1366 x58 Xeon Enthusiast overclocks club

If your stable i wouldn't worry to much really as that temp sounds about right for that cooler and sounds like your already at best speed for that mb
Click to expand...

Ah I see, so what boards are best for achieving higher speeds, or would i need to find a processor closer to the silicon lottery to push it more since im already at 1.35.
 
jforce321 said:
Ah I see, so what boards are best for achieving higher speeds, or would i need to find a processor closer to the silicon lottery to push it more since im already at 1.35.
Click to expand...

Nothing to do with lottery really as that board pretty much tops out at 200blck in most cases i have heard of. You would need a rampage 3 to do better and in my opinion it wouldn't be worth the cost. You need higher multis to get better speed in almost all cases and would require a 5670 or better to have any noticeable results. Is it worth it, is up to you, but in imo if its running good and stable id call it a day;)
 
primetime said:
Nothing to do with lottery really as that board pretty much tops out at 200blck in most cases i have heard of. You would need a rampage 3 to do better and in my opinion it wouldn't be worth the cost. You need higher multis to get better speed in almost all cases and would require a 5670 or better to have any noticeable results. Is it worth it, is up to you, but in imo if its running good and stable id call it a day;)
Click to expand...

Ah Okay, I could get mine to max out around 211-213 blck before itd lose stability, but the amount of cpu voltage i had to add to keep that stable started getting towards 1.55-1.6v around 4.4ghz so it was just too much imo. I am jealous of all the people running 4.5-4.6ghz+ overclocks :p
 
Okay, have some of the toys for my machine re-pot ordered.

500GB Samsung 850 Evo SSD
Thermaltake Core X9 Case
Kraken X61 AIO Liquid cooler (may eventually go for a second and a bracket for my vidcard, but my budget is limited at the moment).
 
primetime said:
I think Deimos has your same board and has experience with that amount of ram. I would suggest pm'ing him for the best bios settings. I know there are others here as well with that board but cant remember all there names and some don't list there hardware which makes it hard to tell. You can find his account on the first page to make it easier to pm him
Click to expand...

Thanks for your help!!
 
jforce321 said:
Ah Okay, I could get mine to max out around 211-213 blck before itd lose stability, but the amount of cpu voltage i had to add to keep that stable started getting towards 1.55-1.6v around 4.4ghz so it was just too much imo. I am jealous of all the people running 4.5-4.6ghz+ overclocks :p
Click to expand...

Using max voltages of intel spec, the realistic top speeds is 4.4-4.5ghz.

If your looking for those kind of speeds, you would be better off with a chip with a higher multiplier. Its pretty common for the x5650 to land around 4.0ghz. That is if your searching for full stability.

This chips can boot and run at much higher speeds. Being fully stable though, the clocks have to be more modest. I would say the 4ghz is exactly where I would set my expectations with a x5650. The chips with higher multipliers can get a few hundred MHz higher with the same voltage. Generally it seems anyway, but overclocking has always been random.
 
I'm more than likely ordering a Nepton 140XL this weekend. Right now on Newegg, it's $75 after a $5 discount code and $20 rebate. I don't think I'm going to find a better AIO cooler deal than that.
 
This weekend seems to be nice for finding deals.

Found the 500GB Evo 850 for $189.99 (as opposed to $199.99) on Amazon
Found out that the Core X9 is $159.99 (as opposed to $169.99) at the local MicroCenter.
Also pulling the Kraken X61 for $139.99 from MicroCenter.
And have an in-store discount of $10 for MicroCenter as well on 1 item of $50 or more.

And while local taxes ($21.75) eat into that a little, I still manage to save a couple bucks and get stuff so that I can start working on it THIS weekend.
 
jforce321 said:
Ah Okay, I could get mine to max out around 211-213 blck before itd lose stability, but the amount of cpu voltage i had to add to keep that stable started getting towards 1.55-1.6v around 4.4ghz so it was just too much imo. I am jealous of all the people running 4.5-4.6ghz+ overclocks :p
Click to expand...

