General Intel HEDT Xeon/i7 Discussion

[bimmerman]

I routinely got FPSs in the 50-70 range at 3440x1440 at high/ultra settings with my 4.5GHz X5675 and a 1080ti. Games like the Tomb Raider series are what I mostly play, so competitive shooter framerates I can't speak to. I also value eye candy over outright FPS, as my monitor is locked at 60Hz, so....I'd bet it would run faster on less intense settings. But I don't play games competitively so I don't care.

 

I recently built an R5 3600 system precisely because the X58 chip doesn't support AVX, and WindowsMR VR requires it. Framerates are higher and the machine is overall snappier, but not immensely so. Objectively it's an upgrade, subjectively, I should've just bought a VR headset that didn't require AVX. I didn't know until I went to plug the headset in...serves me right for not researching.

 

Anyway. Anyone built a Freenas system out of their X58? Pretty sure that's what mine is going to evolve into. Thought about unRaid but am not wild about the data array options vs a parity freenas setup.

[Slayer3032]

14 hours ago, bimmerman said:

I routinely got FPSs in the 50-70 range at 3440x1440 at high/ultra settings with my 4.5GHz X5675 and a 1080ti. Games like the Tomb Raider series are what I mostly play, so competitive shooter framerates I can't speak to. I also value eye candy over outright FPS, as my monitor is locked at 60Hz, so....I'd bet it would run faster on less intense settings. But I don't play games competitively so I don't care.

 

I recently built an R5 3600 system precisely because the X58 chip doesn't support AVX, and WindowsMR VR requires it. Framerates are higher and the machine is overall snappier, but not immensely so. Objectively it's an upgrade, subjectively, I should've just bought a VR headset that didn't require AVX. I didn't know until I went to plug the headset in...serves me right for not researching.

 

Anyway. Anyone built a Freenas system out of their X58? Pretty sure that's what mine is going to evolve into. Thought about unRaid but am not wild about the data array options vs a parity freenas setup.

I built a spare parts X58 home server running FreeNAS, FreeNAS is great until you come along trying to utilize it the way you would like just a Debian server. The Jails/Plugins are really neat but whatever you install in them is likely going to be a nightmare when it comes time to update. They're always behind the latest Plex Media Server update so you always get the stupid update prompt when you view your server. There's many things which just don't support FreeBSD very well, lately of note my certbot just decided to straight pack it up and disappear despite being installed and I can't renew my certs.

 

Bhyve is alright at best, sure it isn't ESXi or a tier 1 hypervisor or whatever they're called which if I recall Unraid falls under. It works though, well sort of works. For some unknown reason it won't boot Debian, you have to exit in the UEFI shell and go through boot maintenance>boot from file and load your grubx64.efi manually to get it to boot. I tried installing a Windows 7 VM for a trash game that only supports windows gameservers but the windows installer just errored right before finishing. Otherwise, other than that it it's fine lmao.

 

I've really been impressed that my X5660 will handle HEVC codecs without having AVX. They absolutely tear up the cpu usage but as long as you aren't trying to host more than a few concurrent Plex users with nothing but h.265 it performs fine. I stuck a $15 212 LED on my X5660 and I think it's only touched 40c once after something running in mono died. I have thought about giving it a boost up into the high 3ghz range but the thought of ZFS dying straight scares me.

 

If I were to do it again, I think I would go ESXi or Unraid because the scope of what I do with it has really kind of exceeded where FreeNAS shines. Which is far more simple and basic. If you're just looking for a NAS, FreeNAS is probably what you want. There are a lot of vocal people who have had serious problems with it over the years and don't have a very positive opinion of it though I will say.

 

[bimmerman]

11 minutes ago, Slayer3032 said:

I built a spare parts X58 home server running FreeNAS, FreeNAS is great until you come along trying to utilize it the way you would like just a Debian server. The Jails/Plugins are really neat but whatever you install into them is likely going to be a nightmare when it comes time to update them. They're always behind the latest Plex Media Server update so you always get the stupid update prompt when you view your server. There's many things which just don't support FreeBSD very well, lately of note my certbot just decided to straight pack it up and disappear despite being installed and I can't renew my certs.

 

Bhyve is alright at best, sure it isn't ESXi or a tier 1 hypervisor or whatever they're called which if I recall Unraid falls under. It works though, well sort of works. For some unknown reason it won't boot Debian, you have to exit in the UEFI shell and go through boot maintenance>boot from file and load your grubx64.efi manually to get it to boot. I tried installing a Windows 7 VM for a trash game that only supports windows gameservers but the windows installer just errored right before finishing. Otherwise, other than that it it's fine lmao.

