General Intel HEDT Xeon/i7 Discussion

[Xa3phod]

A FYI. I tested the Asus Rampage III Formula. Even with a Xeon X5670, it will not show more than 24gigs of ram. I wonder if I installed another bios would it take more? No idea.

[Ground]

Rampage II Extreme has arrived. No to figure out what does what, cause everything has a differnent name then on my MSI board... I need at least 240 BCLK on 32nm out of it to make it a worthwhile upgrade...

[kelvinhall05]

So after around 30 minutes of tweaking, I managed to push my i7-950 on an Asus Sabertooth X58 with an H100i V2 to 3.7GHz at 1.4V. Do you guys think I could go higher? It's my first time overclocking, so how much should I increase the voltage in one "step"? I didn't mess with the voltage, just messed with the CPU multiplier till it was as high as it could go without crashing. Thanks!

[Pasi123]

9 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

So after around 30 minutes of tweaking, I managed to push my i7-950 on an Asus Sabertooth X58 with an H100i V2 to 3.7GHz at 1.4V. Do you guys think I could go higher? It's my first time overclocking, so how much should I increase the voltage in one "step"? I didn't mess with the voltage, just messed with the CPU multiplier till it was as high as it could go without crashing. Thanks!

1.4V? I think that's too much. I currently have my X5670 @ 4.32GHz 1.35V. And you probably could get it to higher than 3.7GHz even at 1.3-1.35V.

[kelvinhall05]

4 minutes ago, Pasi123 said:

1.4V? I think that's too much. I currently have my X5670 @ 4.32GHz 1.35V. And you probably could get it to higher than 3.7GHz even at 1.3-1.35V.

I could be wrong, I'll check in the BIOS, but I just opened up HWMonitor since it was faster.

[kelvinhall05]

8 minutes ago, Pasi123 said:

1.4V? I think that's too much. I currently have my X5670 @ 4.32GHz 1.35V. And you probably could get it to higher than 3.7GHz even at 1.3-1.35V.

OK, some results here. Turns out that the clockspeed is actually 3.79GHz, and the voltage is set to auto. I believe the 1.4V was actually my memory voltage, not my CPU, but I, to my knowledge, have no way of seeing my CPU voltage in the BIOS since it's set to auto.

 

EDIT: Damn, CPU voltage is sitting at 1.408V. Yikes. Should I try and lower that? Is there a possibility of killing my system by undervolting?

[Ground]

10 hours ago, kelvinhall05 said:

OK, some results here. Turns out that the clockspeed is actually 3.79GHz, and the voltage is set to auto. I believe the 1.4V was actually my memory voltage, not my CPU, but I, to my knowledge, have no way of seeing my CPU voltage in the BIOS since it's set to auto.

 

EDIT: Damn, CPU voltage is sitting at 1.408V. Yikes. Should I try and lower that? Is there a possibility of killing my system by undervolting?

 

First gen i7s should be fine with 1.4V with decent cooling. But leaving voltages on auto is never a good idea - set those to manual and then continue. I mostly play with 32nm xeons (those usually need less voltage - I have an e5640 that clocks to 4.8 at 1.4V, though it needs more to be stable, its stable at 4.5 with 1.4V), but 3.8-4.0 should be possible with 1.4V.

 

The Rampage II is better than I expected from the HWBot results (which averaged around 235 BCLK max); with my current GPU I max out at 253 BCLK, but I think with an AMD GPU I might gain a bit more headroom. With some better cooling I can probably take this chip to 5 GHz and beyond... (well, I already had it at 5.04 on my MSI board, but here I have more multiplier options...)

And given that I got an 100€ offer for my MSI board, I'll be even on this trade - 5 Phases + crappy heatsinks to 16 Phases + better heatsinks for free

[bejamartins]

I created a thread but was pointed out to ask in here, I have aAsus  P6T SE board and got a Xeon X5670. The board doesn't officially support Xeons but many people, including in this forum claimed they have it working.

I put in the CPU, reset CMOS and turn on. The fans spin but not output. BIOS version is 2208. Am I missing something or the CPU is fried?

Thanks in advance for any help.

[kelvinhall05]

45 minutes ago, bejamartins said:

I created a thread but was pointed out to ask in here, I have aAsus  P6T SE board and got a Xeon X5670. The board doesn't officially support Xeons but many people, including in this forum claimed they have it working.

I put in the CPU, reset CMOS and turn on. The fans spin but not output. BIOS version is 2208. Am I missing something or the CPU is fried?

Thanks in advance for any help.

You might need to update BIOS, but that could be the latest version.