Those are super high volts. I wouldn't run those for long. I'm pretty pretty confident I could get above 5ghz with those kind of volts, of course some very high end cooling would be needed to bench.

At 1.4v/4.8ghz I can boot Windows, but my cooling isn't good enough to do much else. :)
 
EX58-UD4P continued...


It seems to be a BIOS issue I'm guessing. If I push the BCLK higher in Easytune it works... So I have to boot at 150, then use Easytune to boost further. Unfortunately the PC won't post at all if I lower the memory ratio, so I'm guessing I can't get higher than 170 BCLK in Easytune because the memory won't overclock any further at the only ratio the board seems to post with. You don't seem to be able to change the ratio or memory clock in Easytune (It asks for a reboot, and I assume actually writes the settings into the BIOS, which = no post!)

MEYBFpV.jpg

Y60iCsm.jpg
 
You can loosen up your ram timings, that could/should give you a higher ceiling. 10-10-10 might allow you to run your ram 1800mhz at the same voltage. I think its worth a shot
 
Ocre said:
You can loosen up your ram timings, that could/should give you a higher ceiling. 10-10-10 might allow you to run your ram 1800mhz at the same voltage. I think its worth a shot
Click to expand...

I gave this a try, unfortunately it didn't help. I've got my eye on a cheap Asus Sabertooth that has apparently never been used. If I get it, I'll try for 4.0 - 4.6Ghz 24/7 on it.
 
I have a Sabertooth. I'm assuming you'll be limited by temperatures somewhere around 4.0 to 4.2 GHz. If you have exceptional cooling, you should be able to push 4.4 GHz and maybe 4.6 GHz.
 
For the X5650, 4-4.2ghz would be my guess for complete stability.

These chips can clock and get higher, but full stability comes with lower clocks. People think these ultra high clocks are the norm but the reality is you will have to settle for lower ones if you want your PC to really be stable.

I can boot my chip at 5ghz but I found that stabilizing 4.6ghz was harder than I thought. Its not impossible, but I don't care to run with those kind of voltages
 
This thready really make me want to grab a cpu and board. Where would be a good place to snag both? I need to setup a server at home and this would work out for me.
 
As an eBay Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
So, I was seriously considering upgrading my old x58 system to an i7 4770k. I just found a Xeon x5670 on Amazon that I can get for $40(after bonus points). My board is an EVGA Classified3 that supports these Xeons natively.
So, Jump on it?
 
DriZzLe said:
So, I was seriously considering upgrading my old x58 system to an i7 4770k. I just found a Xeon x5670 on Amazon that I can get for $40(after bonus points). My board is an EVGA Classified3 that supports these Xeons natively.
So, Jump on it?
Click to expand...

At that price it almost be foolish not to....even if you changed your mind they go sale for 100 bucks or more every day......heck it could sell in one day in the f/s forum;) BTW when i started this thread i paid 220 dollars for mine. Do i wish i would have waited for the price to come down? sure...do i regret spending the money? NO
 
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Just take into account that the FX-8000 processors have eight cores while these Xeons have six. If you don't have an X58 motherboard, grabbing the AMD chip makes more sense. The i5-4690K is also priced in the same ballpark.
 
My first tests with a 36GB RamDisk:
gxrSiKA.png


fQxJPdV.png


Definitely something weird with ATTO, but apparently it's common issue with RamDisks?
System is currently @ 3352MHz, DDR-1440.
Was seeing CPU usage up to 10% during benchmarks, but all in all not bad.
Trying to think... what else I could change to speed things up?
 
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adobian said:
How is this chip compared to the AMD FX8XXX ?
Click to expand...

If i understand the scores correctly about 30% better performance than a FX-8150. Keep in mind this is a very conservative clocks and my 24/7 settings. I played all the way thru certain games at 4.6ghz but games don't push as hard as the all core stress test and it wouldn't be honest to say its bullet proof at that speed. This is at 4.2ghz with turbo turned off, which is my normal usage setting.
Capture_zps41wj4u95.png
[/URL][/IMG]

or another way of putting it just slightly ahead of a AMD FX-9590 at 4.7ghz
88b3c582-b2b1-4845-a60b-893261486ef5_zpsqmhbh6ln.png
[/URL][/IMG]
 
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chessmyantidrug said:
Just take into account that the FX-8000 processors have eight cores while these Xeons have six. If you don't have an X58 motherboard, grabbing the AMD chip makes more sense. The i5-4690K is also priced in the same ballpark.
Click to expand...

