General Intel HEDT Xeon/i7 Discussion

[CommanderAlex]

6 hours ago, Zando_ said:

Huh, mebbe something is off so slightly that heat expansion or something puts it back in contact. Only thing I can think of, something about the conditions changing makes either a socket pad or something inside the CPU make proper contact so it can talk to that RAM again.

Yeah that's what I'm thinking is what is going on here and just thermal expansions makes the connection again.

 

7 hours ago, Zando_ said:

Not that I know of, selling them in pairs seems to be for convenience (a 4-set is also common as that's another socket config with these chips).

Ah ok, thanks for your help!

[the pudding]

On 10/19/2022 at 12:05 AM, Crunchy Dragon said:

My next upgrade will likely be X299 with an EVGA board.

 

The more Intel doesn't release an HEDT platform, the less I want a modern Intel chip.

The dark is a rally good move if you can go that route, I recently got a dark myself and I love it, super solid, the OC robot is surprisingly accurate too, I ran it and it plopped my clocks about exactly where they were before on my previous board 

[toasty99]

So does anyone else think J skus are really overrated? Or are EVGA boards just trash? 

 

My J sku 1660v3 only does 4.6ghz all core stable with a 280mm aio. Just a bit disappointed since even my ES 1660v3 did 4.5ghz back on an older gigabyte and an older MSI board I no longer have. 

 

I mean I get 4.6ghz is not terrible but I was really hoping for 4.8 lol.  

 

Also, just don't like EVGA boards so far. Had this on an x99 classified and a x99 Micro. The bios kind of is trash and EVGA boards don't have the extra pins so uncore overclocking is pretty trash. Definitely no where near the gigabyte x99-phoenix I used to have quality wise. 

[Zando_]

11 minutes ago, toasty99 said:

So does anyone else think J skus are really overrated? Or are EVGA boards just trash? 

 

My J sku 1660v3 only does 4.6ghz all core stable with a 280mm aio. Just a bit disappointed since even my ES 1660v3 did 4.5ghz back on an older gigabyte and an older MSI board I no longer have. 

AFAIK j-bin was only a marker of "good chip" on 5960Xs, not other CPUs. My j-bin 5960X would do 4.7GHz with... 1.3v IIRC, 4.5 with 1.2v. Refused to run 4.8 or higher stable even with HT off. So even then it isn't a guarantee of a golden chip, just a pretty damn good one. I'd say 4.6 is a solid clock out of these chips, but it depends on the voltage you need to run that.

14 minutes ago, toasty99 said:

The bios kind of is trash and EVGA boards don't have the extra pins so uncore overclocking is pretty trash.

I vastly prefer the UEFI (X79 boards and newer use UEFI, their old BIOS on X58 boards is horrible though), and don't trust the extra pin sockets much. Those and some power delivery issues are what I've seen blamed for the whole ASUS boards cooking CPUs thing, haven't looked into whether Gigabyte suffered similar issues or no. But yeah, seem the EVGA boards just aren't to your taste. 

[toasty99]

1 hour ago, Zando_ said:

AFAIK j-bin was only a marker of "good chip" on 5960Xs, not other CPUs. My j-bin 5960X would do 4.7GHz with... 1.3v IIRC, 4.5 with 1.2v. Refused to run 4.8 or higher stable even with HT off. So even then it isn't a guarantee of a golden chip, just a pretty damn good one. I'd say 4.6 is a solid clock out of these chips, but it depends on the voltage you need to run that.

I vastly prefer the UEFI (X79 boards and newer use UEFI, their old BIOS on X58 boards is horrible though), and don't trust the extra pin sockets much. Those and some power delivery issues are what I've seen blamed for the whole ASUS boards cooking CPUs thing, haven't looked into whether Gigabyte suffered similar issues or no. But yeah, seem the EVGA boards just aren't to your taste. 

Yeah, fair enough. 4.6ghz at the 1.35v I'm at is ok enough I guess. 

 

Oh well. X99 is so cheap and other than not being able to do PS3 emulation well still hasn't been a bottleneck at 4k.