[bejamartins]

44 minutes ago, kelvinhall05 said:

You might need to update BIOS, but that could be the latest version.

It is and it is the same that people using Xeon's say they are. I read somewhere people suggesting flashing BIOS from other P6T variants (2209 from P6T Deluxe, I believe P6T actually, although for the original P6T, Xeons are also not officially compatible), but that sounds a straightway to brick it. Or is there some particularly to the P6T family I don't know?  P6T actually, although for the original P6T, Xeons are also not officially compatible).

[Ground]

@bejamartins Have you tried booting with a 920 after putting in the xeon, booting, setting Vcore to 1.3V and then swapping to the xeon? Some boards mess up voltage the first time they get a xeon, I had that issue with my Rampage II Extreme.

 

Anyone here got any advice for BCLK beyond 253? Both of my boards were able to boot into windows with 253, but anything beyond that doesn't work at all. PCIe is 117, any higher and my GPU stops working.

 

BOOM! 259 MHz BCLK with a different CPU - I guess my e5640 maxes out at 253, but my e5649 can handle 259  https://valid.x86.fr/v15ddb

[panther420]

21 hours ago, bejamartins said:

It is and it is the same that people using Xeon's say they are. I read somewhere people suggesting flashing BIOS from other P6T variants (2209 from P6T Deluxe, I believe P6T actually, although for the original P6T, Xeons are also not officially compatible), but that sounds a straightway to brick it. Or is there some particularly to the P6T family I don't know?  P6T actually, although for the original P6T, Xeons are also not officially compatible).

Some boards just don't like the Xeons. I so far have yet to get any ram configuration working properly enough to allow me to install an operating system with my X5650 on my Gigabyte EX58-UD5, see this post: 

 

[Ground]

Btw, anyone here who got a board running again that doesn't display anything but fans and HDD spin up (and keep running)? I've tried lots of things, including different cpus (e5640, i7 920, both working in other boards), different GPUs (GTX 670, 8600 GT, both working in other boards), RAM in various slots, removal of BIOS Battery, bios reset jumper (even changed it for a different jumper to confirm it isn't broken), holding the power button for a minute or two with everything unplugged etc.

Would be great if I could get it working some way, would be cool as a second board...

[bejamartins]

15 hours ago, Ground said:

@bejamartins Have you tried booting with a 920 after putting in the xeon, booting, setting Vcore to 1.3V and then swapping to the xeon? Some boards mess up voltage the first time they get a xeon, I had that issue with my Rampage II Extreme.

 

I haven't. I can try that next Saturday. But the voltage configuration won't go away as soon as I reset CMOS?

[Ground]

Decided to give my useless i7 920 another go at frequency. Its a c1, so it clocks rather terrible. Needed 1.875V for 4.672 GHz - in a very unstable way (needed 3 reboots to get a validation file saved)...

http://valid.x86.fr/d6bbcm 

[NoxiousOdor]

I got my EVGA SR-2 running last night. I haven't overclocked yet because I was up really late and was too tired but in any case I am pretty excited

 

I will possibly be posting in here for help when I do begin the overclocking process. I will also have a build log up soon because I was able to do some neat case mods to get the hugeness of the sr-2 into a nzxt s340 case

[Xa3phod]

Well. Update on my project. X5670 on an Asus Rampage III Formula and 16 gigs of DDR3 1600 ram in dual channel with a GTX1060 with 3gigs of ram.

Originally, I just raised the multiplier to 24, which is max and managed 3.2Ghz. I finally got XMP to work and boot, managed 4.233Ghz!!! The performance is really amazing!! (I had to raise the voltage to 1.36 for the CPU)

 

On Cinabench R15 it scored:

OpenGL: 98.55FPS

CPU:941

CPU (Single): 126

 

This is a huge upgrade in performance from before.

Also ran Novabench               

The score went from 1863 to 2208!       

 

Max temp was 84C to 86C across the cores under stress, they average 47C to 53C at idle.

 

I think that is great.

 

If you compare the Cinabench scores to my main rig (I7-6700K OCed to 4.6Ghz, 16gigs DDR4 ram, and a R9 Fury X)

148.24FPS

1017 CPU

188 CPU (single)

 

That is pretty close! For a CPU I paid $40 for and $80 for the board. I had the ram sitting in my 2500K build my wife used.                                                                                                                                                                             

Edited January 10, 2018 by Xa3phod
Uploaded photos!

[NoxiousOdor]

1 hour ago, Xa3phod said:

Well. Update on my project. X5670 on an Asus Rampage III Formula and 16 gigs of DDR3 1600 ram in dual channel with a GTX1060 with 3gigs of ram.

