General Intel HEDT Xeon/i7 Discussion

[drevmcast]

37 minutes ago, the pudding said:

Ooooo, those are real good boards and all 

Did you see my S5520SC board? its like the HC but it has onboard audio. I might use it for a VM server or TrueNAS core build after said and done because it has an optional SAS adapter that I hope to track down. If not some HBA will probably be fine.

[the pudding]

Just now, drevmcast said:

Did you see my S5520SC board? its like the HC but it has onboard audio. I might use it for a VM server or TrueNAS core build after said and done because it has an optional SAS adapter that I hope to track down. If not some HBA will probably be fine.

Yeah they're great boards, I dailied one back in college about 6 years ago, one of my favourite dual boards, as far as the ones I've used so far go anyways 

[Zando_]

EVGA has X99 Micro2s for $99 right now if you need a damn good mATX board: 

https://www.evga.com/products/ProductList.aspx?type=8&family=Motherboard+Family

 

I've had one before, they're very very noice. Yoinked one again so I can move my main rig to my Meshify C Mini and save desk space. 

[GrockleTD]

2 hours ago, Zando Bob said:

EVGA has X99 Micro2s for $99 right now if you need a damn good mATX board: 

https://www.evga.com/products/ProductList.aspx?type=8&family=Motherboard+Family

 

I've had one before, they're very very noice. Yoinked one again so I can move my main rig to my Meshify C Mini and save desk space. 

nice, although i have decided to go x299

[bimmerman]

3 hours ago, Zando Bob said:

EVGA has X99 Micro2s for $99 right now if you need a damn good mATX board: 

https://www.evga.com/products/ProductList.aspx?type=8&family=Motherboard+Family

 

I've had one before, they're very very noice. Yoinked one again so I can move my main rig to my Meshify C Mini and save desk space. 

they also have B stock reference 1080ti models available, including ones without the dang DVI port. EK is also firesale-ing their 1080ti blocks and backplates.....would be ~$450 per card for a new, with warranty, waterblocked single slot 1080ti....times 3. ugh.

 

Not the best price to performance in light of 3080, buuuuuut dang that solves the PCIe issue on the BadDecisions build. Need some free dollars though.

[Zando_]

43 minutes ago, GrockleTD said:

nice, although i have decided to go x299

If you want cores then it's the better option unless you had a 6950X already, though you will need chonky VRMs if you plan to push the chips much. 

[m4shroom]

Helloo. here is my overclock settings for x5675 @4.20 ghz.  I would like to hear about your opinions. Have a nice day.

[bimmerman]

That's looking quite solid. If your cooler can handle it, try a 22 or 23 multiplier and play with CPU Vcore! My X5675 could do 23x200 without much issue at 1.35-1.4 V (I don't remember). Much beyond that is the territory of full water loop and massively diminished gains. 

 

Another thing you can try is to raise uncore and QPI multipliers a bit, as IME that results in a snappier system. Stability will be affected much beyond 3900mhz uncore though, and you may have to raise QPI/VTT voltage a bit. Ideally you peg uncore to 2x memory though, so....YMMV on whether this has a benefit.

 

Some other configs I'd try, depending how much energy you want to spend chasing <5% gains:

1. higher BCLK lower multiplier to OC Ram and Uncore without adjusting their multipliers (eg, 215-220 x21). My UD3R can do 220 BCLK pretty consistently.

2. lower BCLK higher cpu multiplier and 10x/20x/40x mem/uncore/QPI mults, targeting 1800-1900 ram speed. May be doable, may barf. I lost a memory channel above 2000mhz ram but that was with all 6 populated and it came back once I came back to reality.

 

[m4shroom]

Thx for reply  

for now its the limitation especially considering core temps after 10 minutes aida64 stress test resuts. I really appreciated the ways u wanted to show to me. Actually these settings fit what u mentioned in suggestion 1 higher blck  .I got another settings with lower blck and lower core voltage ofc. I can push further if I get a better cooler.

 

[Slayer3032]

My Gigabyte X58A-UD5 rev.1 board really doesn't like base clock and my IMC doesn't like a high uncore either but it'll take all the vcore I can throw at it. I have good luck using a lower base clock and enabling the turbo multipliers, also I think I keep EIST enabled too. I want to say EIST enables the power states otherwise the cpu just never drops it's multiplier at idle.