[Zando_]

10 minutes ago, toasty99 said:

4.6ghz at the 1.35v I'm at is ok enough I guess. 

Ye sounds like you're on the better end of an average bin. There wouldn't be much of a noticeable performance uplift from the 200Mhz increase anyways, so it's not really a biggie for actual use. 

11 minutes ago, toasty99 said:

Oh well. X99 is so cheap and other than not being able to do PS3 emulation well still hasn't been a bottleneck at 4k.

Oh yeah, 4K is very lenient on CPU. My bottleneck for that is always my GPU (2060 Super), at stock speeds these chips will be the bottleneck in unoptimized titles, but around 4/4.2Ghz or above (depending on whether Broadwell-E or Haswell-E) they are solid for any normal multitasking/gaming use. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

On 10/19/2022 at 12:06 AM, Zando_ said:

Yeah. I would love a modern Intel system, but the fact that I don't get quad channel RAM, or anything past GPU + 1x NVMe has to go through chipset, is pretty bleh. I do hope they do an X499 or something at some point (as AMD stole the 399 already).

 

Cost, and likely no ability to OC. Those Xeons have an MSRP around $4400 new, and are only 3 years old (released Q2 2019) so they're plenty current enough to be in a bunch of server racks still. Usually Xeons don't get cheap until they're old enough that datacenters start upgrading, flooding the used market with them. Tis why 1366 Xeons are so cheap, I imagine 2011 Xeons are much cheaper than they used to be as well (I haven't checked), and 2011-3 Xeons are becoming more and more affordable.

These are exactly my reasons.

 

11 hours ago, the pudding said:

The dark is a rally good move if you can go that route, I recently got a dark myself and I love it, super solid, the OC robot is surprisingly accurate too, I ran it and it plopped my clocks about exactly where they were before on my previous board

That looks awesome! I have unfortunately become a stickler for 8 DIMM slots

[toasty99]

Well I managed to snag a 7980xe off eBay for $250 delided and direct die this week. Snagged an ASRock extreme4 x299 motherboard in mediocre condition for $80. Anyways, I don't have a direct die mount so I had to get creative. 

 

For anyone this helps, if you have an x99 motherboard you don't use/is dead if you remove the retention bracket the backplate the cooler screws into on x99 is separate from the rention bracket (not the case on x299). You can take the x99 backplate and place it behind an x299 board with the retention bracket removed. This gives you a way to mount your cooler on a direct die. 

 

Results are... ok. 27,700 Cinebench r23 score on a 280mm aio just fooling around with a per core OC in XTU. I think the mount (and use of thermal paste instead of LM) is holding me back, the best cores are doing 49x (1.35v) while the worst are all the way down at 43x (1.15v) to keep temps under 100C for benching. Overall, I'm having fun but got work to do in optimizing. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

So I did some poking around, ran some numbers:

 

I can have an i7-7820X, an EVGA X299 FTW-K, 8x8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum, and an EVGA RTX 2070 Super FTW3, all for under $1000.

 

Man, that's tempting.
ninja edit: I lied, it was only 8x8. Still, it's quadruple what I currently have.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Update: placed 4 ebay orders between last night and this morning.

 

Pictures will come as things start to roll in. Crunchy is finally leaving X99

 

[Crunchy Dragon]

Motherboard and CPU are here! This board is huge compared to the old one.

 

Haven't been able to do a ton of fancy things yet, but I did score 10,740 in Cinebench R23 with no overclocking. 7820X seems promising so far; my 5820K was a little better than a 7700K after a 4Ghz overclock.

 

 

RAM should be here Thursday, and I'm going to be sending a strongly worded message to somebody if I don't get a tracking number for my GPU by tomorrow.

[Zando_]

2 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Motherboard and CPU are here! This board is huge compared to the old one.

Mmmm welcome to EVGA's love of massive EATX or larger boards.

4 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

7820X seems promising so far; my 5820K was a little better than a 7700K after a 4Ghz overclock.

Mhm, they seem like very nice chips. Based on Skylake, just not the nice low-latency ringbus arch, so you need more work to properly fight a ringbus chip (tis why the 6950X is faster in games at the same clocks, though these chips can clock far higher than most Broadwell-E so they win out by brute force).

