General Intel HEDT Xeon/i7 Discussion

[the pudding]

Isn't she beautiful!

 

[Rolling2405]

On 1/31/2023 at 4:44 PM, CommanderAlex said:

Yeah that's the thing that got me worried a bit when I read the article initially as they appear to be marketing it towards workstations with the Xeon processors. 

I am worried that since they are going to be Xeons we won't get the gaming/enthusiast motherboards like Asus ROG. We will instead get workstation boards

 

On 1/31/2023 at 5:41 PM, Crunchy Dragon said:

I mean, to be fair, X58, X79. X99, and X299 were all workstation platforms as well.

I think they were more marketed for creators and enthusiasts since the workstation platform existed alongside the Core X platform.

 

On 1/31/2023 at 5:41 PM, Crunchy Dragon said:

Seems like the Xeons are more targeted at the server space rather than the consumer workstation HEDT space that X58/X79/X99/X299 were all aimed at.

I am worried we are only getting the workstation platform we will only get workstation boards

[Crunchy Dragon]

11 hours ago, Thomas001 said:

I am worried that since they are going to be Xeons we won't get the gaming/enthusiast motherboards like Asus ROG. We will instead get workstation boards

There's not a huge difference between the two. I'm far more worried about getting server boards that don't fit in standard ATX cases.

 

https://www.asus.com/us/motherboards-components/motherboards/workstation/ws-x299-sage/

https://rog.asus.com/us/motherboards/rog-strix/rog-strix-x299-e-gaming-model/

 

In terms of features, these two boards are nearly identical. The main differences are the WS has two LAN ports, more PCIe slots, no onboard WLAN, and supports twice as much RAM.

11 hours ago, Thomas001 said:

I think they were more marketed for creators and enthusiasts since the workstation platform existed alongside the Core X platform.

A lot of X58, X79, and X99 were marketed for gamers as well(before Core X). Somewhere, I have an old Micro Center flyer touting the i7-5960X as the fastest gaming CPU on the market.

 

The obvious difference was that Intel was making Core i7s to market to gamers, enthusiasts, and creators in that case. In this case, we only know about Xeons so far.

[Zando_]

15 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

There's not a huge difference between the two. I'm far more worried about getting server boards that don't fit in standard ATX cases.

If there's a Xeon focus, then there is. Full Xeon features require a C-chipset, not X. X chipsets are more the enthusiast end with some workstation options as a cheaper alternative for folks who don't need registered ECC and such. Only C chipset boards I know of that can OC are the SR-2 and more recently the SR-3, only because Intel purpose built a Xeon for overclockers (the SR-X fizzled because Intel locked multipliers on the LGA2011 Xeons). I think Thomas' worry (and I share it a bit) is that we may only see a competitor to the Threadripper PRO lineup, which are solidly workstation chips in price, socket, and features, with enthusiasts left by the wayside again. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

6 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

I think Thomas' worry (and I share it a bit) is that we may only see a competitor to the Threadripper PRO lineup, which are solidly workstation chips in price, socket, and features, with enthusiasts left by the wayside again. 

That seems to be the main concern in this thread, shared by most of us

 

On 1/31/2023 at 8:41 PM, Crunchy Dragon said:

Workstation hardware isn't exactly my issue, that's nearly what we all run in this thread anyway. My worry is that instead of occupying the workstation space, these new Xeons will reside in the server space or the very high end workstation space. Think Epyc or the imaginary tier between Threadripper and Epyc.

 

Seems like the Xeons are more targeted at the server space rather than the consumer workstation HEDT space that X58/X79/X99/X299 were all aimed at.

 

[Rolling2405]

9 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

There's not a huge difference between the two. I'm far more worried about getting server boards that don't fit in standard ATX cases.

 

https://www.asus.com/us/motherboards-components/motherboards/workstation/ws-x299-sage/

https://rog.asus.com/us/motherboards/rog-strix/rog-strix-x299-e-gaming-model/

 

In terms of features, these two boards are nearly identical. The main differences are the WS has two LAN ports, more PCIe slots, no onboard WLAN, and supports twice as much RAM.

A lot of X58, X79, and X99 were marketed for gamers as well(before Core X). Somewhere, I have an old Micro Center flyer touting the i7-5960X as the fastest gaming CPU on the market.

 

The obvious difference was that Intel was making Core i7s to market to gamers, enthusiasts, and creators in that case. In this case, we only know about Xeons so far.