 

I've really been impressed that my X5660 will handle HEVC codecs without having AVX. They absolutely tear up the cpu usage but as long as you aren't trying to host more than a few concurrent Plex users with nothing but h.265 it performs fine. I stuck a $15 212 LED on my X5660 and I think it's only touched 40c once after something running in mono died. I have thought about giving it a boost up into the high 3ghz range but the thought of ZFS dying or something straight scares me.

 

If I were to do it again, I think I would go ESXi or Unraid because the scope of what I do with it has really kind of exceeded where FreeNAS shines. Which is far more simple and basic. If you're just looking for a NAS, FreeNAS is probably what you want. There are a lot of vocal people who have had serious problems with it over the years and don't have a very positive opinion of it though I will say.

 

Thanks, that is good info. Definitely muddies the waters further though, which isn't a bad thing necessarily. Just more to read up on.

 

I'm debating between four options really:

1. Unraid. Not the best for data protection w/r/t parity, but more user friendly (so I hear). Also lets me play with virtualization, such as re-virtualizing the existing Windows install to rip BluRay/DVDs to the array.
2. FreeNas. Use it as a Nas and maybe a Plex server. Seems the least user friendly and very heavy on command-line, which.......I ain't got time for that if it's true. Also has major PITA-ness w/r/t backing up the NAS itself.
3. Windows 10 Pro Workstation / Server for Storage Spaces. By far the easiest solution-- just insert drives, powershell a thing, and done. Concerns about array performance and stability w/r/t updates though. Pros/cons: It's windows and I don't have to pretend to understand Linux.
4. Mothball the machine and just buy a Synology. Or do this in combination with any of the others for a backup server, at the cost of $many.

 

Also, from my limited reading, options 1 and 2 are a PITA to turn the machine off when it's not in use (i.e. 99% of the time). Option 3 is...well, windows. So that's another plus.

[Slayer3032]

33 minutes ago, bimmerman said:

Thanks, that is good info. Definitely muddies the waters further though, which isn't a bad thing necessarily. Just more to read up on.

 

I'm debating between four options really:

1. Unraid. Not the best for data protection w/r/t parity, but more user friendly (so I hear). Also lets me play with virtualization, such as re-virtualizing the existing Windows install to rip BluRay/DVDs to the array.
2. FreeNas. Use it as a Nas and maybe a Plex server. Seems the least user friendly and very heavy on command-line, which.......I ain't got time for that if it's true. Also has major PITA-ness w/r/t backing up the NAS itself.
3. Windows Server for Storage Spaces. By far the easiest solution-- just insert drives, powershell a thing, and done. Concerns about array performance and stability w/r/t updates though. Pros/cons: It's windows.
4. Mothball the machine and just buy a Synology. Or do this in combination with any of the others for a backup server, at the cost of $many.

If your only goal is Plex and NAS you wouldn't ever have to touch the command line. It's fairly user friendly and as long as you read their through documentation if you don't know what something does, it's really easy. I had never used it before going in, while I'm somewhat comfortable with Debian I've definitely made infinitely more mistakes with that including recently failing to expand my Debian partition and breaking my VM. FreeNAS, I've only broken a jail once and that was when I manually set that up. Any issues I've had have pretty much been my fault for not doing things the correct way and/or following other people doing things incorrectly.

 

FreeNAS is generally installed to a USB from an install USB. If you have a spare build sitting around with at least a single drive take an hour out and give it a spin. Mine boots off of cloned drives which you can setup after install as well.

 

Mine literally became feature creep: the box. It hosts everything for organizing my media content like Sonarr/Transmission to Nextcloud for ShareX, to a Sven Coop server(goldsrc servers idle at 20%+ of a thread lmao) and some other stuff as well. It's when you're setting up OpenVPN inside of a jail, ect. that things get pretty commandline. I also store more than half my steam library on it and removed all the sata devices from my personal rig.

 

 

As far as a Synology all I know is that I couldn't shove as many drives into one as I have space including 1 of the 5.25" bays, and more when I decide to drop like $200 into a proper sata card and 5.25" enclosures. Nor could I jam 36gb of totally mismatched DDR3(none of the 8gb sticks are the same) into it along with a X5660 that lived in my USB drive bowl for over a year. No idea what kind of software you can load on them but I built this whole thing for under $200 out of pocket including a $4.50 nvme adapter I broke the LED off of, a shucked 8TB drive and that new 550w Focus+ Gold. It is entirely spare parts, trades, ect. It even has my old SM951 in it for storing all of the jails and my old Intel 535 for the Debian VM.