 

Though hmmm, looks like the 7820X is one of the chips with less PCIe lanes (28 vs the full 44) like the 5820K, do keep that in mind if throwing in PCIe devices to muck about with. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just now, Zando_ said:

Mmmm welcome to EVGA's love of massive EATX or larger boards.

Thank you thank you

1 minute ago, Zando_ said:

Though hmmm, looks like the 7820X is one of the chips with less PCIe lanes (28 vs the full 44) like the 5820K, do keep that in mind if throwing in PCIe devices to muck about with. 

Will definitely keep that in mind. I don't expect to need much more than a single GPU for now anyway.

[GillyMoMo]

I thought about going X299. I feel like that too is a bit dated now. I have 3 X99 boxes I am kinda unsure of what to do with them (One is currently a ChimerOS box). Keep us posted on your progress with yours. 

[Zando_]

2 minutes ago, GillyMoMo said:

I feel like that too is a bit dated now.

I think PCIe 3.0 is the only thing that really dates it. Skylake cores are still pretty stronk and you can clock these to around 4.5GHz pretty easily, and quad-channel DDR4 will still be relevant for a while. PCIe is the only real hold-back. They support TPM 2.0 on-CPU so Windows 11 runs fine too (I currently run it on mine for that sweet sweet dark mode task manager). Maybe power draw dates them a bit too, they will pull far more for the same performance vs something like a Ryzen 5950X. 

[GillyMoMo]

1 minute ago, Zando_ said:

I think PCIe 3.0 is the only thing that really dates it. Skylake cores are still pretty stronk and you can clock these to around 4.5GHz pretty easily, and quad-channel DDR4 will still be relevant for a while. PCIe is the only real hold-back. They support TPM 2.0 on-CPU so Windows 11 runs fine too (I currently run it on mine for that sweet sweet dark mode task manager). Maybe power draw dates them a bit too, they will pull far more for the same performance vs something like a Ryzen 5950X. 

That's very true. I guess because I also have dual socket Xeons in the mix as well. Oddly they perform quite well given their age. The only drawback is the tomfoolery to get Windows 11 on those (But then I just run a bit of Linux and that solves that issue). I really want to see some newer HEDT stuff but it's so insanely expensive. 

[Zando_]

2 minutes ago, GillyMoMo said:

I really want to see some newer HEDT stuff but it's so insanely expensive.

Yeep. Tis why I've always been on used HEDT. X58, X99, actually got X79 after X99, now X299 because I scored a deal (and overall it's much cheaper now). I haven't poked into the Threadripper stuff but AFAIK they remain very expensive because there aren't really any replacements, AMD has gone all workstation with the Pro stuff that's basically same CPU but 2x the price because "enterprise". Would welcome the return of actual HEDT, cut above mainstream for folks who want or need more RAM bandwidth/PCIe, but not the eye watering prices of new workstation/server hardware. 

 

As I've said here before, OEMs seem to be content with just slapping really high core count chips on mainstream platforms as that works for most prosumers (who I imagine were a significant portion of the HEDT community) as usually they just need a lot of cores, 1 GPU, and a couple SSDs. RIP to enthusiasts or multi-GPU/other PCIe card users who wanted the more workstation features of HEDT. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

37 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

I think PCIe 3.0 is the only thing that really dates it. Skylake cores are still pretty stronk and you can clock these to around 4.5GHz pretty easily, and quad-channel DDR4 will still be relevant for a while. PCIe is the only real hold-back. They support TPM 2.0 on-CPU so Windows 11 runs fine too (I currently run it on mine for that sweet sweet dark mode task manager). Maybe power draw dates them a bit too, they will pull far more for the same performance vs something like a Ryzen 5950X. 

I would agree with PCIe if more people were able to fully saturate 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0. Skylake-X is limited mostly by power draw and heat output, in my mind.

 

A minor detail I had forgotten about, Skylake-X has thermal compound under the IHS instead of solder or liquid metal. Might be a thing I change about this CPU at some point, depending on how toasty she gets.

[Zando_]

1 minute ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I would agree with PCIe if more people were able to fully saturate 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0.

