SR-2 Optimization Thread

Tobit is now folding at 211 BCLK x18 for 3.8 GHz on his pair of extra sassy L5640's.

moar details coming soon but first frame is two seconds faster than his best frame so far on the same WU and two seconds can actually mean some decent PPD with bigadv. So, as long as frame times are fairly consistent as this continues, and the NIC stays alive, Tobit will be pleased.

:cool:
 
The overclock has gone to his head. Referring to himself in 3rd person...
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
Dresses in Purple, refers to himself in the third person... uh oh, we could be looking at "The Folder formerly known as Tobit".

prince-symbol-guitar.jpg


PS: Keep pushing it Tobit..
 
To the wickedly insane SR-2 tweakers :p
MIBW, jebo, tobit, you know who you are...

Shopping for SR-2 RAM...For better TPF, should I look @ lower CAS, or simply higher RAM speeds?
I've skimmed all 20+ pages, but after too many drinks, I couldn't find it. :(

may i be worthy said:
... uh oh, we could be looking at "The Folder formerly known as Tobit".
Click to expand...
LMAO :D
 
High clocks all the way. Get some 2000+ ram because your spending enough on the rig already so you might as well use it to it's full potential. You should be able to get away with purchasing 6x1GB dimms and get higher clocks for cheap though you'll have to confirm this with "them".
 
Jmtyra said:
Shopping for SR-2 RAM...For better TPF, should I look @ lower CAS, or simply higher RAM speeds?
Click to expand...
I'd worry about timings last. Get the fastest, lowest density, modules you can as the lower density modules seem to put less stress on the memory controllers (low density also confirmed by an EVGA tech). In my case, I went with two Kingston HyperX 3GB DDR3-2000 kits and couldn't be happier. I am now running them just a tad over DDR3-2100 at this BCLK.
 
As always, you folks rock. Thank you for the info guys! :D

Also, good to know about the density bit...I wasn't sure, but it's good to know.

Fold on! :)
 
Since the disable NUMA trick, ram speeds are far less important. What is important is how high a baseclock you can run at. (turning off turbo and going higher - not really an option on lower multi chips where you need every x1 you can get)

I would stay away from 48GB unless you really really need it. - too much stress on memory controller.

I am doing fine with "1600" ram running at 2050. Tobits rig seems to be golden so at this point I would recommend his ram. SR2s seem to like Kingston.

Edit: Geez - multi ninja'd!
 
Ok tried Tobits settings from a few pages back and I can boot at 200BLCK with everything else on Auto.

But when i put a full load on it, my NV display driver fails and the recovery times out = BSOD because of GPU driver.

Not sure what i should do to fix this? Any ideas?
What PCIe slot do you guys run your GPU in?
 
I was running mine in slot #1 and #3 but my rig is only quads, and it's not pushed as hard as the pros. YMMV.
 
I'm just starting to read all the thread to get an idea on how to clock an SR-2.

MoBo and CPU's, X5650's, arrived yesterday.
Case should arrive today if it doesn't snow to badly.
I've already got Ram, PSU & Vid card from the old farm.

So I need to tweak the old fard, remove vid cards to drop power draw.
Then build my new boxen.

Luck ............. :D
[H]
 
Tigerbiten said:
I'm just starting to read all the thread to get an idea on how to clock an SR-2.

MoBo and CPU's, X5650's, arrived yesterday.
Case should arrive today if it doesn't snow to badly.
I've already got Ram, PSU & Vid card from the old farm.

So I need to tweak the old fard, remove vid cards to drop power draw.
Then build my new boxen.

Luck ............. :D
[H]
Click to expand...

Finally another x5650 I can actually help with!

4.0 overclock here http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1036089513&postcount=7
4.2 overclock here http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1036223866&postcount=142

Both of these are a bit out of date, since refined. 4.2 was a bit frustrating - it needs a bit more vcore than what is posted back then to be 100% stable through bastard units like 6701 - and those predated unlocked uncore BIOS - so the 16x did not actually do anything - it was actually at 20x.

I am working on updated screenies with latest battle tested settings that have survived a few months... be up soon.
 
may i be worthy said:
Finally another x5650 I can actually help with!

4.0 overclock here http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1036089513&postcount=7
4.2 overclock here http://hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1036223866&postcount=142

Both of these are a bit out of date, since refined. 4.2 was a bit frustrating - it needs a bit more vcore than what is posted back then to be 100% stable through bastard units like 6701 - and those predated unlocked uncore BIOS - so the 16x did not actually do anything - it was actually at 20x.