I'm pleasantly surprised that the boards are the same. But also this time it looks like we will only be getting a Xeon platform so things might be different.

 

8 hours ago, Zando_ said:

I think Thomas' worry

I was actually more worried about motherboard and platform features more than price. 

 

8 hours ago, Zando_ said:

If there's a Xeon focus, then there is. Full Xeon features require a C-chipset, not X. X chipsets are more the enthusiast end with some workstation options as a cheaper alternative for folks who don't need registered ECC and such. Only C chipset boards I know of that can OC are the SR-2 and more recently the SR-3, only because Intel purpose built a Xeon for overclockers (the SR-X fizzled because Intel locked multipliers on the LGA2011 Xeons).

I am worried about the things you mention such as possible lack of OC support.

 

(I changed my username from what it was before that's why it may look like I am a different user)

[toasty99]

On 2/13/2023 at 11:52 PM, Rolling2405 said:

I am worried that since they are going to be Xeons we won't get the gaming/enthusiast motherboards like Asus ROG. We will instead get workstation boards

 

I think they were more marketed for creators and enthusiasts since the workstation platform existed alongside the Core X platform.

 

I am worried we are only getting the workstation platform we will only get workstation boards

I think to be fair most of us got on x58 when the server supply of x5650/60/70 etc chips flooded the market and the prices hit rock bottom.

 

Then a lot of us got onto x79/x99 when those CPU prices dipped as well. 

 

The older products always contended well with the latest products because Intel kept their desktop class at 4 cores up until the 8th gen. We didn't get past 8 cores on consumer until the Ryzen 3000 series and 10th gen.

 

I mean an xeon x5650 overclocked to 4ghz lacked avx instructions, but with triple channel ddr3 sure it was still at least able to be within throwing distance of a stock Ryzen 1600. 

 

The 4930k/1650v2 could get within throwing distance of an 8700k when overclocked.

 

The 5960x/1660v3/1680v3 could get close to a stock Ryzen 3700x. 

 

My point is, most of us jump on board when the platforms come down in price and newer stuff is out. 

 

The reason x299 has been more limited in adoption is that a 10980xe can't really do much more than match a 5950x even drawing hundreds of watts more and having two more cores. The more affordable 7980xe isn't that far off the 10980xe, but again Ryzen 5000 and Intel 12th gen pricing made it a bit of a stretch to justify unless you need Pci-e lanes. Even then, 3.0 vs 4.0/5.0 on consumer platforms was something to consider depending on your use cases.

 

Honestly:

 

I'm ok with HEDT dying if consumer core counts keep going up like they have been and IPC/clocks keep going up. Seriously, the gap from 11th gen Intel to 13th gen Intel is larger than 2nd gen to 7th gen on the consumer side.

[Crunchy Dragon]

7 hours ago, toasty99 said:

The reason x299 has been more limited in adoption is that a 10980xe can't really do much more than match a 5950x even drawing hundreds of watts more and having two more cores. The more affordable 7980xe isn't that far off the 10980xe, but again Ryzen 5000 and Intel 12th gen pricing made it a bit of a stretch to justify unless you need Pci-e lanes. Even then, 3.0 vs 4.0/5.0 on consumer platforms was something to consider depending on your use cases.

X299 was a major flop compared to X99 for sure(even when it was new), the main selling point is Thunderbolt 3 and HEDT in the same machine. TB3 was on the higher end consumer boards, but if you needed more cores and more RAM, X299 was the way to go.

 

X299 and X99 both have:

all the PCIe lanes
quad channel DDR4

all the SATA ports

high core count

 

The main issue with X299 is that the prices were too high for what it offered over X99, and the performance gains not being great, without factoring how ridiculously hot Skylake-X ran, thanks to Intel's basically nonexistent TIM.

X299 is more like X99.5 than anything else.

 

Ryzen did an amazing job of killing Intel's HEDT.

7 hours ago, toasty99 said:

I mean an xeon x5650 overclocked to 4ghz lacked avx instructions, but with triple channel ddr3 sure it was still at least able to be within throwing distance of a stock Ryzen 1600.

I remember when I was overclocking my Ryzen 1600, and I couldn't beat the X5650 in Cinebench. X58 is probably the best old platform around.

