1366 x58 Xeon Enthusiast overclocks club

The BIOS notes may not but the product page certainly does.

take your Asus P6X58D Premium for example: In the product page it says "bloomfield", in the CPU support list it only shows various i7, and in the bios notes, only vague "new CPU support" entries.
 
http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P6X58D_Premium/

The product page at the very top, I don't know how you missed it, see line 2:

  • Intel® LGA1366 Platform & Intel® X58/ICH10R chipset
  • Next Gen 32nm 6-Core Processor Ready!
  • True USB3.0 and SATA 6Gb/s Support!
  • ASUS True 16+2 Phase Power Design
  • 3-Way SLI & Quad-GPU CrossFireX Support!
  • MemOK! - Any Memory is A-OK!

Also keep in mind that consumer motherboards don't typically list Xeons in the compatability list but since they use the same lithography and pinout it is fairly safe to assume they will work.
 
Have you tried default PLL? (1.8v) I haven't increased mine at all, just did 10 passes of IBT with those settings, gonna try prime now but so far so good.

Try drop your core volts a bit and compensate with a bit more IOH, see how you go, I was able to achieve 4.2Ghz with 1.25v without touching any other voltages (before delidding).

I have been told that as long as your ram volts are within .5v of your IOH that you are safe so if you want more ram volts, increase the IOH

Sorry guys, I'm reading the settings wrong, when I said IOH I meant QPI /DRAM core voltage.
 
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http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P6X58D_Premium/

The product page at the very top, I don't know how you missed it, see line 2:



Also keep in mind that consumer motherboards don't typically list Xeons in the compatability list but since they use the same lithography and pinout it is fairly safe to assume they will work.

with that line I'm sure they are mainly referring to the i7-970/980/980x/990x/995x

The main problem with Xeon compatibility seems to be the dual QPI link aspect of the Xeon processors. Many X58 boards are not physically setup for that, even though the chipset is capable/designed for it.

The other less major issue is that a mobo may simply not have a bios coded for the Xeons. Although they will sometimes work anyway.

Anyway, I'm wondeing if there's a list somewhere that someone can link. I've done a lot of searching, but mostly only turn up hard facts on Asus boards. Due to the second hand nature of most X58 board purchases nowadays, I'd rather not buy something that isn't compatible. Because I often won't have a return option.


*on another note: people parting out X58 stuff on Ebay must really be heavy handed about it. Many Ebay boards have socket/pin damage : \
 
with that line I'm sure they are mainly referring to the i7-970/980/980x/990x/995x

The main problem with Xeon compatibility seems to be the dual QPI link aspect of the Xeon processors. Many X58 boards are not physically setup for that, even though the chipset is capable/designed for it.

The other less major issue is that a mobo may simply not have a bios coded for the Xeons. Although they will sometimes work anyway.

Anyway, I'm wondeing if there's a list somewhere that someone can link. I've done a lot of searching, but mostly only turn up hard facts on Asus boards. Due to the second hand nature of most X58 board purchases nowadays, I'd rather not buy something that isn't compatible. Because I often won't have a return option.


*on another note: people parting out X58 stuff on Ebay must really be heavy handed about it. Many Ebay boards have socket/pin damage : \

For the most part non-oem consumer type boards play nice with Xeons and they should run similar to their i7 counterparts. Some early revisions of EVGA x58 boards won't work (because they are not equipped to handle any hex-core cpus) and most OEM boards out of dells etc. don't appear to be compatible with Xeons. I don't think theres a comprehensive list out there, but every motherboard I've tried from Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI have worked with the Xeons.
 
Sorry guys, I'm reading the settings wrong, when I said IOH I meant QPI /DRAM core voltage.
I take photos with my phone of all my bios settings to eliminate any confusion...cause i be honest i could never remember all those settings, and im not going to write them down when i can snap some pics and pull them up anytime i need them...aside form the fact asus labels certain bios settings different from other vendors...the qpi/dram to be exact if i remember correctly....but if we both have asus boards then were on the same page anyway;)
 
For the most part non-oem consumer type boards play nice with Xeons and they should run similar to their i7 counterparts. Some early revisions of EVGA x58 boards won't work (because they are not equipped to handle any hex-core cpus) and most OEM boards out of dells etc. don't appear to be compatible with Xeons. I don't think theres a comprehensive list out there, but every motherboard I've tried from Asus, Gigabyte, and MSI have worked with the Xeons.