I am working on updated screenies with latest battle tested settings that have survived a few months... be up soon.
Click to expand...

Hey! I exist too :p I wouldn't mind seeing some newer settings/results as well.
 
Tigerbiten said:
I'm just starting to read all the thread to get an idea on how to clock an SR-2.

MoBo and CPU's, X5650's, arrived yesterday.
Case should arrive today if it doesn't snow to badly.
I've already got Ram, PSU & Vid card from the old farm.

So I need to tweak the old fard, remove vid cards to drop power draw.
Then build my new boxen.

Luck ............. :D
[H]
Click to expand...

I knew it was just a matter of time...

Welcome to the club Tiger!
 
nitrobass24 said:
Ok tried Tobits settings from a few pages back and I can boot at 200BLCK with everything else on Auto.

But when i put a full load on it, my NV display driver fails and the recovery times out = BSOD because of GPU driver.

Not sure what i should do to fix this? Any ideas?
What PCIe slot do you guys run your GPU in?
Click to expand...

Mine are both in slot #1. Have you touched your PCI-e clock speed at all? Maybe downclock PCI-e a bit? I have never had a video card driver crash on either of mine.
 
musky said:
Mine are both in slot #1. Have you touched your PCI-e clock speed at all? Maybe downclock PCI-e a bit? I have never had a video card driver crash on either of mine.
Click to expand...

I had a truckload of GPU driver crashes/GPU artifacts on SR2#1 when I was running at uncore 19x or 20x. Since I accepted reality and stayed at uncore 18x they have cleared up. So my thought is to drop uncore one or two notches. YMMV. EDIT - also I had some GPU artifacts and slowdowns when my mem timings were a fraction too tight.
 
211 BCLK still going strong at 48% -- will go for 212 BCLK when this WU finishes.

2mmhiye.jpg
 
I do have so interesting notes from my latest session. While running stable at 206bclk I've got the [email protected]. [email protected]. Unlike some of the others, I can't even get booted into windows at 211, it hard locks at the windows logo and requires a reboot.
Those voltages are quite a bit lower than I had before. I was using 1.45 and 1.4. I don't know why, but I'm seeing over 15sec faster TPF. I'm down to 16:44 TPF on my 6900wu. That's 90k PPD from old quad cores. (New personal record btw)

I still can't get my ram stable at the rated settings. I have the corsair dominator 1gb sticks, 8-8-8-20 DDR3 1600. But I'm only stable at 8-9-9-24 1630. Is is because of the higher bclk's? I'm capped at 2:8 it seems so that limits my testing.
 
Jmtyra at this point I would recommend tobit's ram too. 1gb sticks might be the key as well.

Tiger its good to see you on the prowl :)
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
Confident that 211 BCLK is stable having returned one bigadv and a few normal SMP units, Tobit has decided to push on [H]arder. He first tried a 214 BCLK but the onboard NIC died soon after loading up all cores to 100%. Tobit is now at 213 BCLK and all appears well and he's currently folding a bigadv.

moar later... 213 however may be his limit.

Edit: onboard NIC problems have returned at 213 BCLK as well. Time to install the dedicated Intel NIC I believe.

:cool:
 
Last edited:
nimbyfaygo said:
I do have so interesting notes from my latest session. While running stable at 206bclk I've got the [email protected]. [email protected]. Unlike some of the others, I can't even get booted into windows at 211, it hard locks at the windows logo and requires a reboot.
Those voltages are quite a bit lower than I had before. I was using 1.45 and 1.4. I don't know why, but I'm seeing over 15sec faster TPF. I'm down to 16:44 TPF on my 6900wu. That's 90k PPD from old quad cores. (New personal record btw)
Click to expand...

Fascinating. I woinder if you are seeing what I am - phantom occassional boots that result in faster times. My fastest rig SR2#3 had one magic day where it would bench 10:48. But I cannot get that back. I photograph my BIOS screens, I know I am on the same settings, but I consistenly bench 10:58. If I cannot work out why I will have to reduce my figures in Jebos benchmark spreadsheet. :(

But I am thinking they are more to do with wacky inconsistent RAM polling at boot than voltages.

I have pm'ed vcdz382 - as he suffered this - different benches after rebooting - reboot and run 3 frames, reboot and run 3 - each consistent times within a reboot, just very different across reboots.

nimbyfaygo said:
I still can't get my ram stable at the rated settings. I have the corsair dominator 1gb sticks, 8-8-8-20 DDR3 1600. But I'm only stable at 8-9-9-24 1630. Is is because of the higher bclk's? I'm capped at 2:8 it seems so that limits my testing.
Click to expand...