[Pasi123]

I finally upgraded from the GTX 960 I've had since 2016 to a new to me GTX 1080 Strix Advanced. The difference in games is HUGE, games that barely ran on the GTX 960 at low settings now run just fine at much higher settings. Though the card might need new thermal paste, under load it runs the fans at close to 2500 RPM and the temps are around 82C with the case side panel open

 

3DMark Fire Strike. Ignore the CPU downgrade, I haven't put my better binned X5670 back in yet

https://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/29534986/fs/24012634

 

 

 

The card is thin enough to fit in with a USB 3.0 card below it. The gap is way bigger in real life than what it looks like in the picture

[Crunchy Dragon]

22 minutes ago, Pasi123 said:

I finally upgraded from the GTX 960 I've had since 2016 to a new to me GTX 1080 Strix Advanced. The difference in games is HUGE, games that barely ran on the GTX 960 at low settings now run just fine at much higher settings. Though the card might need new thermal paste, under load it runs the fans at close to 2500 RPM and the temps are around 82C with the case side panel open

Definitely repaste that sucker.

 

Nice build! I used to have a Define R5, I couldn't imagine fitting my current PC inside of it. Now update your signature >:)

[Zando_]

7 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

The main issue with X299 is that the prices were too high for what it offered over X99, and the performance gains not being great, without factoring how ridiculously hot Skylake-X ran, thanks to Intel's basically nonexistent TIM.

The add-in chip to enable CPU RAID was also a big mark against it, a loooot of people greatly disliked that. I don't think TIM was a major issue, enthusiasts are used to needing delids to push chips all the way back to the 4770/4790K or so. 

7 hours ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

I remember when I was overclocking my Ryzen 1600, and I couldn't beat the X5650 in Cinebench. X58 is probably the best old platform around.

My 5675 at ~4.4GHz even handled AC Odyssey sorta playable (sat in the pretty consistent 40s) while trying to keep up with a 1080 Ti, rather impressive for such an old chip given Odyssey has stupid CPU overhead (apparently due to how anti-piracy stuff is implemented). 

1 hour ago, Pasi123 said:

finally upgraded from the GTX 960 I've had since 2016 to a new to me GTX 1080 Strix Advanced. The difference in games is HUGE, games that barely ran on the GTX 960 at low settings now run just fine at much higher settings. Though the card might need new thermal paste, under load it runs the fans at close to 2500 RPM and the temps are around 82C with the case side panel open

Nice! 1080s are awesome, I had a pair for a while, a friend has them now and they're still kicking. They were EVGA SC models, in an SLI config the top card maxed out at 76C while pushing 2100Mhz core/max power target. That STRIX card should be a similar or better performing cooler, so it definitely needs a repaste, shouldn't be getting that hot. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

1 hour ago, Zando_ said:

The add-in chip to enable CPU RAID was also a big mark against it, a loooot of people greatly disliked that. I don't think TIM was a major issue, enthusiasts are used to needing delids to push chips all the way back to the 4770/4790K or so.

Enthusiasts, sure, but the regular people who just want the newest and shiniest things? Not so much.

[Zando_]

1 hour ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Enthusiasts, sure, but the regular people who just want the newest and shiniest things? Not so much.

If folks aren't pushing these chips then they aren't that hot. ~190W stock for a 7980XE, an appropriate big air tower should cool 'em easily. Given 13900Ks can be cooled with a 280mm AIO and those are ~250W stock, better TIM/IHS setup to be fair but I doubt that offsets 60W more power draw.

[Crunchy Dragon]

2 hours ago, Zando_ said:

If folks aren't pushing these chips then they aren't that hot. ~190W stock for a 7980XE, an appropriate big air tower should cool 'em easily. Given 13900Ks can be cooled with a 280mm AIO and those are ~250W stock, better TIM/IHS setup to be fair but I doubt that offsets 60W more power draw.

For sure, but I also feel like your typical person is gonna want to overclock their fancy shiny new CPU.

 

I dunno man

[Zando_]

4 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

For sure, but I also feel like your typical person is gonna want to overclock their fancy shiny new CPU.

 

I dunno man

Not a point I can understand well.

 

You'd need a person who isn't doing workstation tasks (as typically you don't OC for those, stability being paramount), does have $1999 for a CPU (that was MSRP when it was shiny and new) and $300-400 or so for a motherboard, doesn't have the money for a custom loop or even a good AIO to cool it, does want to dial in a pretty hefty overclock, and doesn't want to do a delid. I don't think that person is typical. Although... I could be thinking through this too thoroughly. I do see a lot of people scared off by a "big" wattage number with little understanding of what's coolable or no. So I guess people could have been ran off by that, but then it isn't like X99 is docile either when OCed. I moved to a custom loop because an NH-D15S couldn't keep a teeny tiny 6c/12t i7 5820K cool enough for my liking at 1.35v vCore, and I didn't want to drop clocks (and I planned to - and eventually did - get a 5960X so I was only going to move to a hotter CPU at some point anyways).

