General Intel HEDT Xeon/i7 Discussion

[kaibsora]

2 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

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... 

I read that thismorning while trying to do my own research on the matter. Good read if I say so. , but I'm also reading elsewhere that the motherboards dont support anything higher than 4gb dims. Which would in theory make sense for the 24gb limit

[Zando_]

3 minutes ago, kaibsora said:

I read that thismorning while trying to do my own research on the matter. Good read if I say so. , but I'm also reading elsewhere that the motherboards dont support anything higher than 4gb dims. Which would in theory make sense for the 24gb limit

Where does it say that? If it's an X58 mobo made in 2009 ofc it'd say that, I don't think they had 8GB DDR3 DIMMs widely available for consumers, so I doubt they'd bother to put them on the supported list. 

Cause I run a V1.0 (2009) EVGA X58 Classified with the hardware mod to support Westmere-EP (soldering two sets of pins around the VRM and northbridge areas), and 3x8GB DDR3. So it supports 8GB DIMMS without a single issue, I OCed these 1600Mhz CL9 ones to around 2100Mhz CL10-11-11-36 at 1.65v. 

[kaibsora]

5 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Where does it say that? If it's an X58 mobo made in 2009 ofc it'd say that, I don't think they had 8GB DDR3 DIMMs widely available for consumers, so I doubt they'd bother to put them on the supported list. 

Cause I run a V1.0 (2009) EVGA X58 Classified with the hardware mod to support Westmere-EP (soldering two sets of pins around the VRM and northbridge areas), and 3x8GB DDR3. So it supports 8GB DIMMS without a single issue, I OCed these 1600Mhz CL9 ones to around 2100Mhz CL10-11-11-36 at 1.65v. 

Holy moly. That's alot of cow. I was reading it more and alot of people say that ddr3 48gb is definately possible. But not more. I kind of need more for my project so I'll have to look into x79 at least

[Zando_]

Just now, kaibsora said:

Holy moly. That's alot of cow. I was reading it more and alot of people say that ddr3 48gb is definately possible. But not more. I kind of need more for my project so I'll have to look into x79 at least

If your mobo has 6 DIMM slots, supports 8GB DIMMs (it will), and you use a Xeon so your IMC doesn't melt, you should be able to run 6x8. Get a dual CPU setup and do some snippety snip to your case and you should be able to smack 12x8GB on there. IIRC @WhisperingKnickers runs 6x8GB on his SR-2 without issue, that's 48GB with half the slots filled, so a 96GB feasible limit with them all populated with 8GB DIMMs (the SR-2 is chipset 5520, same as all the other LGA1366 Server/dual CPU boards). 

X79 will let you do 64GB if you run 8x8GB I guess, and there are dual CPU options available. I've seen SR-Xs for reasonable prices with 2 10c Xeons already installed, and other dual CPU boards are likely cheaper. Non-OCable X79 Xeons shouldn't cost too much either, especially lower core count ones if you don't need a massive amount of threads. 

[Slayer3032]

I run 3x4 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws, 2x8gb Kingston ValueRam 1600mhz CL11 8gb low profile and a 1x8gb stick of corsair vengeance 1866mhz on my home server for 36gb. It all happily runs at 1600mhz 9-9-9-24 in triple channel. 8GB dimms definitely work just fine.

 

Anything more than that and you're probably looking into the solid unsupported territory where it's a coin flip on what works or not for you. Something I've found to help with memory which doesn't post is to mix in some other sticks. Usually the cheapest garbage you have to get your board to try some looser timings. You'll have to swap sticks back in after you dial in your memory settings if your overclock gets rolled back but after it's all setup that shouldn't happen often.

[kaibsora]

20 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

If your mobo has 6 DIMM slots, supports 8GB DIMMs (it will), and you use a Xeon so your IMC doesn't melt, you should be able to run 6x8. Get a dual CPU setup and do some snippety snip to your case and you should be able to smack 12x8GB on there. IIRC @WhisperingKnickers runs 6x8GB on his SR-2 without issue, that's 48GB with half the slots filled, so a 96GB feasible limit with them all populated with 8GB DIMMs (the SR-2 is chipset 5520, same as all the other LGA1366 Server/dual CPU boards). 

X79 will let you do 64GB if you run 8x8GB I guess, and there are dual CPU options available. I've seen SR-Xs for reasonable prices with 2 10c Xeons already installed, and other dual CPU boards are likely cheaper. Non-OCable X79 Xeons shouldn't cost too much either, especially lower core count ones if you don't need a massive amount of threads. 

That's what I'm ultimately looking for. A cheaper x79 with pcie slots for an hba, and an amount of ram to virtualize some servers while not touching zfs ram. 