Possibly. I have given up on pretending I know all the mysteries of SR2s and RAM - there are many. Just know that you are giving up very little in CAS timings but gaining a great deal by being at higher baseclocks.

Tobit said:
Confident that 211 BCLK is stable having returned one bigadv and a few normal SMP units, Tobit has decided to push on [H]arder. He first tried a 214 BCLK but the onboard NIC died soon after loading up all cores to 100%. Tobit is now at 213 BCLK and all appears well and he's currently folding a bigadv.

moar later... 213 however may be his limit.

Edit: onboard NIC problems have returned at 213 BCLK as well. Time to install the dedicated Intel NIC I believe.

:cool:
Click to expand...

MIBW/FTFDU thinks TFFKAT (or "Dark Orchid") should install the damn NIC already, and push on to 220. :cool:
 
may i be worthy said:
Fascinating. I woinder if you are seeing what I am - phantom occassional boots that result in faster times. My fastest rig SR2#3 had one magic day where it would bench 10:48. But I cannot get that back. I photograph my BIOS screens, I know I am on the same settings, but I consistenly bench 10:58. If I cannot work out why I will have to reduce my figures in Jebos benchmark spreadsheet. :(
But I am thinking they are more to do with wacky inconsistent RAM polling at boot than voltages.
I have pm'ed vcdz382 - as he suffered this - different benches after rebooting - reboot and run 3 frames, reboot and run 3 - each consistent times within a reboot, just very different across reboots.
Click to expand...
It seems that random reboots are turning out to be the norm for me. To put it in perspective, the longest I've ran the computer nonstop is 19days. It doesn't happen that often, I'm just going to put it off on the high overclock.
And even though I've played around a lot with settings, I've almost always been running over 200bclk. As I type this I'm running a 6900 at 17:04tpf, with identical settings as previously posted.

I do note that times per frame is very stable if I leave it alone through an entire WU.
 
It looks like 212 BCLK is where I will be running at. There is some type of wall at 213/214 BCLK and it's just taking too much mucking around for me to bother with it. Instead
of fooling around with any higher BCLKs, there are other areas, such as kernel tweaks and lowering current voltages, that I want to focus on tweaking instead.

212 with DDR3 @ 2120 MHz is about as fast I can go and still show an improvement in TPF numbers over previous lower BCLKs.

ibhwuo.jpg
 
Tigerbiten said:
I'm just starting to read all the thread to get an idea on how to clock an SR-2.

MoBo and CPU's, X5650's, arrived yesterday.
Case should arrive today if it doesn't snow to badly.
I've already got Ram, PSU & Vid card from the old farm.

So I need to tweak the old fard, remove vid cards to drop power draw.
Then build my new boxen.

Luck ............. :D
[H]
Click to expand...

musky said:
I knew it was just a matter of time...

Welcome to the club Tiger!
Click to expand...

Pfftt, butt out, hes mine! :p

Forget about the SR-2 club, its getting crowded up there, Welcome to the X56xx Club Tiger! :D
 
I'm starting to stress test mine at only 3.2 Ghz.
Setting off 12x copies of Orthos, set to blend, uses just over 17 gig of memory ........ :eek:
I'll let it run for an hour or so then up the clock.
Max core temps at the moment are only in the mid 50C, so I've still a bit of headroom there.

Luck .......... :D
[H]
 
Crank it up Tiger! I'll make some room for ya back up here in the Top 5 PPD. :cool:
 
Tigerbiten said:
I'm starting to stress test mine at only 3.2 Ghz.
Setting off 12x copies of Orthos, set to blend, uses just over 17 gig of memory ........ :eek:
I'll let it run for an hour or so then up the clock.
Max core temps at the moment are only in the mid 50C, so I've still a bit of headroom there.

Luck .......... :D
[H]
Click to expand...

Great stuff, looking forward to seeing what you can get.

But I would suggest ditching the now useless Orthos for Intelburntest2.5.

2 instances using Very high, 12 threads and assigning affinity using taskmanager for CPUs 0 to 11 and 12 to 23 is the fastest way I have found of testing stability. It does run a fair bit hotter than FAH). If you pass 10-20 runs or more then move on to testing folding - run a 6701 or two and you are good.
 
finally assembled my first sr-2 with 2 e5620's temps are around 50c with bclk at 160 and vcore at 1.3 tried bclk at 175 BSOD after 15 min on folding thinking its the ram thats holding me back since its ddr3 1066 ecc
 
Try running the Mem Divider at 2:6 this should allow you run 177BLCK and still be at stock speed on your ram.
 