[bimmerman]

1 hour ago, Slayer3032 said:

If your only goal is Plex and NAS you wouldn't ever have to touch the command line. It's fairly user friendly and as long as you read their through documentation if you don't know what something does, it's really easy. I had never used it before going in, while I'm somewhat comfortable with Debian I've definitely made infinitely more mistakes with that including recently failing to expand my Debian partition and breaking my VM. FreeNAS, I've only broken a jail once and that was when I manually set that up. Any issues I've had have pretty much been my fault for not doing things the correct way and/or following other people doing things incorrectly.

 

FreeNAS is generally installed to a USB from an install USB. If you have a spare build sitting around with at least a single drive take an hour out and give it a spin. Mine boots off of cloned drives which you can setup after install as well.

 

Mine literally became feature creep: the box. It hosts everything for organizing my media content like Sonarr/Transmission to Nextcloud for ShareX, to a Sven Coop server(goldsrc servers idle at 20%+ of a thread lmao) and some other stuff as well. It's when you're setting up OpenVPN inside of a jail, ect. that things get pretty commandline. I also store more than half my steam library on it and removed all the sata devices from my personal rig.

 

 

 

As far as a Synology all I know is that I couldn't shove as many drives into one as I have space including 1 of the 5.25" bays, and more when I decide to drop like $200 into a proper sata card and 5.25" enclosures. Nor could I jam 36gb of totally mismatched DDR3(none of the 8gb sticks are the same) into it along with a X5660 that lived in my USB drive bowl for over a year. No idea what kind of software you can load on them but I built this whole thing for under $200 out of pocket including a $4.50 nvme adapter I broke the LED off of, a shucked 8TB drive and that new 550w Focus+ Gold. It is entirely spare parts, trades, ect. It even has my old SM951 in it for storing all of the jails and my old Intel 535 for the Debian VM.

Ok cool, that's encouraging. Freenas is high on my list of ideal systems because of ZFS and data security. I'm just not sure it's the right option given how (I've read, at least) it doesn't really play nice with backup drives or other systems. Is there a jail/docker that can rip from a blu ray drive and store it on the array? Would like to use the machine to do that in addition to being a NAS box.

 

Regardless of Unraid/Freenas/Windows Server, my current plan is toss in a 10GbE and SAS card (+drives) in addition to the existing pcie-NVMe adapter and GPU (hooray X58 PCIe lanes!). I just don't trust my flaky mobo sata implementation and it only has a single 1GbE port.

[asand1]

Considering selling my Sabertooth X58, X5680, and 24gb 1600 RAM. Does $200 USD sound like a good price for a quick sale?

[Zando_]

1 minute ago, asand1 said:

Considering selling my Sabertooth X58, X5680, and 24gb 1600 RAM. Does $200 USD sound like a good price for a quick sale?

Oh yeah, the mobos alone will go for that, with a CPU and 3x8GB (I assume, otherwise 6x4GB?) RAM it should sell ez.

[asand1]

6x4gb with IO shield and original box.

[Slayer3032]

24 minutes ago, bimmerman said:

Ok cool, that's encouraging. Freenas is high on my list of ideal systems because of ZFS and data security. I'm just not sure it's the right option given how (I've read, at least) it doesn't really play nice with backup drives or other systems. Is there a jail/docker that can rip from a blu ray drive and store it on the array? Would like to use the machine to do that in addition to being a NAS box.

 

Regardless of Unraid/Freenas/Windows Server, my current plan is toss in a 10GbE and SAS card (+drives) in addition to the existing pcie-NVMe adapter and GPU (hooray X58 PCIe lanes!). I just don't trust my flaky mobo sata implementation and it only has a single 1GbE port.

I tried importing some NTFS drives to it and had absolutely zero luck, maybe they would work better via USB or something but importing drives is kind of pointless since they wouldn't be ZFS. I've always just transferred anything across the network from my computer, while pretty gross it was the easiest way I found. FreeNAS doesn't have the best hardware support, honestly I'm not even 100% sure if it supports gpu encoding with Plex Pass since I don't have it. There are some 10gig cards it doesn't support but I think that's being significantly improved with FreeNAS 12 that's in beta or something currently.