Originally, I just raised the multiplier to 24, which is max and managed 3.2Ghz. I finally got XMP to work and boot, managed 4.233Ghz!!! The performance is really amazing!! (I had to raise the voltage to 1.36 for the CPU)

 

On Cinabench R15 it scored:

OpenGL: 98.55FPS

CPU:941

CPU (Single): 126

 

This is a huge upgrade in performance from before.

Also ran Novabench               

The score went from 1863 to 2208!       

 

Max temp was 84C to 86C across the cores under stress, they average 47C to 53C at idle.

 

I think that is great.

 

If you compare the Cinabench scores to my main rig (I7-6700K OCed to 4.6Ghz, 16gigs DDR4 ram, and a R9 Fury X)

148.24FPS

1017 CPU

188 CPU (single)

 

That is pretty close! For a CPU I paid $40 for and $80 for the board. I had the ram sitting in my 2500K build my wife used.                                                                                                                                                                             

 

 

That is super cool! I am glad to see that everything is working well! That is a really big jump in perfomance

[Ground]

After my e5640 refused to cooperate for x265 I decided I had enough of it and went ahead, maxed out the multiplier, disabled all but one core and went up on the BCLK. On my old MSI board it had needed 1.6V for 5.0 - so I decided to start there again. Oddly enough, I didn't run into issues until 5.3 GHz, where it refused to boot with them (looks like the MSI board had some voltage stability problems in that range - no surprise with a 5 Phase...). Upped it to 1.65V, continued on; maxed out at 5.50 with that. I had given other e5640s 1.7V before, so I decided to go all out - 1.675V didn't take me anywhere, but 1.7V brought me all the way to 5.577 GHz - 22x253; the absolute limit for this chip I had found on this board. https://valid.x86.fr/ek1wqm

 

Now I wonder what my e5649 can do... Max multiplier is also 22, and its BCLK maxes out at 260...

[Brennan Price]

Just recently moved to a Xeon X5670 with an Asus P6T6 WS revolution from an FM2+ Athlon 860K build. The performance gain was insane, this is even before I have started overclocking.

 

Can't wait to add more GPU's to my build!

[NoxiousOdor]

7 minutes ago, Ground said:

After my e5640 refused to cooperate for x265 I decided I had enough of it and went ahead, maxed out the multiplier, disabled all but one core and went up on the BCLK. On my old MSI board it had needed 1.6V for 5.0 - so I decided to start there again. Oddly enough, I didn't run into issues until 5.3 GHz, where it refused to boot with them (looks like the MSI board had some voltage stability problems in that range - no surprise with a 5 Phase...). Upped it to 1.65V, continued on; maxed out at 5.50 with that. I had given other e5640s 1.7V before, so I decided to go all out - 1.675V didn't take me anywhere, but 1.7V brought me all the way to 5.577 GHz - 22x253; the absolute limit for this chip I had found on this board. https://valid.x86.fr/ek1wqm

 

Now I wonder what my e5649 can do... Max multiplier is also 22, and its BCLK maxes out at 260...

It is amazing what can happen when you decide to go ham. That is really fast

[NoxiousOdor]

2 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

Just recently moved to a Xeon X5670 with an Asus P6T6 WS revolution from an FM2+ Athlon 860K build. The performance gain was insane, this is even before I have started overclocking.

 

Can't wait to add more GPU's to my build!

Nice! with overclocking you should be able to get an even bigger jump in performance

[Brennan Price]

2 minutes ago, WhisperingKnickers said:

Nice! with overclocking you should be able to get an even bigger jump in performance

I have a hugeeeee Enermax ets-t40 for the overclocking, I will just wait till I get a new GPU until I overclock. Plus I erm, need to figure out the entirety of the BIOS haha

[NoxiousOdor]

3 minutes ago, Brennan_Price said:

I have a hugeeeee Enermax ets-t40 for the overclocking, I will just wait till I get a new GPU until I overclock. Plus I erm, need to figure out the entirety of the BIOS haha

That is a big cooler! I have the Noctua NH-U12DXi4 and a Noctua NH-U9DXi4 and I am hoping they will do well when I start overclocking. I just recently started learning how

[Brennan Price]

1 minute ago, WhisperingKnickers said:

That is a big cooler! I have the Noctua NH-U12DXi4 and a Noctua NH-U9DXi4 and I am hoping they will do well when I start overclocking. I just recently started learning how

Dawm they are pretty decent coolers too. I need to find a cheap cooler for my second rig with a Xeon E5620 too. I'll turn that build into a video editing rig for my bro eventually though