 

 

[Muhammad Osama]

8 hours ago, the pudding said:

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 

I m a noob when it comes to overclocking.. this is the first pc i am overclocking.. can you tell me how to tweek the right settings?

[Muhammad Osama]

8 hours ago, the pudding said:

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 

I want 4.5 ghz which I can't

[Troika]

On 9/10/2019 at 9:10 PM, the pudding 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 

I like the board, it has nearly all the expansion I need aside from a usb 3.0 header so I could use my front usb 3.0. I plan on picking up a USB 3.0 card because I do actually need three more usb ports, along with a few other expansion cards I plan on picking up. I have my eyes on a LSI SAS Raid controller card that can support upto 8 sata drives at 6gbps so I can have all my sata storage running at sata 3 speeds and a pci-e two slot m.2 riser card one sata and one nvme for boot and for high speed sata storage.

I have decided that I'll want to run a three way SLI or crossfire setup for this rig, though, since it'll be my primary rig for some time, I'll be getting a powerful single gpu first. I'm thinking a GTX 1080 Ti will be the most powerful thing I'll need for 1440p @ 144hz for quite some time. When I upgrade back to Ryzen, I'll get the three gpus I want to use for the multi-gpu setup. I was thinking either triple GTX 580s (most powerful single Nvidia GPUs when the i9 990X was released), GTX 680 (The obvious upgrade for the GTX 580s) or potentially the GTX 780TI (reasonably the most powerful set of gpus that could be used without a major cpu bottleneck would be a concern with more powerful options). I considered the GTX 590 and GTX 690 as options since those would allow for quad SLI but they technically aren't the best when compared to just using two single cards (580s for the former or 680 for the latter) In the case of the GTX 590, it has less memory bandwidth in its stock configuration in comparison to a reference GTX 580 due to lower memory clocks as well as lower core clocks, In the case of the GTX 690, it just has a lower core clock. That said, those dual gpus do add a certain level of "Badassness" that simply using single gpus don't on top of the fact that the stock coolers do look nicer, especially the GTX 690. That said, if I want to do any extreme overclocking, I will have to figure out how to liquid cool them and I doubt that I can find any waterblocks specific to these cards anywhere. On AMD's side, the ideal choice would be the Radeon HD 7970, specifically the 6GB model. Why the 6GB model instead of going for two HD 7990s? Because the 7990 only comes in a 3GBx2 configuration despite having faster core and memory clocks. Its hard to justify going for only a total of 3GB usable vram when the 6GB single card models exist. On top of that, the HD 7970 is extremely powerful. It definitely mops the floor with the GTX 580 and traded blows with the GTX 680 frequently and that's comparing the 3GB 7970 and the 2GB 680 at 1080p. The 6GB 7970 would probably do decently well at 1440p as well. I'll come to that particular hurdle once its closer in sight, there's plenty more important upgrades for me to aim for than replacing my Fury X at the moment. Like getting better quality memory and moving up to a i7 970.

 

Oh, there's also the inconvenient fact that my board isn't properly compatible with Xeons so I have to go with the more expensive i7 980X and 990X if I want the best chip to socket into this board. That said, now that I have a compatiblw chip in the board, the bios is much easier to live with. The system is very happy at 3.78Ghz and ~1200mhz ram. There's the weird occasional boot issue that somehow my boot drive becomes indetectable when I turn my computer on but that's easily solvable by turning the power supply switch to off and power draining the whole computer before trying to turn it on again. Its quite an odd behavior that's inconvenient but not really bothersome. Other than that, the system works perfectly fine when in use. I even managed to get Mass Effect Andromeda to place nice with it despite my phenom II 1090T just wouldn't play ball despite being similarly powerful as a i7 920 but hey, its progress. I can play it at 1080p high with the scaler set to 900p perfectly fine at 80~90fps, 1440p is a bit too much with lows going down as far as 10fps in some cases.

[the pudding]

3 hours ago, Muhammad Osama said:

I m a noob when it comes to overclocking.. this is the first pc i am overclocking.. can you tell me how to tweek the right settings?

for locking the turbo multi -1 im pretty sure it would have to be one of the second revisions of boards that came around with the 6 core parts so im not sure if your board would manage it, but you generally have to turn speedstep off and a few other settings iirc and from there it shouldn't, in theory, be able to step down from what multi you set and most boards will allow you to set one multi step below the max turbo multi 

 

3 hours ago, Muhammad Osama said:

I want 4.5 ghz which I can't

most X5670s will do 4.5 in my finding, I've yet to have one that won't do 4.5GHz with 1.4v, i got lucky with this chip though, it'll do 4.5GHz with 1.32v (though i run 1.375v so it's rock solid stable) and it'll do 4.8GHz bench stable with 1.52v (i would 100% recommend not running this kind of voltage for more than an hour or two at a time, and don't do that too often)

