Hi all. I just encountered the most baffling thing in my entire 39 years upon this earth. Last summer I bought new PC parts and in them was the CPU I am using now, a Sandy E3-1220 Xeon. I knew full well it was locked but I got it for the same price as the equivalent locked I5 and it has more cache on it (same as the I7). I had it in a MSI H61m board for ages before recently upgrading to a MSI Z77A G45. So this is where it gets freaky..... I tried enabling OCgenie for a laugh in the bios itself. Unsurprisingly, bugger all happened. I figured this was because my CPU was locked. However, after having a poke through the drivers for my board I came across the ClickEFI software and for a giggle (OK I was bored) I loaded it up. What was strange, however, was that unlike in my actual bios this app let me enable, and indeed play with, the OCgenie. I tinkered for a while and eventually set the CPU multi to 40, as well as the GT multi to 40. NOTE - in the pic it says 41 but I figured I was just wasting my time so I set it to an even 40. I then set the GT multi to 40 also. And clicked apply. I figured it had crashed because it sat frozen for two minutes or so, then it came up with this... When the system restarted I got a message in bold yellow saying "OCgenie is enabled, please do not change any bios settings". Now bear in mind that this restart that it demanded from Windows was a full power down reboot, with my system being completely off for about four or so seconds. When I entered bios I was greeted with this. Note, this is the actual bios and I am not in Windows here. I shut the system down completely three times and each time I went back sure enough my overclock was alive and well.. However, when I got to Windows..... So I ran 3Dmark11 and sure enough my Physics score was a bog standard stock score for 3.2ghz. Does any one know what's going on here? is there something Intel install in Windows that ignores any overclocks on a locked CPU? This one has gotten me truly stumped.
I will guess it is a bug, where it is allowing you to set an arbitrary value, and upon booting is silently setting to what the maximum the cpu is capable instead of failing to post.
I'm beginning to think it's not a bug, rather,something in Windows forcing it to remain at stock. This is Intel's own actual Extreme tuning utility and sure enough I'm getting the MP of 40 that I set with Ocgenie, it's even showing it as my turbo speed top right. Yet, for some reason it isn't applying and working when I force a load onto the CPU. Very very odd !
It isn't a Windows issue. It's a CPU/BIOS thing. You can generally set whatever values you want in BIOS for multiplier/boost but if your CPU isn't unlocked it just won't apply regardless of what BIOS says. It works the same on FM2 for AMD. I can set my multis to whatever I want, but as soon as I get into Windows, everything reports stock speeds. The Intel software will report it correctly as it'll just grab whatever value is set in BIOS, even if it isn't correct. Having said all that on standard i5/i7 non unlocked models you should be able to set a boost multiplier upto 7 (I think) notches above standard clock speed. So in your case that would be 38, but I'm not sure if Xeons would allow thee same sort of thing.
Yep, providing the board/chipset supports it - Although I didn't think it was an extra 7 multipliers, I thought it was just limited to a max of 40 by intel and some board manufacturers tweaked that to 41.
From what I've read about boost clocks (turbo that is) you can normally overclock the boost clock by 4 cycles. My CPU boosts to 3.4ghz on one core only and 3.3ghz on all 4. I tried 3.6ghz but it didn't even register so I am assuming the Xeon doesn't even have that feature.. It's not a huge problem for me because even with GTX 670 in SLI I achieve the minimum and average frame rates I need in all games. It would just be nice for benchmarking Thanks for the help guys I appreciate it
It's a bump of 4 multipliers above standard boost on all cores I think. But yeah a max of 40/41 like the max for an i5 750 was 21/22.