 

My system with the X5675@4.5ghz/1.425v and GTX 1080 idles at a lower power than my home server with a stock X5660 and 6 3.5" drives. I think in Windows it's around 138w and in Ubuntu like 106w. The home server usually sits around 134w at 4% cpu.

[drevmcast]

Finally "finished" with the S5520SC build!

 

After another weekend at the recycler I found some goodies and a EATX chassis that doesn't look absolutely gaudy. But before that some honorable mentions from the recycler.

 

 

This very poor Skulltrail board. All untested or broken boards were only 5 dollars but this socket was far too gone. So sad, what a beautiful x58 board.

 

 

I ended up with this G34 board, a eSATA HBA, and 2 140mm and 1 120mm corsair fans for a grand total of 13 dollars! Very excited to try to do something with this Opteron board. Too bad that the chips really suck for anything modern, even with modern instruction sets. 

 

 

Man, this case is so massive. It fit right in perfectly in (almost) all mounting holes. This would be a fun chassis to do some crazy watercooling setup or something. 

 

 

If anyone had any idea how big this case was. I'm going to have to put this in my closet or something because it does NOT fit anywhere near my desk. Any tips to extend my display cables + MNKB about 30 feet or so? I know it's not the scope of this thread but im all ears. And here's thermals and my new Cinebench R15 score post build.

 

[drevmcast]

Couple issues with the motherboard that have really baffled me. One is that it does not recognize ANY boot device and locks up in the bios when I open the boot manager with my eSATA card installed and the other is that I cannot update my bios to the latest version.

 

I'm pretty confident that updating my bios would probably fix my problems with the eSATA card but I keep getting (ERROR Unable to initialize SMBIOS library) when updating. Some searching around and the culprit is that I'm jumping too many bios revisions (Jumping from R0050 to R0069) Also a diagnosis light LED is "blinking amber" which indicate a couple bad things. The worst to me looks to be CATERR error which is a catastrophic error... but everything works just fine?

Really strange, but everything except trying to use the eSATA card works just fine.

 

I guess when I have time tomorrow I'll try to flash a slightly newer bios as a "lily pad" to jump to the newest bios. Intel still offers some "recovery bios-es" for corrupt bioses. Hopefully I can flash one of those. 

 

[bimmerman]

Whelp, end of an era. Giving away my X5675/mobo/RAM/AIO/R9 290 to a friend who wants to build a PC to play overwatch.

 

Downclocked it to 21x200, 1600 ram, leaving uncore and qpi and voltages at their 4.52 setting for stability. Here's hoping they like it!

 

Keeping the case (HAF 932) for the supermicro beast board. Updates forthcoming on the SR2 front as well.

[m4shroom]

Hello everyone. I had shared my overclock settings in previous page for x5675 @4.2 ghz on gigabyte ex58-ud5.I want to give some feedback about a problem. Setting was working perfectly till I downgrade gpu from rx5600xt to rx460. With the same settings an awkward error occured about unproper voltage settings and bios resets itself stock voltage,blck etc. However if I use pc on stock setting for a while and load overclocked settings back it works normal again and if I restart pc while working with overclocked bios settings it gives no errror at the start and all work just fine. But if pc stays shut down for a night and start in the morning error occurs again.(I tought maybe I needed to adjust all settings from scratch, but didnt help). I fixed the problem by reducing blck  and some voltages and raised cpu multi a little to achieve same clock speed.  So here is my latest cpu-z screenshot. Have fun with your xeons :)) ( Btw I couldnt find any logical explanation about a cpu overclock setting work with rx5600xt flawless and same setting causes a problem with rx460 )

 

 

 

 

[bimmerman]

That.....is quite weird!

 

Maybe try upping PCIE volts a tick, or IOH / IOH PLL. Honestly that's bizarre. I wonder if your GPU itself is unstable and that (or power delivery to it) is the issue rather than mobo overclock.

[Pasi123]

New video from Tech YES City. X58 with a RTX 3090

 

 

[bimmerman]

Yup, saw that. It's not surprising!

 

So, SR2 build update. Goal has been to build a 4 gamer 1 tower kind of build for local lan parties once covid is over (so, never?). I've gotten virtualization and GPU passthrough to be working, but performance....is kinda dogshit due to lack of cores and stock-ish speeds of X58 xeons. Each VM is being allocated 4-6 threads total, with best performance coming from pinning 2-4 threads per CPU for hypervisor. Essentially, each VM is being given a hyperthreaded dual core virtual CPU, which isn't optimal, and really shows the age of the platform.