 

If you're wanting docker support, you're suggested to install RancherOS in Bhyve if I recall. Jails are not docker, although to an end user the end result is somewhat similar. The only officially supported jails are PluginV2's which are just officially supported jail configs. I wasn't ever able to get them to update through the UI but if you enable the pkg package manager on them you can just toss pkg update/pkg upgrade at them and that works for a few days until PMS updates again and doesn't get pushed to the repos for a little while.

[Ground]

are people still paying that amount of money for standard 1366 boards? In Germany low-endish boards (basic P6T, ud3r, msi x58 pro, foxconn flaming blade) go for ~50-60€ now, mid tier boards maybe 90€, older high end boards (R2E, Ud7) for 120€ ish and the very very best boards for 150ish (x58a-oc, R3E, though even these can be found for less)... Zen 2 and dropping mem pricing put a serious hit in the value of x58 as a platform...

[MaratM]

18 hours ago, Ground said:

are people still paying that amount of money for standard 1366 boards? In Germany low-endish boards (basic P6T, ud3r, msi x58 pro, foxconn flaming blade) go for ~50-60€ now, mid tier boards maybe 90€, older high end boards (R2E, Ud7) for 120€ ish and the very very best boards for 150ish (x58a-oc, R3E, though even these can be found for less)... Zen 2 and dropping mem pricing put a serious hit in the value of x58 as a platform...

It is not just zen2, even intel i5 8400/9400/F is can deliver the same level of performance (out of the box with a stock intel cooler for $130 brand new and with a warranty) as x58 and if you add a Z board 170/270/370 you can get a bit more by oc ram. The x58 becomes a enthusiast thing unless you have a few sticks of ddr3 and the motherboard for free or next to nothing. (I was lucky and sold my p6t with x5680 for $150)

[Windows7ge]

After a month of BS dealing with NEMIX I have finally achieved:

 

Dual Channel, x2, with 64GB DIMMs

[Crunchy Dragon]

6 hours ago, Windows7ge said:

After a month of BS dealing with NEMIX I have finally achieved:

 

Dual Channel, x2, with 64GB DIMMs

What an absolute madlad

[Windows7ge]

1 hour ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

What an absolute madlad

Next step, something you rarely see anymore. Triple Channel, x2, 384GB. Before that though the servers getting a different kind of upgrade. I think I shared photos of it already. There's no place to put 3.5" storage. I need to offload about 4TB of video footage from the SSD pool to a more longer term archival storage. So, I'm going to build a DAS.

 

You have people with USB3 external storage, you have USB3.1 external storage, heck you even have USB Type C external storage. Forget all of those, what you need to do is get yourself one of these:

Mini-SAS SFF-8088. Branded capable of 3GB/s (24Gbit) but I'm convinced she may be capable of 6GB/s (48Gbit). This will make a great expansion to the C612 server. I have the DAS itself, I had the SFF-8087 to SFF-8088 adapter. All that's missing is the SAS expander which will break the 3GB/s|6GB/s bandwidth into 32 individual SAS/SATA port. Each will be limited to about <100MB/s but as you create larger and larger pools and RAID them together you achieve extremely dense storage at very high speeds.

[Crunchy Dragon]

19 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

Mini-SAS SFF-8088. Branded capable of 3GB/s (24Gbit) but I'm convinced she may be capable of 6GB/s (48Gbit).

Honestly, one of those bad boys would probably be nicer than a NAS.

[Windows7ge]

9 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Honestly, one of those bad boys would probably be nicer than a NAS.

NAS - Network Attached Storage

DAS - Direct Attached Storage

 

It's a NAS but directly attached. It doesn't use network based protocols. It's direct SAS communication so you want to talk about access times this'll have you covered. You can build one yourself. The specific hardware would cost you ~$75 then you can improvise everything else. Make it so you can house all your HDDs separate from your tower.

[Crunchy Dragon]

Just realized our boy Alex is on X99: https://linustechtips.com/main/profile/481883-alexthegreatish/

 

I wonder if we can get him in here...

[the pudding]

On 9/2/2019 at 6:58 AM, Troika said:

 

aside from the no 1.5x uncore setting how have you gotten on with that board? my X5670 can run 2x uncore without any issues anyways till about 1800MHz ram and i never run more than 4.5GHz anyways so if i can lock the turbo multi in then that makes things easier, reason i ask is that there's one dirt cheap on ebay locally so im tempted to grab it for my main system since i need more pcie slots and then i can offload the rampage 3 gene to the other halves or keep as spare or something, either that or grab a 'kinda dead' R3E for the same price 

[Muhammad Osama]

Hey guyz..