Only if you aren't interested in dealing with used stuff, if you are willing to take a risk then there is no way the AMD stuff will compare with a x56xx for the $, assuming that you can get a board for ~$120 and a CPU for around $100.

It is unlikely that the FX's will match the x56xx's in production applications at any clock speed.

9370@5ghz
[email protected]
[email protected]
 
tbob22 said:
Only if you aren't interested in dealing with used stuff, if you are willing to take a risk then there is no way the AMD stuff will compare with a x56xx for the $, assuming that you can get a board for ~$120 and a CPU for around $100.

It is unlikely that the FX's will match the x56xx's in production applications at any clock speed.

9370@5ghz
[email protected]
[email protected]
Click to expand...

If you don't have an X58 motherboard, then I would suggest going the Z97 route with an i5-4690K. I just find it hard to justify spending $120+ on a used X58 motherboard.

Honestly, now isn't really the best time to build a new rig with 1150 nearing the end of its lifespan. When I put together my first LGA 775 build, it was on the heels of Nehalem's release. Probably the worst time to put together a 775 build. Then Microcenter had i7-930s on sale for $200 when they were $320 everywhere else so I felt like I had to buy it. That's basically the only reason I was locked into a 1366 build.
 
I bought a 920 and E758 back in February of '09. I used StepUp to go to the Classified E759. After running it stock for a while, I bumped up to a 167 BCLK for lazy 25% overclock with everything set to Auto in the BIOS.

Recently I got looking at the BIOS updates for it again. I had memory issues with one particular version, so I just stopped updating for a while. I noticed the Xeon support in the release notes, saw how cheap they were on eBay, and decided to pick one up. Like most others in this thread, I simply haven't found newer hardware to be all that compelling for a complete system overhaul.

I started looking at the X5650 since it was dirt cheap. The X5660 was only a little more. The X5670 was just a little more than that. Then I found an X5680 on sale, so it was much closer in price to the X5670. I wanted to make sure that the new CPU wasn't a downgrade from my 3.33GHz 920 (in case I had the worst CPU luck ever or was too lazy to bother overclocking at all), so I went with the X5680 exactly a month ago.

When the X5680 came in, I discovered my E759 was an early revision and didn't actually work with it. I got the mod done, and it worked great. Like the old i7, I ran it stock for a while. I'm just now starting to mess with overclocking it.

I started off easy with the same 167 BCLK I had on the 920 with 20x to put it back to the stock 3.33GHz just to make sure everything else was still working at that speed (again, with everything set to Auto). I bumped it up to 22x (3.67GHz) and it reset on me. I manually set all the voltages to the default values and set the VCore to 1.30 as a nice middle-of-the-road value. It booted right up with no issues and ran a few rounds of IBT fine. I rebooted again and bumped it up to 24x for an even 4GHz, which is where it sits as I type this.

X5680_4000_1.png


I'm still playing with it and testing, but so far, so good.


Quick question: I got the X5680 to ensure that my bare minimum speed would at least match my overclocked 920 (considering how much I've gotten out of this system, I didn't mind paying a few bucks more for a higher model Xeon even if it doesn't OC any better). How does the X5680's 130W TDP compare to the 95W TDP of the X5650/X5660/X5670? I realize that stock TDP doesn't mean a whole lot once you get into overclocks like these, but is that TDP difference just proportional to the clockspeed increase? Or does the higher TDP indicate that they needed more wiggle room to hit that speed?
 
I don't know if any of us went with a 130W TDP Xeon. I purposefully went with a 95W chip to ensure lower temperatures.