Can you say for sure the Gigabyte ver 1 boards work with a Xeon 56xx CPU?

I have an EVGA x58 FTW3 and an Asus P6T deluxe v2 and both are running x5660 no problem.
The EVGA classified3 and sli3 ftw3 all will work.
 
I'm still using my old E5520 in my Beater system...stupid easy overclock to 3600MHz and solid as a rock at that frequency.

Not too bad for a CPU that lived in my closet for three years...;)
 
Welp, someone drove up the price and ultimately out bid me on what was supposed to be a lower cost MSI board. Strange that the board prices are still driving relatively high, when you can get X5650's all day, for under $90.
 
If anyone is wondering if these older X58 systems will take a shit ton of ram, they can. I just installed 48GB of G.Skill RipjawsX (1.5v 9 9 9 24 1600Mhz) in my P6X58D Premium.
Didn't do anything special, just chucked it in there and it booted up just fine, Windows 8 shows it all there, disabled the pagefile and its looking pretty good.
 
Would one of these Xeon cpu's give me an upgrade over my i7-930 in gaming performance?

I was late to the x58 chipset and my board is one of the last 758 3way Sli boards Evga sold with the black and gray ram slots as I bought it in March 4 2010 .. it's been a great board without issues for the past 4 + years and I even bought a full water cooling blocks for the board but never used them.
 
@fanboy, yes it will help tremendously with gaming.

Can someone tell me why my X5650 is now showing only 3 cores / 6 threads? I was messing around in the BIOS trying to find a combination of settings that would let me enable the 23 multiplier, but nothing I did would let the 23 multi show itself. A friend of mine in another forum has the same exact cpu running at 23x200 on his Rampage II, so I thought heck maybe I can get my Rampage III to do the same. He told me his settings, and I do not have the same settings, but in the very short run at messing with settings, the Task Manager, Performance monitor, CPU-Z and any and all other monitoring software only shows 3 cores running. I even cleared CMOS and fired up my known good 4ghz Xeon settings that was definitely running all 6 cores 12 threads and still nothing. It only took me about 10 minutes to break my CPU?

Any ideas?

kSMryXRl.jpg
 
If anyone is wondering if these older X58 systems will take a shit ton of ram, they can. I just installed 48GB of G.Skill RipjawsX (1.5v 9 9 9 24 1600Mhz) in my P6X58D Premium.
Didn't do anything special, just chucked it in there and it booted up just fine, Windows 8 shows it all there, disabled the pagefile and its looking pretty good.

That's is very impressive and now i am jealous....can you post a link to where you bought yours so i can at least consider the cost. It't would make one hell of a fast ram disk for even a game the size of bf4 or i bet it could come in useful as a scratch discs for encoding video files of blue ray size or smaller...but heres the real question?

Dose your board actually still run the memory at the same speed settings as before? It doesn't like make you drop down to ddr 1333 speed or anything special? I wonder if its also 1t stable as well? very interesting so lets us know:D
 
@fanboy, yes it will help tremendously with gaming.

Can someone tell me why my X5650 is now showing only 3 cores / 6 threads? I was messing around in the BIOS trying to find a combination of settings that would let me enable the 23 multiplier, but nothing I did would let the 23 multi show itself. A friend of mine in another forum has the same exact cpu running at 23x200 on his Rampage II, so I thought heck maybe I can get my Rampage III to do the same. He told me his settings, and I do not have the same settings, but in the very short run at messing with settings, the Task Manager, Performance monitor, CPU-Z and any and all other monitoring software only shows 3 cores running. I even cleared CMOS and fired up my known good 4ghz Xeon settings that was definitely running all 6 cores 12 threads and still nothing. It only took me about 10 minutes to break my CPU?