 

I have a asus p6t x58 mobo with an x5670 on it.. i overclocked it from 3.3 ghz turbo to 4.2 ghz.. and uncore at 3.4ghz and ram at 2000mhz here are the settings.. 

Vcore at 1.38v

Uncore at 1.45v

Ram bus 1.64v

Pll 1.90v

Multi 22x

Bclk 191

 

I tried to lower the coltage on each thing one by one but I can't get voltage lower then this.. and also i can't achieve 4.4 even at 1.4v and i cannot give it more voltages because my coolermaster masterair ma410p complains on that..

 

EDIT: i also wanted to know about my one problem.. my bios allow me to set the multi at 24x but it doesn't stick to that.. i mean when i boot into windows it show 24x multi but when ever the cpu usage go more then 3-4% it drops the multi to 22x? Any help on that?

[unclewebb]

22X is the default multiplier for the X5670.  Any multiplier higher than this requires that Turbo Boost be enabled.  When 1 or 2 cores are active, it can use a 25X multiplier but this is only available if you have enabled the C states in the bios, core C3 or core C6. 

 

When 3 or more cores are active, it can use the 24 multiplier as long as the CPU is within the TDP / TDC limits.  This is a locked processor so these limits are likely locked.  If you try to run Prime95 or a similar test on all 6 cores, you will probably be limited by the TDP / TDC settings.

 

Some monitoring software does not accurately report these early Core i CPUs.  If you want a much more accurate look at what your multiplier is doing, give ThrottleStop a try.  It closely follows the Intel recommended monitoring method.  Most other monitoring programs do not.

 

https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-throttlestop/

 

It will also show you what C states your CPU is using and what your TDP / TDC limits are set to and if they are locked.

[the pudding]

51 minutes ago, unclewebb said:

22X is the default multiplier for the X5670.  Any multiplier higher than this requires that Turbo Boost be enabled.  When 1 or 2 cores are active, it can use a 25X multiplier but this is only available if you have enabled the C states in the bios, core C3 or core C6. 

 

 

if you tweak the right settings in (it will vary from bios to bios) you can lock the turbo multi -1 across all cores, this is what I'm running on my X5670, this is under OCCT load 

[kaibsora]

So I have a question. Is the max ram support for x58 24gb? Or is there larger amounts that can work?

[Zando_]

Just now, kaibsora said:

So I have a question. Is the max CPU support for x58 24gb? Or is there larger amounts that can work?

I think that's the official Intel limit at the time they were released, pretty sure some can run 48GB though that may be dual socket setups (official limit for the SR-2 is 48GB but again, pretty sure people run higher since there's higher cap DDR3 DIMMs made after the board came out). I know you can run 3x8GB just fine for 24GB, doubt there'd be too many issues running 6x8GB (or 12x8GB on a dual socket system). If I had more ECC-Reg I'd try it, but I only have 3x8GB for my server board, pretty sure I can't mix normal DDR3 and Registered ECC DIMMS together (unregistered wouldn't have issues AFAIK). 

[kaibsora]

Just now, Zando Bob said:

I think that's the official Intel limit at the time they were released, pretty sure some can run 48GB though that may be dual socket setups (official limit for the SR-2 is 48GB but again, pretty sure people run higher since there's higher cap DDR3 DIMMs made after the board came out). I know you can run 3x8GB just fine for 24GB, doubt there'd be too many issues running 6x8GB (or 12x8GB on a dual socket system). If I had more ECC-Reg I'd try it, but I only have 3x8GB for my server board, pretty sure I can't mix normal DDR3 and Registered ECC DIMMS together (unregistered wouldn't have issues AFAIK). 

Because if I'm going to be running freenas and vms, I need a high amount of ram to play nicely with both...

 

The board that i was looking at is the msi x58-proE

[Zando_]

2 minutes ago, kaibsora said:

Because if I'm going to be running freenas and vms, I need a high amount of ram to play nicely with both...

 

The board that i was looking at is the msi x58-proE

http://wp.xin.at/archives/880

Apparently it should work since there's technically a limit of 64GB on the i7's IMC, and a cool, casual 1TB (2TB in a dual CPU config) on the Xeons...