 

For reference on stock TIM/IHS: Tweaktown ran 4.4Ghz at 1.2v on "water cooling" but their test setup is an AIO so I assume they're referring to that: https://www.tweaktown.com/reviews/8348/intel-core-i9-7980xe-7960x-cpu-review/index.html#Overclocking-and-Power-Consumption. To be fair, they were likely running temps that would make most folks uncomfortable while doing so though.

 

[Crunchy Dragon]

14 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

Although... I could be thinking through this too thoroughly.

There's an equally strong possibility I'm underthinking it just as much

[the pudding]

21 hours ago, Zando_ said:

The add-in chip to enable CPU RAID was also a big mark against it, a loooot of people greatly disliked that. -snip-

Yeah this is the really big fly in the ointment for me, I'd have liked to just do a proper hardware NVME raid, only way around that is just to use all intel drives, or source the vroc key which is easier said than done here 

[Zando_]

Y'all we may be in for good times again: 

 

 

 

 

 

12-56c unlocked chips. OEM-only for the 8 core and below, but MSRP is $360 for the 6c/12t and I'm sure they'll be purchaseable by normal folks somehow, so possibly low-end entry point to the platform for HEDT enjoyers. W3/5s are all 64 PCIe lanes and 4-channel RAM, no silly PCIe lane cuts like older platforms, on pricing they compete with what TR was before AMD dumped it. Built on the same tech as 12th gen P-cores so they should be stupidly fast. W7/9 are 112 PCIe lanes (PCIe 5.0 instead of the 4.0 TR Pros use) and 8-channel RAM, on pricing they compete with TR Pro. They use a similar chiplet layout to TRs but closer together so hopefully lower latency. 

 

[the pudding]

I'm really hopeful for these yeah, time to remortgage the hoose lmao 

[CommanderAlex]

58 minutes ago, Zando_ said:

Y'all we may be in for good times again: 

~Snipped~

12-56c unlocked chips. OEM-only for the 8 core and below, but MSRP is $360 for the 6c/12t and I'm sure they'll be purchaseable by normal folks somehow, so possibly low-end entry point to the platform for HEDT enjoyers. W3/5s are all 64 PCIe lanes and 4-channel RAM, no silly PCIe lane cuts like older platforms, on pricing they compete with what TR was before AMD dumped it. Built on the same tech as 12th gen P-cores so they should be stupidly fast. W7/9 are 112 PCIe lanes (PCIe 5.0 instead of the 4.0 TR Pros use) and 8-channel RAM, on pricing they compete with TR Pro. They use a similar chiplet layout to TRs but closer together so hopefully lower latency. 

 

I'm surprised he did a video on this, haven't watched it yet. 

[Zando_]

17 minutes ago, CommanderAlex said:

I'm surprised he did a video on this, haven't watched it yet. 

Linus has been a pretty long-time HEDT user. His home rig was X99 for a damn good while, he bought into the TRX40 platform when AMD promised to support it too (he mentions that in this video). Given LTT's legacy of over the top X gamers 1 CPU and overkill builds, the return of zonkers HEDT is pretty appealing as well. I don't know if they ever did W-3175X coverage though, IIRC JayzTwoCents and GN did as they were battling each other for bench scores. That was the funky 28c unlocked Xeon that like... only EVGA and I think Gigabyte made mobos for, hopefully we'll see an SR-4 for the 56c chip this gen. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

My day went from "meh" to "oho" when I read this

[Kilrah]

Was hoping for higher clocks on the low core count parts, unless IPC is in another league or the unlocked parts can be pushed significantly it seems they're going to be dogs for single thread perf...

[Zando_]

8 hours ago, Kilrah said:

Was hoping for higher clocks on the low core count parts, unless IPC is in another league or the unlocked parts can be pushed significantly it seems they're going to be dogs for single thread perf...

Same core tech as 12th gen. i3 12100 is 3.3 base and 4.3 boost, so I expect these chips would land around similar single core. Perfectly usable, but not something mind blowing, though I wouldn't expect that from a Xeon. It will be interesting to see how well the -X chips overclock. 

