Hardware EVGA Classified SR-2 Review

Bindi will bit-tech be doing a review on that Lian-li case??

 

I'm heading to their factory on Thursday to (exclusively ho-ho-ho, or so I'm told) cover the launch and fitting of the SR-2, as well as hopefully do a tour of the factory and laser cutter too! There's a thread in hardware for our community (you!) to voice questions to Lian directly

 

Yes, the ppd on the graphs is from both CPUs and all four graphics cards.

Yes, I did try with only the CPUs folding, with both the A3 and bigadv clients. In the end though, the ppd was so much higher with everything folding together, and I needed to prove whether the board can handle the load (I/O, power and heat), I only graphed the total ppd.

However, from my notepad:

CPUs at 2.66GHz running one bigadv client (=50k ppd ) + 4 graphics cards (=40k ppd), total 90k ppd @ 862W
CPUs at 2.66GHz running one bigadv client (=67k ppd), total 67k ppd @ 537W

So, it looks like folding with the GPUs drops about 17k ppd from the CPU client, but adds 40k ppd, a net gain of 23k ppd.

Using some pretty crude maths, I'd therefore guestimate that the overclocked X5650s would yield about 101k ppd and the overclocked X5680s about 110k ppd.

 

Were the 4x460s still fitted to the sr-2 on the 67kppd @ 537w run?

Did you try overclocked cpus without gpus or just standard clock cpu?

 

Fitted, but not folding, so you could subtract roughly 150-200W from this figure to bring it more into line with the Prime95 power figures on page 11.

 

I burn. I pine.

 

One of my best mates has just become an animator, now can I convince him to get this i wonder...

I love stuff like this, gear thats on the bleeding edge of R&D, if I could afford it I'd get one.

 

Want! Want badly! May have new job soon.. God help me!

 

In a word 'want'. This with some 480s and octane render would make a fine graphics work station.

 

It's like some sort of omen! Today I find out I have a tax rebate on the way for almost a grand! I feel a folding rig coming on!

 

WHAAATTTT, GIMME THAT!!!!
One day I'll convince myself that I need this watercooled bundle.....except my mind doesn't want to work with me right now.

 

How do you feel this ranks James in terms of enjoyment while reviewing kit? Must be in your top 5 reviews!? Does look epic, if Santa is reading this you know what to get me for Christmas.

 

I really need for a rich relative to die and leave me a bunch of monies. And quick too.

May I ask why I'm not seeing any triple monitor 4-way GTX480 SLI crysis benches @ 7680x1600?

 

and it's quality tested by shagmino

 

On that note then buying the SR-2 and an X5650 is just £190.64 more than buying the R3E and an i7-980X with the second xeon coming at a later date spreading the cost sounds more and more appetizing to me! I was planning to put the R3E and an i7-980X in my 'Bismarck' case mod but now I'm having a serious rethink lol!! Cheers pal

 

Yes, it certainly was a lot of fun to play with, although there was quite a lot of pain too with learning the BIOS and working around the overheating issues discussed in the article. Still, as a long-term dual-processor enthusiast I definitely want one too.

 

WAIT!

Sorry, perhaps I misled you. Clock for clock, a single Xeon will perform almost identically to a Core i7. But, the X5650 runs at 2.66GHz, and the i7-980X at 3.33GHz, so unless you overclock the Xeon, the i7-980X will be much faster.

To get comparable performance (without overclocking) you'd need to buy a X5680, which is a lot more expensive than the i7-980X.

Still, a single overclocked X5650 for now, with the option to upgrade later would be uber

 

I plan on overclocking as much as possible lol with whichever setup being stable with it being used for many hrs at a time. The other question is though, is a quad 120 rad enough to cool 2 overclocked xeons in the same loop?!

 

Yes, a quad 120mm will copy with two overclocked Xeons fine.

I reckon you'd need to add another rad if you plan on watercooling the SR-2 and/or any graphics cards too though.

 

This is pointless for gaming since as shown in the past games dont take advantage of that many cores. So no matter how you spin this, it isnt great for gaming so its more a sever, folding and rendering rig then it ever would be for gaming,