[the pudding]

34 minutes ago, Troika said:

I like the board, it has nearly all the expansion I need aside from a usb 3.0 header so I could use my front usb 3.0. I plan on picking up a USB 3.0 card because I do actually need three more usb ports, along with a few other expansion cards I plan on picking up. I have my eyes on a LSI SAS Raid controller card that can support upto 8 sata drives at 6gbps so I can have all my sata storage running at sata 3 speeds and a pci-e two slot m.2 riser card one sata and one nvme for boot and for high speed sata storage.

I have decided that I'll want to run a three way SLI or crossfire setup for this rig, though, since it'll be my primary rig for some time, I'll be getting a powerful single gpu first. I'm thinking a GTX 1080 Ti will be the most powerful thing I'll need for 1440p @ 144hz for quite some time. When I upgrade back to Ryzen, I'll get the three gpus I want to use for the multi-gpu setup. I was thinking either triple GTX 580s (most powerful single Nvidia GPUs when the i9 990X was released), GTX 680 (The obvious upgrade for the GTX 580s) or potentially the GTX 780TI (reasonably the most powerful set of gpus that could be used without a major cpu bottleneck would be a concern with more powerful options). I considered the GTX 590 and GTX 690 as options since those would allow for quad SLI but they technically aren't the best when compared to just using two single cards (580s for the former or 680 for the latter) In the case of the GTX 590, it has less memory bandwidth in its stock configuration in comparison to a reference GTX 580 due to lower memory clocks as well as lower core clocks, In the case of the GTX 690, it just has a lower core clock. That said, those dual gpus do add a certain level of "Badassness" that simply using single gpus don't on top of the fact that the stock coolers do look nicer, especially the GTX 690. That said, if I want to do any extreme overclocking, I will have to figure out how to liquid cool them and I doubt that I can find any waterblocks specific to these cards anywhere. On AMD's side, the ideal choice would be the Radeon HD 7970, specifically the 6GB model. Why the 6GB model instead of going for two HD 7990s? Because the 7990 only comes in a 3GBx2 configuration despite having faster core and memory clocks. Its hard to justify going for only a total of 3GB usable vram when the 6GB single card models exist. On top of that, the HD 7970 is extremely powerful. It definitely mops the floor with the GTX 580 and traded blows with the GTX 680 frequently and that's comparing the 3GB 7970 and the 2GB 680 at 1080p. The 6GB 7970 would probably do decently well at 1440p as well. I'll come to that particular hurdle once its closer in sight, there's plenty more important upgrades for me to aim for than replacing my Fury X at the moment. Like getting better quality memory and moving up to a i7 970.

 

Oh, there's also the inconvenient fact that my board isn't properly compatible with Xeons so I have to go with the more expensive i7 980X and 990X if I want the best chip to socket into this board. That said, now that I have a compatiblw chip in the board, the bios is much easier to live with. The system is very happy at 3.78Ghz and ~1200mhz ram. There's the weird occasional boot issue that somehow my boot drive becomes indetectable when I turn my computer on but that's easily solvable by turning the power supply switch to off and power draining the whole computer before trying to turn it on again. Its quite an odd behavior that's inconvenient but not really bothersome. Other than that, the system works perfectly fine when in use. I even managed to get Mass Effect Andromeda to place nice with it despite my phenom II 1090T just wouldn't play ball despite being similarly powerful as a i7 920 but hey, its progress. I can play it at 1080p high with the scaler set to 900p perfectly fine at 80~90fps, 1440p is a bit too much with lows going down as far as 10fps in some cases.

ahh brilliant! many thanks

[Muhammad Osama]

22 minutes ago, the pudding said:

for locking the turbo multi -1 im pretty sure it would have to be one of the second revisions of boards that came around with the 6 core parts so im not sure if your board would manage it, but you generally have to turn speedstep off and a few other settings iirc and from there it shouldn't, in theory, be able to step down from what multi you set and most boards will allow you to set one multi step below the max turbo multi 

 

most X5670s will do 4.5 in my finding, I've yet to have one that won't do 4.5GHz with 1.4v, i got lucky with this chip though, it'll do 4.5GHz with 1.32v (though i run 1.375v so it's rock solid stable) and it'll do 4.8GHz bench stable with 1.52v (i would 100% recommend not running this kind of voltage for more than an hour or two at a time, and don't do that too often)

i will try to tweek some setting let see what will happen

[Troika]

8 hours ago, the pudding said:

ahh brilliant! many thanks

Were you considering picking up a MSI Big Bang Xpower?