Any ideas?

kSMryXRl.jpg

your picture is a little hard to read but its ok.....My first idea to would be to do an image restore or re install since its possibly a software issue and my main reason for thinking this is you already cleared the cmos, reset the bios settings to default and then put all the correct settings back for the overclock....

Let me ask you this what does the bios boot prompts say as the pc is booting up? Is it showing the correct cpu frequency? I for one could also load up like a live iso like parted magic on usb and see what its reporting as well...

The main things is....is it a software issue or a hardware issue? when looking around in the bios check and see if possibly one of the settings like "active processor cores" is set to all instead of some crazy number...let us know your progress and well get this sorted out...and just a fyi but the only setting in the bios on my board that would make the task manager report the cpu speed incorrectly was speed step......for some reason speedstep makes the windows task manager get the info wrong, but since i can double check with benchmarks and other software like core temp it hasn't caused me to many headaches.

I would try disableing the power saving stuff like speed step, core parking, and c states at least until we figure out what the issue is:)
 
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I promised the user primetime some 3dmark Sky Diver CPU benchmark results with the EVGA SR-2 and the X5650s clocked at 4.4 GHz.
We have had an insane heatwave here in southern Sweden with temperatures around 30C which in turn means that its 30C+ inside my computer room.
Even though I have had the chanse I have not yet upped the frequency to 4.4 GHz again because of the heat generated at that speed and because the OC profiles dosnt work on the SR-2 so reconfiguring isnt just loading a profile.

Now I got sidetracked by an offer I could not refuse.
I bought another EVGA SR-2 with two more CPUs and some memory. See the picture below for specs, this is with everything at stock settings (turbo on) :p
Now I know first hand that the SR-2 can handle quite a lot of memory, even without lowering the memory multiplier or messing with voltages.

EVGASR2X569096GB.jpg
 
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(Anyway, I'm wondeing if there's a list somewhere that someone can link.)

From what I learned so far is that EVGA x58 E758 3Way Sli boards will support Xeons after a mod as rev 1.0 and 1.1 need the mod and Evga can mod it for you.. rev 1.2 does not need the mod and support Xeon out of the box ..just needs a bios update..

Lucky for me that my board is rev 1.2
 
We have had an insane heatwave here in southern Sweden with temperatures around 30C which in turn means that its 30C+ inside my computer room.

If that kinda a heat bothers you then you would love north america.....35 or higher is not very uncommon and even happens in the northern states.....Currently one place in the country is reporting 39.44 but of course we always discus it as Fahrenheit. Mix in high humidity and it makes for one hot day:)
I get the impression your home doesn't use any type of air conditioning? I hope you have some nice fans
 
If that kinda a heat bothers you then you would love north america.....35 or higher is not very uncommon and even happens in the northern states.....Currently one place in the country is reporting 39.44 but of course we always discus it as Fahrenheit. Mix in high humidity and it makes for one hot day:)
I get the impression your home doesn't use any type of air conditioning? I hope you have some nice fans


I have an small portable air conditioning unit but the two storey building my apartment is located in is made out of concrete with panorama windows all around and a flat black roof just over my head. My little portable aircon unit cant handle the heat at all. The concrete keeps the apartment hot even at night when its ~18C outside. Supposedly the worst is over by now. If the fortune tellers are right it will "only" be ~25C during daytime the coming week.

In any case its nice to hear some some people have it even worse ;)
Well I hate the extreme cold aswell and we have plenty of that here in Sweden.
 
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That's is very impressive and now i am jealous....can you post a link to where you bought yours so i can at least consider the cost. It't would make one hell of a fast ram disk for even a game the size of bf4 or i bet it could come in useful as a scratch discs for encoding video files of blue ray size or smaller...but heres the real question?

Dose your board actually still run the memory at the same speed settings as before? It doesn't like make you drop down to ddr 1333 speed or anything special? I wonder if its also 1t stable as well? very interesting so lets us know:D

I'm not sure if you would really want to purchase RAM from New Zealand.

The ram I got does not set 1T when using the XMP profile but it does seem to be working.

As for memory speed, I'm not sure why but I cannot run my memory at 1600Mhz unless I increase the BCLK, if I run at the standard BCLK the system wont even post with the ram at that speed but increasing the ram from 12 to 48GB has made no difference in any way, I can run the ram at the rated speed and timings without any issues at all.