You should honestly take your time when overclocking. First, you should isolate your BCLK ceiling. Set your multiplier to something lower, like 15; lower your memory ratio to remove RAM from the equation; then increase BCLK by 10 at a time up to 200, then increase by 5. Perform 3 to 5 runs in IBT with each increase. If you're not stable, increase VTT slightly until you hit 1.35V. If an increase in VTT doesn't help, then bump core voltage slightly. You shouldn't have to mess with core voltage if your multiplier is low enough.

After isolating your BCLK ceiling, find your RAM's ceiling. This can actually be rather time consuming if you want to just find your maximum overclock, keep your memory ratio low enough to ensure it's not the limiting factor. Pick your highest multiplier the BIOS allows, which in your case is either 25 or 26. I don't know if your BIOS allows you access to turbo multipliers. If not, set your multiplier to 25, start with a conservative BCLK (140 or 150) and go through 5 runs of IBT. If you're not stable, bump up core voltage slightly; if you are stable, bump BCLK by 10 until 170 BCLK, then by 5 after that. Chances are you'll be limited by heat and voltages before you reach the BCLK ceiling you found earlier.

I don't think you should have much of a problem reaching 4.50 GHz. Smaller increments past that will probably produce a lot heat than the performance increase is worth. The only way to know is by trying it out yourself.
 
chessmyantidrug said:
If you don't have an X58 motherboard, then I would suggest going the Z97 route with an i5-4690K. I just find it hard to justify spending $120+ on a used X58 motherboard.

Honestly, now isn't really the best time to build a new rig with 1150 nearing the end of its lifespan. When I put together my first LGA 775 build, it was on the heels of Nehalem's release. Probably the worst time to put together a 775 build. Then Microcenter had i7-930s on sale for $200 when they were $320 everywhere else so I felt like I had to buy it. That's basically the only reason I was locked into a 1366 build.
Click to expand...

While I agree for gaming this is good advice and if you don't want to deal with issues from used stuff down the road. But for my uses (mostly Photoshop/Lightroom) the ~$200 investment gives me better performance than a heavily overclocked 4790k which would have easily cost 2x as much for a decent board combo.

Moving from P55 to X58 cost me less than $50 after selling my old board/cpu.
 
InvisiBill said:
I bought a 920 and E758 back in February of '09. I used StepUp to go to the Classified E759. After running it stock for a while, I bumped up to a 167 BCLK for lazy 25% overclock with everything set to Auto in the BIOS.

Recently I got looking at the BIOS updates for it again. I had memory issues with one particular version, so I just stopped updating for a while. I noticed the Xeon support in the release notes, saw how cheap they were on eBay, and decided to pick one up. Like most others in this thread, I simply haven't found newer hardware to be all that compelling for a complete system overhaul.

I started looking at the X5650 since it was dirt cheap. The X5660 was only a little more. The X5670 was just a little more than that. Then I found an X5680 on sale, so it was much closer in price to the X5670. I wanted to make sure that the new CPU wasn't a downgrade from my 3.33GHz 920 (in case I had the worst CPU luck ever or was too lazy to bother overclocking at all), so I went with the X5680 exactly a month ago.

When the X5680 came in, I discovered my E759 was an early revision and didn't actually work with it. I got the mod done, and it worked great. Like the old i7, I ran it stock for a while. I'm just now starting to mess with overclocking it.

I started off easy with the same 167 BCLK I had on the 920 with 20x to put it back to the stock 3.33GHz just to make sure everything else was still working at that speed (again, with everything set to Auto). I bumped it up to 22x (3.67GHz) and it reset on me. I manually set all the voltages to the default values and set the VCore to 1.30 as a nice middle-of-the-road value. It booted right up with no issues and ran a few rounds of IBT fine. I rebooted again and bumped it up to 24x for an even 4GHz, which is where it sits as I type this.

X5680_4000_1.png


I'm still playing with it and testing, but so far, so good.


Quick question: I got the X5680 to ensure that my bare minimum speed would at least match my overclocked 920 (considering how much I've gotten out of this system, I didn't mind paying a few bucks more for a higher model Xeon even if it doesn't OC any better). How does the X5680's 130W TDP compare to the 95W TDP of the X5650/X5660/X5670? I realize that stock TDP doesn't mean a whole lot once you get into overclocks like these, but is that TDP difference just proportional to the clockspeed increase? Or does the higher TDP indicate that they needed more wiggle room to hit that speed?
Click to expand...

