Cheap Sandy Bridge-EP Xeons

Good News

Hi All

The seller has offered to replace the dodgy CPU. He says he will post it tomorrow so at least I don`t have to wait for 2 way international post .

The RAM works perfectly, with all settings on "auto" it runs at 1333MHz 9,9,9,24,1 at 1.5v, this is normal for Sandy Bridge systems. With "DDR speed" set to "Force DDR3 1600" it rebooted with the memory at 1600MHz 9,9,9,24,1 at 1.5v . This is very good news because getting the memory up to speed was a major concern.

I have started work on the case and will build the system up with one CPU while I wait for the replacement to arrive.

To be continued.

 

Good news bud, hopefully new one will all be good and you can finish the build

I'm looking forward to what PPD it can push and at how many watts

 

Woo, watching this thread with much enthusiasm Would love a SB 2P build.

 

Fitting it in the case

Hi All

My replacement chip is on the plane, fingers crossed. In the meantime I have built the system up with one CPU and four DIMMs. The case is the standard gloss black version not the matt black special edition. The outside is very shiny and contrasts nicely with the matt black vents. It has lots of neat features that make building a system easier, NZXT include a tiny socket for tightening the standoffs and an CPU 8pin extension cable with individually braided wires.


There is also a seven way fan hub attached with Velcro so you can stick it anywhere.


The motherboard has 10 mounting holes but only 8 of these match up with holes in the tray. One on the right hand edge of the board is over a cable hole so it will not be used.


One at the top edge does not line up even though there are 4 holes in this area, I suspect Asus have used a non standard hole placement in order to clear the DIMM slots. I drilled a 3.5mm hole in the tray and used a spare standoff as a nut to attach the NZXT standoff.



The case is very tall and the main power cables only just reach, NZXT has put a cable hole above the motherboard in just the right place. The second EPS 8pin cable has to go through a small hole near the back of the case and will not reach without an extension, now I see why NZXT included one. Everything else was straightforward, this case swallows the EEB board.

 

Software and performance

Hi All

I have installed Ubuntu-12.04-desktop-AMD64. First problem is the install CD did not want to play with the GT610 graphics card, I had to fit an older card for the install, update the Nvidia driver then swap back to the GT610. I used the ext3 file system and disabled barriers as per Musky`s Guide

I have installed FAH V7. Tip: install FAHClient first, it will ask for username, team no and passkey then it starts up and runs as a service in the background. You can`t see it running but it is there. Then install FAHControl so you can monitor the client. I have also linked this client to FAHControl on my Windows PC for remote control.

The Xeon is running SMP16 with no extra options, it is getting a4 core work units. So far it is showing 30K to 33K PPD in FAHControl, with the 10% bonus that`s 33K to 36K. Power consumption is 125W at the wall That`s 290PPD/W. Core temps are in the high 30s`C, this is much cooler than I expected. I am using Psensor to monitor temps and i7z to monitor clock speed. According to i7z the CPU frequency is about 2.2GHz this is lower than expected and explains the cool temps .

The quest continues.

 

Congratz on the chip replacement. Hopefully he marks it as replacement or warranty (if it works that way there) so you don't have to pay all those fees again. I hope you can get your speed on the CPU to what you want, now is a good time to experiment with it until you get the new chip so you know what to do with the other when it arrives.

 

Nice. So double the PPD and a little less than double the W when you have both CPU running?

 

Glad you have it running bud

Wish mine was running

What are you using to get the power draw at the wall?

Sent from my BlackBerry 8520 using Tapatalk

 

In fact if performance scales with no of cores then the QRB means that PPD would be about 2.8 times as much. If the extra CPU adds 95W then total power would be about 220W but I would like to get it to turbo boost higher .

 

A generic plug in power meter like this, mine has a model number on the back "2000MU"

 

thanks

 

Hi I may be able to offer some tips here as I am folding on the same motherboard and similar chips. If you set the long term power limit for the chip to 130w and the long term duration to the max the chip should be running at 2.4ghz on all cores. Boost the fsb to 104mhz the max it will allow and you will be running at just under 2.5ghz. My machine is running at these speeds and completes 8101 at 25minutes per frame and 6901 at 12minutes per frame. Power usage is just under 200w at the wall with no graphics card installed. I am very impressed with the power consumption.

 

When running i7z, if you drag the right side of the window to the right you will see the core temps.