I'm stable at 3.85, 20x175 plus turbo.
Vcore 1.22v, Vtt & IOH are at 1.35v after tweaking.
Temps across all cores are in the mid 60's bar two core, 5&6 on CPU0, which run low 70's.
I think I'll pull both CPU's out and swop sockets to see if it a bad seating heat sink or just two cores in the CPU running hot.

It will boot and run at 4.00 Ghz,20x182 plus turbo, but not folding stable.
I think I need to up the CPU voltages a bit, but I need to cure the hot cores first.
It wont boot at 4.00 Ghz, 20x200 without turbo.
I need to try to get to 4.00 Ghz by 18x 200 with turbo.

I know it boots at 200 Bclk because I tested 3.2 Ghz by 16x 200 without turbos.
So it a balancing act between Vcore and Temps to get it stable

Then I'll need to tweak the memory faster to finish the overclock off.

Luck .......... :D
[H]
 
Tigerbiten said:
I need to try to get to 4.00 Ghz by 18x 200 with turbo.[H]
Click to expand...

MIBW can confirm, but I do not believe this is possible. Your chip has a 2x turbo with a 20x multiplier. The problem is that you end up with a 3x turbo with a 19x multiplier or a 4x turbo with an 18x multiplier. In other words with turbo on, it will try to run at 22x under load regardless of what you set the multiplier to. This is probably a bug in the SR-2 bios, but as far as I know, it is still there.
 
musky said:
MIBW can confirm, but I do not believe this is possible. Your chip has a 2x turbo with a 20x multiplier. The problem is that you end up with a 3x turbo with a 19x multiplier or a 4x turbo with an 18x multiplier. In other words with turbo on, it will try to run at 22x under load regardless of what you set the multiplier to. This is probably a bug in the SR-2 bios, but as far as I know, it is still there.
Click to expand...

Exactly right, although I have not personally tested it with A50 bios. I think the last time I tested it was A49.

@tigerbiten - probably too late to save you some time, but the CPUs are almost always ~10c different, and it is a motherboard thing - remounting won't fix it.
 
Going to be going down for a bit myself for some more tweaking, I've had several "client core communications errors" over the last week or so. Going to refine my oc, see if I can go a few higher, and work (for the umpteenth time) on disabling NUMA. Wish me luck. ;)
Might as well do some dusting and hook up those extra fan clips for each TS that I bought to run push/pull. :) Waiting for this 6900 to finish before I take 'er down.
 
Good luck with numa zero.

From what I've heard, its probably a ram issue. If you figure it out please tell me how!
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
 
My upper limit for my X5650's looks like ~3.9 Ghz without a lot more voltage.
Above that speed it starts to fail Intel Burn Test on CPU 1.
20x 177 + turbo, 3.89Ghz is now running fine for ~18 hours.
Vcore 1.22v-1.23v, Vtt 1.33v-1.34v, Vddr 1.60v, IOH 1.35v.
Temps mid 60's bar the 2 hot cores which run ~70c.

TpF p6900 12:54.

Luck ............ :D
[H]
 
I think octo-2011 should be right around that 13min speed range though we might have to wait for 22nm to get that many cores. A 2600k gets 25-26min around 4.8Ghz now and so with quad channel ram etc. I expect half of that. Thats still a long way away though:(
 
jebo_4jc said:
Good luck with numa zero.

From what I've heard, its probably a ram issue. If you figure it out please tell me how!
Posted via [H] Mobile Device
Click to expand...

+1 on the RAM isues. I had problems like that with running -bigadv on my SR-2 until I replaced the RAM with approved modules. Even though the stuff I was running was good stuff (Corsair) it wasn't on the approved list and for some reason was messing with the client being able to complete the WU about 25% of the time.
 
I'm running 4x 3x 2Gb sticks of Corsair TR3X6G1600C8.
No idea if they are on the approved list or not.
But I was useing them in my i7 920 systems before moving them to the SR-2.
They seem to be working without a hitch.

From E-leet .........
Voltage 1.6v
DDR speed 702.3 Mhz.
Divider 2:8.
Timing 8,8,8,20,59,2T.

I need to catch the system when it finishes a protien and see if it stable with the 2:6 divider.
Cannot be bothered to try and get them to run at T1, even though I know it faster.

Luck .......... :D
[H]
 
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