[Slayer3032]

Last week the primary nvme in my X58 home server hit the write endurance threshold and threw a SMART error, so I quickly replaced it with a spare PM981 that I was using in my old X58 build which has begun collecting dust since I picked up a 5800x/X570 Dark Hero. When I went to boot it up again, it wasn't in good shape at all. It just kept boot looping, but this time around it was acting like it had a short and was instantly clicking off the PSU. It wasn't just cycling post codes failing to run the Mac Pro memory which is something it's always done when not shut down correctly.

 

Something seemed really off, it had been complaining of DMI errors during boot but the most recent thing I had it doing was testing some game clients just idling away so I had it set back to stock which it never liked with the Mac Pro memory. So tried clearing cmos, nothing. Pulled the battery, no change. About an hour of troubleshooting in and it finally decided to post. It detected memory in all 6 dimms but it was running in dual channel 4x4gb according to the bios. Then after exiting bios it failed to post again. Then the backup bios kicked in, said the primary was corrupted and my patched F6 bios with newer microcodes came in from the backup bios and sort of improved things but it was still down a memory channel. Definitely time for a reseat...

 

A while back I picked up a Corsair A500 when they cleared them out of amazon for $30. I messed around with it for a while and found out I could just slap the mount bars on top of my nh-d14 secufirm kit and that seemed to get the cooler to mount just fine. Everything lined up perfectly and I even got to use the oem thermal paste application which I rarely get to do. Tested it with the 180x25@1.425v overclock, got a little warm after 10-15 mins but 92-95c in a stuffy case was perfectly normal. 20c idle, max of 45c on stock clocks was bang on so I called it good. Oh boy was I so very wrong, always check your thermal paste contact on a new cooler...

 

 

Okay, so not only was it not making contact at all on the left half it was also completely bottomed out against those capacitors which for some unknown reason are taller than the IHS height by about 1-2mm. This was very not good, but kinda crazy that this mount was perfectly fine for about a year and never ran hot under normal use. I expected a dead board at this point, this thing has seen two power supplies die, liquid intentionally sprayed into it while running(killed psu#1 and 4 fans) and vcore has almost never been ran under 1.35v... It's seen like 50+ bios flashes, memory has been in and out of the third channel over a hundred times at least. It's been removed/replaced/rebuilt 20+ times. It's still doing great pushing 4,680mhz on single threaded boost.

 

Clearly this A500 is trying its best, I used to run my NH-D14 in top exhaust orientation in the OG Antec 900 and this CM Storm Scout has a top exhaust as well. I flipped the mount around but the just the edge of the cold plate was still touching those caps. I broke out the dremel and a file from the garage and knocked a good bit of the edge off down into the edge of the screws. Now it fit and had good contact on the IHS without touching anything on the board for sure. Here's a link to some extra images. https://imgur.com/a/UpRwCyw

 

I went to stick it in the case and the A500 that's just a couple sheets of paper away from the side panel was just barely hitting on the top rail of the case blocking the top A500 fan from fitting in there and preventing the board from going into the case. Luckily the adjustable fans on the A500 are actually pretty well thought out and removing one of the limiting notches on the top of the fan holder and then chopping half an inch out of the rails on the cooler side I was able to click the fan down exactly one more height adjustment perfectly clearing the top rail now. The side panel doesn't even touch, the only real downside is that the top motherboard screws are impossible to install in this case and I have to pull the PSU to tilt the board out.

 

 

So far everything seems to still be stable, the case definitely isn't my Meshify 2 or 450D with good fans so doing P95 workloads isn't really the target here. However, half the reason I drug it out again was to check out these modified bios'es that have been getting around for X58 that enable native nvme booting. There's a thread over on techpowerup which you'll have to dig through and the guy who's doing it seems to offer them for most boards. Although it seems more like he's doing them personally per board and per device for each request. Language barrier seems kinda rough here. I've seen some familiar setups posted in there although those might be from OCN.

https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/2022-x58-1366-pin-motherboards-nvme-m-2-ssd-bios-mod-collection.299867/

 

I went through all the effort of using [at]bios on windows 7 to flash a 2mb bios again since my backup bios wiped out my previous F8a bios. Sure enough, using my new spare PM981 it's right there in my boot order as if it was just a normal drive to boot from.

 

My AHCI SM951 was never recognized by the bios, DUET worked fine but there's a PM981/970 Evo right here in the boot order of a board I bought new in 2010. A board where I updated the original bios via floppy and even ran IDE disk drives in it. Absolutely wild, X58 somehow just keeps on going.