 

So, rethinking my platform. Tempted to go dual E5-v3 Xeon (2011-3 / x99 era), but no overclocking and the high core count CPUs are slooooow. Ideally I'd be able to allocate somewhere between 12-16 threads per VM, and with Star Wars Squadrons supporting 5 player teams....that means I need a truly ludicrous number of threads (~32-36 total cores or so) for VR, hypervisor, and VM to all be happy and have good performance. Threadripper would make sense as well, but there are exactly zero TRX40 boards with 5+ CPU connected PCIe slots for GPUs. 'Only' doing 4 players is definitely reasonable, but kind of a bummer to not be able to do 5.

Le. Sigh. gaming laptops are so much easier to deal with for group parties.

[Zando_]

11 minutes ago, bimmerman said:

-snip-

One of these absolute motherfuckers maybe? 

https://www.asus.com/Commercial-Servers-Workstations/WS-C621E-SAGE/overview/

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11960/asus-announces-ws-c621e-sage-workstation-motherboard-dual-xeon-overclocking

Although few caveats being I have no idea what they cost or what the CPUs compatible with them cost (they claim OC control as well, but can any Xeons other than the single socket only W-3175X actually OC these days?). 

But hey, dual socket, high core count options, and then 3x PCIe 3.0 x16, 2x PCIe 3.0 x16/x8, and then 2 PCIe 2.0 x16/x8. 

 

Ah, Office Depot has them for $589, other places are closer to $700: https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/6753785/Asus-WS-C621E-SAGE-Workstation-Motherboard/?cm_mmc=PLA-_-Google-_-Computer_Cards_Components-_-6753785&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&gclid=CjwKCAjwq_D7BRADEiwAVMDdHssx9UXaYypRnrSSPj-znh3iLI3u7I-4lJreO2KivTFA23NxX9d5HRoC5U0QAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds. But again, the CPUs are likely bonkers expensive as well so prooobably less practical than settling for 4 users and getting a TR setup. 

[bimmerman]

2 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

One of these absolute motherfuckers maybe? 

 

https://www.asus.com/Commercial-Servers-Workstations/WS-C621E-SAGE/overview/

 

https://www.anandtech.com/show/11960/asus-announces-ws-c621e-sage-workstation-motherboard-dual-xeon-overclocking

Although few caveats being I have no idea what they cost or what the CPUs compatible with them cost (they claim OC control as well, but can any Xeons other than the single socket only W-3175X actually OC these days?). 

But hey, dual socket, high core count options, and then 3x PCIe 3.0 x16, 2x PCIe 3.0 x16/x8, and then 2 PCIe 2.0 x16/x8. 

 

Ah, Office Depot has them for $589, other places are closer to $700: https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/6753785/Asus-WS-C621E-SAGE-Workstation-Motherboard/?cm_mmc=PLA-_-Google-_-Computer_Cards_Components-_-6753785&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&gclid=CjwKCAjwq_D7BRADEiwAVMDdHssx9UXaYypRnrSSPj-znh3iLI3u7I-4lJreO2KivTFA23NxX9d5HRoC5U0QAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds. But again, the CPUs are likely bonkers expensive as well so prooobably less practical than settling for 4 users and getting a TR setup. 

Holy balls!

 

I was looking at the Z10 + E5 v4 CPUs as a package but daaaang this is interesting. Board is the same cost so question is, have 3647 CPUs come down yet

[Zando_]

Just now, bimmerman said:

Holy balls!

 

I was looking at the Z10 + E5 v4 CPUs as a package but daaaang this is interesting. Board is the same cost so question is, have 3647 CPUs come down yet

Yeahhhh.. just looking and an 8c/16t Xeon Gold with a usable clockspeed (3.6, with skylake cores that'll be fine if you're not pushing high refresh rates) has an MSRP of $2,200. Unless you're able to get compatible ES/QS versions or retail ones got dumped cheap somewhere, CPU cost would probably make it pretty impractical. 
 

Teetering on blasphemy for this thread, but I wonder how a single/dual socket EPYC would do, since those CPUs are usually far cheaper per core. 