These are the modules I got:
G.Skill RipJaws X F3-1600C9S-8GXM
 
Can someone tell me why my X5650 is now showing only 3 cores / 6 threads? I was messing around in the BIOS trying to find a combination of settings that would let me enable the 23 multiplier, but nothing I did would let the 23 multi show itself. A friend of mine in another forum has the same exact cpu running at 23x200 on his Rampage II, so I thought heck maybe I can get my Rampage III to do the same. He told me his settings, and I do not have the same settings, but in the very short run at messing with settings, the Task Manager, Performance monitor, CPU-Z and any and all other monitoring software only shows 3 cores running. I even cleared CMOS and fired up my known good 4ghz Xeon settings that was definitely running all 6 cores 12 threads and still nothing. It only took me about 10 minutes to break my CPU?

Any ideas?

My BIOS has an option called 'CPU Down Core Mode' to disable cores since fewer cores can be run at higher frequency. Strange that when you cleared CMOS it didn't return it back to default but double-check anyway.
 
Just got an LSI 9211 card working in my system only to realize that I used my SFF-8087 cables already :(

Something else I realized when I was searching for cables, my hardware situation is getting WAY out of hand. I recently built a PC because I had enough parts to build another one. As I was looking through my boxes I discovered that I have enough bits and pieces to build another 2 complete systems :eek:

I need to start selling or giving away some of this stuff...
 
I just found this thread, and I think it might satisfy my itch to tweak/upgrade my current system. I have a ASUS Rampage II (the exact same one Kyle used in his review here: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2009/05/28/asus_rampage_ii_gene/#.U8QKffldVfB) I've been running an i7 930@ 3.5 GHz in it since I got it several years ago. I'm assuming that my board is good to go with running a Xeon. The big question I have is, where do I start in looking at processors? The old Xeon naming conventions are really confusing to wrap my head around.
 
The big question I have is, where do I start in looking at processors?
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-...BV7-/131145076235?pt=CPUs&hash=item1e88db0e0b Price:US $175.00
the X5670 will do 4 to 4.6ghz without much fuss...

if wanting the cheaper rout then the x5660 US $129.95
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-...BV6-/171386625238?pt=CPUs&hash=item27e7705cd6
would get you 4ghz as well

at any rate ebay is loaded with them...I personally started out with the 920, sold it, bought the 5639 and sold it, then decided to stay with the x5670 since the models above this one so far are in the 400 dollar range or more
 
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Just got an LSI 9211 card working in my system only to realize that I used my SFF-8087 cables already :(

Something else I realized when I was searching for cables, my hardware situation is getting WAY out of hand. I recently built a PC because I had enough parts to build another one. As I was looking through my boxes I discovered that I have enough bits and pieces to build another 2 complete systems :eek:

I need to start selling or giving away some of this stuff...

By all means if giving away pm me for info:D With being said Hardocp usually has a charity thing where they build and give away pc's to needy charity's. Wouldn't hurt to pm Kyle for possible info of when they do the next one;)
 
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-...BV7-/131145076235?pt=CPUs&hash=item1e88db0e0b Price:US $175.00
the X5670 will do 4 to 4.6ghz without much fuss...

if wanting the cheaper rout then the x5660 US $129.95
http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-...BV6-/171386625238?pt=CPUs&hash=item27e7705cd6
would get you 4ghz as well

at any rate ebay is loaded with them...I personally started out with the 920, sold it, bought the 5639 and sold it, then decided to stay with the x5670 since the models above this one so far are in the 400 dollar range or more

Awesome!! Thanks for the info. I'll look at the X series then, and see what I can find.

As far as heat goes, are you guys on Air or Water? I've been good with an old Thermalright Ultra Extreme and a Panaflo 120 so far for the 930.
 
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Awesome!! Thanks for the info. I'll look at the X series then, and see what I can find.

As far as heat goes, are you guys on Air or Water? I've been good with an old Thermalright Ultra Extreme and a Panaflo 120 so far for the 930.