[the pudding]

46 minutes ago, Troika said:

Were you considering picking up a MSI Big Bang Xpower?

I've found one locally for £45 so I'm looking at grabbing it yeah, I know it doesn't do the 1.5x uncore thing but I run my X5670 at 2x uncore on my rampage 3 gene anyways

Edited September 12, 2019 by the pudding
rampage 3 gene not rampage 2 gene

[the pudding]

nvm, ended up winning an auction for rampage 2 gene, 3x2gb ram (this won't be used, just thrown into the spares bin) and a cpu of some description (probably a 920) for £35 shipped 

[Zando_]

3 minutes ago, the pudding said:

nvm, ended up winning an auction for rampage 2 gene, 3x2gb ram (this won't be used, just thrown into the spares bin) and a cpu of some description (probably a 920) for £35 shipped 

Ooooooo nice score! Also it's one of the classic "what is a color scheme" ones isn't it? mATX too, very nice. I have a bad habit of collecting unreasonably large X58 mobos for myself... 

[the pudding]

2 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Ooooooo nice score! Also it's one of the classic "what is a color scheme" ones isn't it? mATX too, very nice. I have a bad habit of collecting unreasonably large X58 mobos for myself... 

proper good deal, and yeah classic 'what is colour scheme' and matx yeah, will prolly pop it in a spare case with a spare psu and put it at the other halves or something similar, though this'll mean i'll have both a rampage 2 gene and a rampage 3 gene 

[Zando_]

9 minutes ago, the pudding said:

proper good deal, and yeah classic 'what is colour scheme' and matx yeah, will prolly pop it in a spare case with a spare psu and put it at the other halves or something similar, though this'll mean i'll have both a rampage 2 gene and a rampage 3 gene 

Just collect the whole series, ez. I've done something similar, I have the X58 Classy 3-Way, X58 Classy 4-Way, and the X58 Classy Super Record 2. Thankfully they're all reasonably sized motherboards and easy to fit in normal cases 

My first X58 board was a Rampage III Formula though, basically the ATX version of your boards. Hella nice mobo. 

[Crunchy Dragon]

4 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

My first X58 board was a Rampage III Formula though, basically the ATX version of your boards. Hella nice mobo. 

I have a broken Rampage II Extreme sitting with my collection of hardware

[the pudding]

12 minutes ago, Zando Bob said:

Just collect the whole series, ez. I've done something similar, I have the X58 Classy 3-Way, X58 Classy 4-Way, and the X58 Classy Super Record 2. Thankfully they're all reasonably sized motherboards and easy to fit in normal cases 

My first X58 board was a Rampage III Formula though, basically the ATX version of your boards. Hella nice mobo. 

lul i wish i had that kinda money

 

ahh yeah the R3F is a great bit of kit, i like my small towers and matx boards, which is a pain since they're usually rare and expensive XD 

[Zando_]

2 minutes ago, the pudding said:

lul i wish i had that kinda money

 

ahh yeah the R3F is a great bit of kit, i like my small towers and matx boards, which is a pain since they're usually rare and expensive XD 

Tell me about it. I'd love one of the one (1) X99 mITX boards but nobody sells them, I think @Damascus managed to get his hands on one though. Sadly there were never any mITX X58 or X79 boards made from what I can tell. 

[Damascus]

I collect ITX unicorns, AMA

[SenKa]

19 minutes ago, Damascus said:

I collect ITX unicorns, AMA

Whats your rarest ITX motherboard, as well as your weirdest/most interesting?

 

Spoiler

I haven't owned an X58 board since 2013 I'm just stopping by don't mind me.

 

[Damascus]

8 minutes ago, SenKa said:

Whats your rarest ITX motherboard, as well as your weirdest/most interesting?

 

  Hide contents

I haven't owned an X58 board since 2013 I'm just stopping by don't mind me.

 

Probably the x99e-itx for both of those.  But if we expand it out to general ITX parts, the rarest was a Vega nano and the most interesting my (also ultra rare) 92mm gentle typhoons.  Maybe my 2x92mm copper rad from a gen1 aio

[SenKa]

1 minute ago, Damascus said:

Probably the x99e-itx for both of those.  But if we expand it out to general ITX parts, the rarest was a Vega nano and the most interesting my (also ultra rare) 92mm gentle typhoons.  Maybe my 2x92mm copper rad from a gen1 aio

Jesus I bet that Vega Nano throttles like hell, I just looked it up and that cooler looks worse than the R9 Nano, which also throttled.

 

Funnily enough I was looking at that exact motherboard roughly 2 years ago for an ITX build I never did, got turned off by the price.