Don't worry about the tdp...its all the same for all of us no matter what chip once the overclocking starts. At my current clock speed the lowest power draw my pc will do is about 158-170 watts.
Anyways use your highest multi available to yourself in the bios (24 or 25?) and shoot for around 172blck...should put you around 4.3ghz....up to 1.35vcore, 1.35 QPI/dram, and pll can be raised up to 1.9 if needed...if not leave at stock or some even lower it
With that high of multi on that chip you might be running 4400-4600 fairly easy and safe
Because you have such a high multi to begin with i doubt blck will be much of a limiting factor....would be my first impression anyway
 
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I'm getting old and lazy, so I'm likely to settle for "decent but easy" rather than trying to wring every last MHz out of it.

I originally went with 167 BCLK because it's a nice multiple from the stock 133, so it doesn't skew all the other speeds. I was trying to get back to the stock 25x (for 4.5GHz at 27x Turbo), but it wasn't stable with 1.35V VCore. I dropped down to 160 BCLK, which gives me a nice even 4GHz with 25x, and 4.15-4.3GHz with 26x/27x Turbo. I left it at 1.35V and it seems completely stable at this speed so far, with no other tweaking whatsoever.

http://valid.canardpc.com/kr5acl

I'm sure I can get more out of this if I put more effort into it, but I'm happy with where I am for the small bit of time invested so far.
 
Is your VTT <= 1.35V? If so, you might have to increase that a little bit with your BCLK. This is one of the reasons you find your maximum BCLK first.
 
InvisiBill said:
I'm getting old and lazy, so I'm likely to settle for "decent but easy" rather than trying to wring every last MHz out of it.

I originally went with 167 BCLK because it's a nice multiple from the stock 133, so it doesn't skew all the other speeds. I was trying to get back to the stock 25x (for 4.5GHz at 27x Turbo), but it wasn't stable with 1.35V VCore. I dropped down to 160 BCLK, which gives me a nice even 4GHz with 25x, and 4.15-4.3GHz with 26x/27x Turbo. I left it at 1.35V and it seems completely stable at this speed so far, with no other tweaking whatsoever.

http://valid.canardpc.com/kr5acl

I'm sure I can get more out of this if I put more effort into it, but I'm happy with where I am for the small bit of time invested so far.
Click to expand...

No argument from me....you not bad at all right were your at and i imagine you have a bit of headroom left in case you get board one day...well done;)
 
My Nepton 140XL came in. Turns out it doesn't really fit inside my NZXT Tempest. I ended up having to remove both 140mm fans on top, routing the tubes through one hole and mounting the radiator over the other fan mount. I currently have the fans pushing air into the case through the radiator figuring that's going to give me the best performance. Unfortunately, my temperatures didn't improve by very much. During IBT, core temps maxed at 78/77/70/70/77/77. I guess I can't complain too much about a drop of 2 C to 4 C across each core, but I was hoping for double that.

I tried pushing my overclock since I had a little more thermal headroom. I had a 0x0A error during my first attempt at 24x185 so I lowered the uncore ratio slightly since VTT was already at 1.35. My system froze during the next attempt so I'm resigned to the idea my overclock is currently limited by all six RAM slots being populated.

I plan on buying a Phanteks Enthoo Pro at some point this year. I'm in no rush so I'm going to keep my eyes peeled for a sale. I realize the price is already really good at $99, but the worst thing that can happen by waiting is I spend $99 later instead of sooner.
 
chessmyantidrug said:
If you don't have an X58 motherboard, then I would suggest going the Z97 route with an i5-4690K. I just find it hard to justify spending $120+ on a used X58 motherboard.

Honestly, now isn't really the best time to build a new rig with 1150 nearing the end of its lifespan. When I put together my first LGA 775 build, it was on the heels of Nehalem's release. Probably the worst time to put together a 775 build. Then Microcenter had i7-930s on sale for $200 when they were $320 everywhere else so I felt like I had to buy it. That's basically the only reason I was locked into a 1366 build.
Click to expand...