[bimmerman]

8 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Yeahhhh.. just looking and an 8c/16t Xeon Gold with a usable clockspeed (3.6, with skylake cores that'll be fine if you're not pushing high refresh rates) has an MSRP of $2,200. Unless you're able to get compatible ES/QS versions or retail ones got dumped cheap somewhere, CPU cost would probably make it pretty impractical. 
 

Teetering on blasphemy for this thread, but I wonder how a single/dual socket EPYC would do, since those CPUs are usually far cheaper per core. 

Oof yea, that's just too much. As is the SR-3 and the 28 core unlocked nonsense....

 

I was just looking at Epyc haha. Price is good but used stuff isn't flooding ebay just yet.

 

Honestly the easy button would be a 10980XE, X299, and just set up 4x 4c/8t VMs with 2/4 left over to manage the hypervisor. ~60% of a TR3 setup in cost, buuuuuuut not exactly purchasable. 

[Zando_]

4 minutes ago, bimmerman said:

Oof yea, that's just too much. As is the SR-3 and the 28 core unlocked nonsense....

 

I was just looking at Epyc haha. Price is good but used stuff isn't flooding ebay just yet.

 

Honestly the easy button would be a 10980XE, X299, and just set up 4x 4c/8t VMs with 2/4 left over to manage the hypervisor. ~60% of a TR3 setup in cost, buuuuuuut not exactly purchasable. 

ES octacores (IIRC ASUS' WS boards usually support ES Xeons) look to be $99-200 each, but lower clocked (this board can do BCLK + some other fuckery tho). And it even has a microSD card slot for a hypervisor OS . But yeah, defo a pretty impractical platform.

 

The X299 route should be doable if you settle for a 7980XE, those are much more obtainable. Plus one of those with a delid + custom IHS should make for plenty of fun when not running hypervisor duty. 

TRX40 would be amazing if they didn't hate PCIe slots for some odd reason. Highest I can see is 4x x16 + one x1. Which is weird because TR3000 chips are practically oozing with PCIe lanes - and since they're 4.0, bandwidth as well. 

[bimmerman]

49 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

ES octacores (IIRC ASUS' WS boards usually support ES Xeons) look to be $99-200 each, but lower clocked (this board can do BCLK + some other fuckery tho). And it even has a microSD card slot for a hypervisor OS . But yeah, defo a pretty impractical platform.

 

The X299 route should be doable if you settle for a 7980XE, those are much more obtainable. Plus one of those with a delid + custom IHS should make for plenty of fun when not running hypervisor duty. 

TRX40 would be amazing if they didn't hate PCIe slots for some odd reason. Highest I can see is 4x x16 + one x1. Which is weird because TR3000 chips are practically oozing with PCIe lanes - and since they're 4.0, bandwidth as well. 

Right??? It baffles me why there is such PCIe bandwidth but they focused on M.2 sockets instead of slots. Oh well.

 

I did find a 10980XE in stock at B&H. Sooooo yea, kinda tempting. Would be super fun to mess around with!

 

Good tip on the ESs. I'll look into that more. The micro SD card slot made me giggle a bit.

[GrockleTD]

would ya'll be mad if i cooled a lapped LM'ed 7820x with a Gammaxx 400?

[bomerr]

On 6/24/2020 at 2:21 PM, Zando Bob said:

X299 if you want to hardcore tune a chad CPU, but if virtualization is the goal, a TR3 rig with a board that has solid IOMMU groups would be s w e e t. Lads on the L1Techs forums would probs be hella helpful too, they do a lot with Linux and virtualization on the TR platform, vs the gamer side I'm more familiar with. 
 

Oh there's probably some back a ways, but most of the bench records will have already been set, and IDK that we have many people doing much higher than water. Have a couple who have done LN2 though, it was either bimmerman or another of the OGs who binned through 10s, if not 100s, of Xeons on a Gigabyte board with an LN2 pot, did some nutty stuff. 

These are the latest numbers I have from any of my rigs:

 

That's my daily OC. About as fast as the RAM will go (my Hynix DIMMs abhor anything past their XMP profile), and for the CPU I don't want to push a chip this expensive hard, so it sits at 4.2, gets up to 1.24v under load and caps at 80C after a good run of Prime95. It did pass CB20 at 4.4 with 1.3v but wouldn't do any heavier AVX stuff at that clock, and I don't wanna run an AVX offset. 

I have the 1660v3. Do you think a 6950x is worth the upgrade at the current price or should I wait till the price falls a bit more?