Not for more lanes, more bandwidth. It would be nice to have the ability to run funny fast NVMe SSDs. 

1 minute ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Skylake-X is limited mostly by power draw and heat output, in my mind.

Indeed, they'll clock very well if you can cool them. 

3 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

A minor detail I had forgotten about, Skylake-X has thermal compound under the IHS instead of solder or liquid metal. Might be a thing I change about this CPU at some point, depending on how toasty she gets.

Yep yep, mine is delidded with a custom flat IHS (original owner didn't want to lap the original IHS and yeet the serial # and such), brings down the temps overall and most importantly, the delta between cores. It's still 10-11C for me usually, but I am using an EVGA CLC and not the EK Magnitude block I have for it (still waiting for UPS resolution on the mobo damage) so the coldplate on the cooler itself is probably not perfectly flat. So a move to water for the CPU should bring those deltas down a bit. 

 

For overall temps it's... a bit eyebrow raising, but fine for gaming currently. Using the OC Robot per-core OC, it runs the cores at 4.2-4.3ish, up to 4.5 on the 4 best cores, they will peak at 96C under CB23 looping (Prime95 makes them downclock and run cooler even with AVX completely disabled, no idea why that is), but in games it doesn't break the 70s so it's good 'nuff for now. Once I actually have the mobo drama sorted I can put on a proper all-core OC with no AVX offset and see where I end up. 

[CommanderAlex]

1 hour ago, Zando_ said:

Maybe power draw dates them a bit too, they will pull far more for the same performance vs something like a Ryzen 5950X. 

When I had a 10980XE, it drew a lot more power and didn't score near my 5950X. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

4 hours ago, Zando_ said:

Yep yep, mine is delidded with a custom flat IHS (original owner didn't want to lap the original IHS and yeet the serial # and such), brings down the temps overall and most importantly, the delta between cores. It's still 10-11C for me usually, but I am using an EVGA CLC and not the EK Magnitude block I have for it (still waiting for UPS resolution on the mobo damage) so the coldplate on the cooler itself is probably not perfectly flat. So a move to water for the CPU should bring those deltas down a bit. 

 

For overall temps it's... a bit eyebrow raising, but fine for gaming currently. Using the OC Robot per-core OC, it runs the cores at 4.2-4.3ish, up to 4.5 on the 4 best cores, they will peak at 96C under CB23 looping (Prime95 makes them downclock and run cooler even with AVX completely disabled, no idea why that is), but in games it doesn't break the 70s so it's good 'nuff for now. Once I actually have the mobo drama sorted I can put on a proper all-core OC with no AVX offset and see where I end up. 

Yup. I should be fine with this kind of horsepower for a while to come, but I'd imagine if I start to do any overclocking, I'll want to delid and liquid metal that sucker.

 

Also, got a tracking number for the GPU(finally), it should be here around the same time as my RAM. Finished build pics should be ready by the weekend, and I really should figure out what software EVGA uses to control their motherboard RGB...

[Crunchy Dragon]

I guess it's Thursday already. RAM arrived 2 days early

 

Sidenote: I really love EVGA's BIOS. If anything good comes from the Nvidia split, let it be more motherboards from them

[Zando_]

33 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I really love EVGA's BIOS.

Their UEFI is the best in the biz. Clear, presents the info you actually need and use in as few tabs as possible, doesn't have 47 sub-menus to navigate through. The OC robot utility actually works too, and doesn't seem to try obscenely high voltages. Their BIOS though (on X58 boards at least), that was pretty shit. All the sub-menus, eye destroying bright blue with garish text, not a fun time. ASUS was far better, clear tabs with few sub-menus and a grey/blue scheme that wasn't eyeball torture.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Ebay: your order will be arriving on Monday, November 14.

also Ebay: your order was delivered today.

 

I guess it's Monday now.

Dang, I need to give my PC a nice deep clean.

[the pudding]

19 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Ebay: your order will be arriving on Monday, November 14.

also Ebay: your order was delivered today.

 

I guess it's Monday now.

Dang, I need to give my PC a nice deep clean.

Man that's got the pretty