I have been thinking about selling my other ex58-ud3r and i7 920 while the prices are up. Instead of building another rig, i was thinking of building a brand new PC for the first time in several years. But I am having a hard time......

I can get excited about a haswell build, its just not much of an upgrade. My neighbor has a 4770k and we compare benchmarks and such. The sad sad part is that in most of the benchmarks, my 4.2-4.4ghz westmereEP is faster.

Clock to clock, single thread performance of haswell is stronger, there is no doubt. But the world is much more threaded now, more than it has ever been. There are very few single core benchmarks anymore. So in the bench offs we ran, he scored very few wins, the single core advantage just cannot do enough to keep up with the extra 2 cores.
I was expecting more from the 4770k. He can't get much of an overclock at all and is running just 4ghz. He needs an aftermarket cooler, i guess.....,but it just blows my mind how such a low TDP chip shoots up in temps. It is like its already pushed near its limits or something.

The main load for my PC is gaming. Since my neighbor doesn't have a GPU or any of the games I have, I haven't been able to compare gaming performance. There also just isn't a lot of benchmarks of modern games with overclocked gulftowns. But I have compared games on my PC with results of websites using haswell and a gtx980 and there isn't a lot of difference. Sometimes I have higher fps and other times slightly lower. Within a few fps. But since most modern games don't have benchmarks, the reviewers try to find repeatable runs. Its really hard to say. Most of the time they don't give details on where they got the results.

I am just not sure what I want to do. I want to build a new PC but I just don't think haswell will bring me much at all in terms of performance increase. I was waiting for broadwell and now it seems that is a bust too. So now i have a dilemma.

1- sell my other x58 and build a haswell
2- buy another westmere (maybe a w3690 just cause I am feeling kinky)

Skylake seems so far away and who knows what will happen in the x58 used market by the time it launches.
 
An aftermarket cooler would make a world of difference on his processor.

There's no need for you to upgrade if the hardest thing your computer does is video games. After installing this Xeon, I'm fairly certain I won't swap out the motherboard, CPU and RAM for two or three years. Apparently my PSU is no longer in warranty so I'll probably replace it later this year just to be proactive about it. I'd really like to get 3x4GB or even 2x8GB for RAM, but I'm fairly certain my next build will utilize DDR4 so there's not much point in making the switch. And I don't think six 2GB sticks have much resale value, even if they have really tight timings.
 
Don't do 8gb x 2. Intel has greatly improved their memory and caching over the years but you will take a performance hit if you limit your cu to dual channel mode. Some apps won't show a difference but anything memory extensive will take a hit going down dual channel.

You should be able to run 3x 8gb with no issues, if you want to go with 8gb sticks.
 
I have found some good deal on ebay for used ram. 3x4gb gskill sniper 1600mhz 80$ works great.
There is some gskill 4x4gb ripjaws now asking 100$
There is also 4x2gb ripjaws blue sticks 8-8-8-25 1.5v for 50$ Should O/C well
I just bought 2x2 ripjaws black 777 to match two I have on an AMD build I have. 30$ was just under the going rate,
Picked up 6x2gb pc3 1333R ECC 30$
I have had good luck with used ram and CPUs, saved a lot of $ too.
 
Bill1024 said:
I have found some good deal on ebay for used ram. 3x4gb gskill sniper 1600mhz 80$ works great.
There is some gskill 4x4gb ripjaws now asking 100$
There is also 4x2gb ripjaws blue sticks 8-8-8-25 1.5v for 50$ Should O/C well
I just bought 2x2 ripjaws black 777 to match two I have on an AMD build I have. 30$ was just under the going rate,
Picked up 6x2gb pc3 1333R ECC 30$
I have had good luck with used ram and CPUs, saved a lot of $ too.
Click to expand...

Yeah, right now, one of my X58 rigs is only running a single stick of 8GB. I've seen a few 2 x 8GB DDR3-1600 kits for as low as $90 on eBay. I've been thinking I should probably get it running in triple channel mode.
 
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