No need for Psensor in that case

Really nice build

 

Hi Ben

Thanks for your input, I have tried what you suggest but it made no difference. In fact I have tried lots of BIOS settings but nothing has had any effect on the clock speed. Maybe it`s because I am running a single processor, the system may behave differently with two CPUs installed.

One Box thanks for the tip, I installed Psensor before I tried i7z.

My 3770K has 4 cores and 8 threads at 4.4GHz, the Xeon has 8 cores and 16 threads at 2.2GHz so in theory they should have the same performance. Both machines are currently running project 8049 so I compared the frame times, 56.9s for the 3770K and 56.4s for the Xeon.

 

Update

Hi All

Still can`t get the clock speed over 2.2GHz but the time per frame on P8049 has come down to 52s so something i`ve changed has made an improvement. I will note down the current BIOS settings and see if I can figure it out.

 

IT`S ALIVE!

Hi All

Still not getting anywhere with the BIOS settings. Yesterday evening it was running P8049 with a TPF of 51s, then I reset the BIOS to optimized defaults and it continued at 51s per frame. So it appears that my BIOS tweaks had no effect at all.

The replacement processor has arrived. The system booted up first time with 2 CPUs and 8 DIMMs and appears to be totally stable. It is now running SMP 32 on the a4 core. CPU 0 is running at about 2.2GHZ but CPU 1 is running at about 2.3GHz.

Intel Turbo Boost
The research I have done so far indicates that the maximum multiplier with all cores active is 24. And the processor must also remain within pre-set limits for power, current and temperature. As well as changing the multiplier the clock pulse can be modulated to reduce the total number of clock cycles. So even if the multiplier is at 24 if the processor exceeds its TDP the clock pulse can be modulated to throttle it back and stay within the power budget. The processor can exceed its TDP for a short time to make the computer more responsive but if the load is maintained then it will throttle back.

When the system boots up FAH starts automatically and both CPUs boost up to 2.4GHz for about 30s then CPU 0 drops back to about 2.2GHz, after about 60s CPU 1 drops back to about 2.3GHz. The frequencies are not constant, they fluctuate all the time. I have disabled spread spectrum so I would expect the frequency to be constant. Nothing I have tried so far has made any significant difference to this behavior. Anyone have any ideas?

 

Thats wierd I havent tried to run my motherboard with one cpu so dont know if it makes a difference to the turbo speeds. I know I upped the tdp of the chips from 95w to 130w and I got 2.4ghz on all cores plus another 90mhz or so for the extra 4mhz on the bus. I have got my time per frame down from 25min to 24min on 8101 by restarting the folding client after it starts like the kraken does which I dont have installed. The ES chips are a bit pot luck as they have little bugs and behave differently in different motherboards. I am currently experimenting with a single chip in an gigabyte x79 board. The turbo options are very poor and I am not getting the speeds I wanted which I think is down to the gigabyte bios which just isnt as good as asus for support of spicy chips. I am going to run it with 15cores enabled in the linux client using bigadv to see if it gets any tasty work units while avoiding the 8101s which will never complete in time. The thing keeps restarting randomly at the moment so will see if I can get it stable for some more ppd.

 

Just had a couple of ideas - have you set the max power duration time limit to max time in seconds and are you running your multi at 20x or 24x - stick to 20. Plus when speedstep is enabled to allow turbo manual voltage settings for the cpus are ignored and they run with stock vids. Last thought is how good is your cooling as temps are taken into consideration with turbo. I recon this could be the problem, run with a good bit of airflow through the heatsinks and keep cpus as cool as pos. Glad the new chip arrived as these setups are nice and those C0 chips were a very good buy. Going to buzz seeing your ppd rise now - think I may need to turn an extra machine on lol.

 

I guess you did play around with values Advanced>CPU Power Management menu, right ? I mean the "Long duration power limit" item, which in my understanding is a relative value to the factory 95W value. +10 means 105W limit etc.

 

Hi Faugusztin

In Advanced>CPU Power Management I have changed the following:
Energy Performance, set to [Performance]
Long Duration Power Limit, set to [130]
Long Duration Maintained, set to [250]
Short Duration Power Limit, set to [160]

I took the "Long Duration Power Limit" to be an absolute value in Watts. The notes in the BIOS say that "Long Duration Maintained" can be set between 1 and 32 but there are no units. The highest value I can enter is 250. It seems odd that the default value for all these limits is zero.