X58 platform still viable in 2016 thanks to cheap Xeons
- Thread starter mrcorbo
- Start date
Well, I'm happy my uATX (and quite fancy) Asus Rampage II Gene found room not only for six dimms, but also a PATA connector. It helped when backing up and formatting some ancient HDDs.
Ran the system with OCZ Platinum 1600MHz DIMMs which supported 8-8-8 1T timings for some quite low latency memory accesses with all 6 slots populated. They ran pretty fricken hot at max speed tho, but after switching to a Noctua NH-C12P SE14 (quite the mouthful, lol) with a larger 140mm fan blowing air downwards, DIMM temps improved considerably.
These days the system doesn't want to remain stable at 1600MHz memory speed, so I run it at ~1333MHz. Probably little or no discernible difference in performance anyhow, and as I recall the nehalem wasn't fully capable of taking advantage of its triple-channel memory controller anyhow.
Ran the system with OCZ Platinum 1600MHz DIMMs which supported 8-8-8 1T timings for some quite low latency memory accesses with all 6 slots populated. They ran pretty fricken hot at max speed tho, but after switching to a Noctua NH-C12P SE14 (quite the mouthful, lol) with a larger 140mm fan blowing air downwards, DIMM temps improved considerably.
These days the system doesn't want to remain stable at 1600MHz memory speed, so I run it at ~1333MHz. Probably little or no discernible difference in performance anyhow, and as I recall the nehalem wasn't fully capable of taking advantage of its triple-channel memory controller anyhow.
Been trying to source of of these, but very few on eBay in the UK and they are fetching £140+. Another forum mentions upgrading X58 using Xeon 5650. It's also socket 1366 compatible. It's 6 core/12 @ 32nm. Nominally rated at 2.66Ghz, but apparently is also a really good overclocker with 4Ghz reported . On eBay for £60.
Generally is the X56xx and W36xx identical chips, just different markings ?
Generally is the X56xx and W36xx identical chips, just different markings ?
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Both use the same architecture. The W3600-series is meant for workstations -- lower QPI throughput, single-socket only, constrained memory capacity. Nothing that can limit it on an X58 board.
Biggest difference is locked vs. unlocked upper multiplier. This makes overclocking easier with the W3690 since you have more than just the BCLK to work with.
Cool. Interested to see your results.
Props to you, mrcorbo.
Got a W3690 off of Ebay. Some korean guy had multiple on sale, when he was down to one, I bought it for $204. Received it yesterday
, works like a charm. I have an Asus P6t, which I flashed to the newest BIOS. There is no official support for Westmere SKUs, but they work
I had it running at 4GHz by just increasing the multiplier, but my cpu cooler isn't quite up to the task. At 3.73GHz and 3.87GHz, T_junction was around 55 degrees C with limited noise from the cooler, at 4Ghz the temperature jumped to 61 degrees C and the cooler fan went nuts. All six cores were 100% loaded (POVRay).
It's currently running at 3.73GHz, a healthy 40% increase on the i7-920 it replaced.
I spent another $70 on 12GB 1833MHz DDR3. I read somewhere Westmere CPUs don't support DIMMs larger than 4GB.1833 only works with some wonky X.M.P overclocking profile, so it runs at 1600MT/s, that's still a 50% increase over the 1033MHz I used to have.
40% higher single thread performance, 50% extra cores, 50% more bandwidth for $270
Cheers
Got a W3690 off of Ebay. Some korean guy had multiple on sale, when he was down to one, I bought it for $204. Received it yesterday
, works like a charm. I have an Asus P6t, which I flashed to the newest BIOS. There is no official support for Westmere SKUs, but they work I had it running at 4GHz by just increasing the multiplier, but my cpu cooler isn't quite up to the task. At 3.73GHz and 3.87GHz, T_junction was around 55 degrees C with limited noise from the cooler, at 4Ghz the temperature jumped to 61 degrees C and the cooler fan went nuts. All six cores were 100% loaded (POVRay).
It's currently running at 3.73GHz, a healthy 40% increase on the i7-920 it replaced.
I spent another $70 on 12GB 1833MHz DDR3. I read somewhere Westmere CPUs don't support DIMMs larger than 4GB.1833 only works with some wonky X.M.P overclocking profile, so it runs at 1600MT/s, that's still a 50% increase over the 1033MHz I used to have.
40% higher single thread performance, 50% extra cores, 50% more bandwidth for $270
Cheers
Props to you, mrcorbo.
Got a W3690 off of Ebay. Some korean guy had multiple on sale, when he was down to one, I bought it for $204. Received it yesterday
I had it running at 4GHz by just increasing the multiplier, but my cpu cooler isn't quite up to the task. At 3.73GHz and 3.87GHz, T_junction was around 55 degrees C with limited noise from the cooler, at 4Ghz the temperature jumped to 61 degrees C and the cooler fan went nuts. All six cores were 100% loaded (POVRay).
It's currently running at 3.73GHz, a healthy 40% increase on the i7-920 it replaced.
I spent another $70 on 12GB 1833MHz DDR3. I read somewhere Westmere CPUs don't support DIMMs larger than 4GB.1833 only works with some wonky X.M.P overclocking profile, so it runs at 1600MT/s, that's still a 50% increase over the 1033MHz I used to have.
40% higher single thread performance, 50% extra cores, 50% more bandwidth for $270
Cheers
Glad you found the information useful. I'm settled in at 4.29GHz. Temps stay just under 80c under full load, but my fan never gets too loud, so I'm fine with that. I can actually hit higher on the CPU, but with the ratios available the other clocks are optimal at this BCLK.
Just got round to doing this yesterday.
My motherboard is an X58A-UD3R rev 1.0. Took my time and eventually got he chip replaced. Powered up on its defaults of 133 x 23/25. multipler could be notionally be changed, but had no effect. THen I hit problems. No matter WHAT I changed, bios didn't like it an reverted back to standard settings. Even just changing the 133 to 134 caused it to baulk. Clearing the cmos didn't help.
Played around for ages, no luck. Somewhere along the line my bios got courrupted. Luckly the board has a dual bios, so it was detected and copied across. But the copy was a much older F3 version, instead of F7. And although this version has less parameter changing options, changing the options was allowed and it would boot up win10 fine with the new settings. Play with that for a while, then decided t download the latest bios, F8L, the one I had was F7. Back to the same problem of no changes working. tried to download F6, but firefox didn't like it.
The most recent bios I could download that would allow changes was F5. And that's what i'm using. Chip is now doing 180x23, i.e. 4.14Ghz. The only things changed was Vcore to 1.3125V and QPI core similar, and the memory clock ratio down from 10:1 to 8:1 (my memory is 1333Mhz).
I really haven't stress tested it, but as it stands this is clocking better that the i930 I took out, plus I've got a couple of extra cores.
Anyone with experience have solid thoughts on what max cpu temp is safe, as read by ET6 ?
Thanks again to the OP for raising this upgrade capability.
My experience has been that these chips will thermal throttle if they are unhappy with the temps so, as long as you're stable I'd expect you're OK. In fact, that's what lead to me making this upgrade. I happened to notice that my 920 was thermal throttling under load and once I was resolved to take the HSF off anyway to re-apply thermal paste, I figured I may as well see if there was a worthwhile CPU upgrade available. I really did not expect things to work out this well.