.

 

I can't think of anything else people might want to know, so please ask any questions which cross your mind

 

Thank you for reading and I hope this helps someone out there.

 

EDIT: Album Fixed

Edited September 6, 2017 by Pyroven
Album Fixed

[emosun]

I use two x5679's and it's important to note that gpu rendering is faster than these cpu's. The cpu's can sometimes help in specific situation like live effect previews but for the most part these are slower than the 1060 doing the work.

Some cheaper or simplier video editors might not support gpu rendering in which case these could be faster. But again it depends on the situation. 

 

[mariushm]

Should have the same performance as a Ryzen 7 1700 (mostly in multithreaded apps)  but at double the power consumption and double the fans and more memory sticks.

In single threaded apps, it may actually end up a bit slower than FX6350, due to cores only running at 2.8 ghz.

 

Well, for 100 pounds it's a good upgrade, especially if that money includes the memory costs.

 

Keep in mind that your video renderer may not be smart enough to use both processors, it may not be significantly faster because maybe it defaults on one cpu.

x265 (command line hevc encoder) is smart enough to detect multiple processor sockets and distribute threads and workloads on multiple processors.

x264 (command line or through GUIs like MeGUI ) is also smart enough to use all cores available.

 

If you have a lot of disk space, you should try to use Export to AVI (or whatever you have in your software) and use a very fast lossless video codec like MagicYUV to render the video super fast to a large file on disk , then use MeGUI or command line x264 to encode to h264 super fast , or use hardware encoding tools that rely on NVenc or VCE or AMF (amd's new framework for hardware decoding and encoding) to use gpu to encode video.

 

[Pyroven]

4 minutes ago, emosun said:

I use two x5679's and it's important to note that gpu rendering is faster than these cpu's. The cpu's can sometimes help in specific situation like live effect previews but for the most part these are slower than the 1060 doing the work.

Some cheaper or simplier video editors might not support gpu rendering in which case these could be faster. But again it depends on the situation. 

 

I've an R9 280 and it helping with the rendering is why the CPU usage is so low as far as I can tell. But what I like more than anything else is the ability to do stuff like that in the background without it crippling the other applications I'm running. That's what makes me truly happy.

[emosun]

1 minute ago, Pyroven said:

I've an R9 280 and it helping with the rendering is why the CPU usage is so low as far as I can tell. But what I like more than anything else is the ability to do stuff like that in the background without it crippling the other applications I'm running. That's what makes me truly happy.

yes few people realize the benefit of multi socket.

a ryzen could probably run a game far better than my machine , but my machine can render a video while playing the game at the same time better than the ryzen. so it's a trade off of sorts.