The Xeon X56x0 will probably run cooler than your i7 930.
The Thermalright Ultra Extreme is good enough to cool it and not hold back overclocking, at least not by much.
 
I would like to see someone make a youtube video of one of Xeon running a current game..
 
Just got an LSI 9211 card working in my system only to realize that I used my SFF-8087 cables already :(

Something else I realized when I was searching for cables, my hardware situation is getting WAY out of hand. I recently built a PC because I had enough parts to build another one. As I was looking through my boxes I discovered that I have enough bits and pieces to build another 2 complete systems :eek:

I need to start selling or giving away some of this stuff...

Can i ask what the purpose of the LSI 9211 card was for? Does it give you a higher throughput connected to your ssds or hardrives? I was just wondering...thanks;)
 
I would like to see someone make a youtube video of one of Xeon running a current game..

What game would you like? I can make a bf4 clip if your really want it...i use afterburner osd so you see see actual cpu usage while playing.....to be honest it hardy pushes it since i believe that particular games uses 8 cores at most, but it could be other reasons i guess. just let me know and i can try and make one
 
any current game would be fine as some say that the xeon is not made for gaming and would offer little upgrade to my i7-930..
 
Can i ask what the purpose of the LSI 9211 card was for? Does it give you a higher throughput connected to your ssds or hardrives? I was just wondering...thanks;)

Well the Marvell controller is shit, I get max throughput of 400MB/s on my Samsung 840 Pro also the ICH10R has a maximum throughput of 660MB/s (say for example if you stripe 4 SSDs you'll only get a maximum of 660MB/s and around 60k IOPS)

I have personally seen 1500MB/s and over 100K IOPS on the 9211, specs list 275K IOPS. Considering the 840 Pro is capable of 100k IOPS I think its a no brainer.
 
any current game would be fine as some say that the xeon is not made for gaming and would offer little upgrade to my i7-930..

Gods honest truth is, I don't know if there's any games out yet that really benefit from the extra cores versus what you currently have. If your and my cpu were clocked at the same speed and ram and don't think you would gain much performance. I was thinking that bf4 would make use of the extra 4 threads, but what really happens is were you might be at 60% cpu usage, and i would be at 30% usage so i could multitask easier or run extra apps without as much performance loss. If games come out that truly make use of the extra cores then of course it would help. I tried making a video tonight and it really didn't work out that well not to mention it doesn't give you any real facts.

The real benefit from running a hexa core from what you currently have is going to be much faster video encoding, faster unzipping files, that kind of stuff as long as were at the same clock speed, i seriously doubt there's much gain in games yet . 3dmark skydiver will give me a lot higher physics score than yours, but does it really add up in games right now, because most games are console ports, i say no, it won't really help fps, but it will use less cpu usage as i mentioned earlier. So if your cpu is only clocking at 3ghz then the faster clock speed will definitely help.

I love this cpu, but don't buy it unless you current one cant clock very well, cause most games are video card bottle necked from your current cpu and up. One day they might make a game that can use all the extra cores but I haven't found one yet. Put your money toward a better video card if thats the case ;)
 
Just to add to what primetime is saying, PhysX is heavily threaded in software mode (i.e. if you enable PhysX with an AMD GPU it runs in software mode on the CPU)

However PhysX is so badly optimized for software mode that it pretty much pointless running it at all.

For example, If I enable PhysX on Batman: AC I see one core maxed out (the game engine) and the remaining cores are at about 30-40% utilization (yes, all 11 remaining threads are being used) but the resulting game speed is pretty much unplayable, benchmarks show 50FPS average but the game is a stutter fest. Without PhysX enabled just a single thread is utilized.

I would imagine in this scenario the 6 core xeon would best any quad core on the market but as I say, its poorly implemented making it pointless.
 
From what ive read the hex cores help with better gpu utilization for games and better fps. There is a guy on overclock.net with a lengthy post and good info/benchmarks comparing a i7 quad vs hex xeons and even compares them ti hex i7s on sandy bridge-e
 
My new "storage solution" seems to work well.
I did a quick Crystal Disk Mark run with lots of programs and 50 firefox tabs open, the performance is still OK :)

crystaldiskmark.jpg
 
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