Techspot: Haswell-E vs Dual Xeon (SB-EP)

[nitromullet]

Will the H90 not mount like this in the Define XL R2?

...and is it possible that the second EPS12V connector on the PSU is two four pin plugs instead of a single eight?

I'm not sure exactly which Seasonic 520 you got, but they indicate the S12II Bronze 520W has that kind of configuration. http://www.seasonicusa.com/S12II-Bronze.htm

edit: since you're using a 520W PSU I presume you aren't also using a high power gpu in that system. If that is the case, you could also use a 6-pin PCIE power connector with an adapter like this on your second EPS12V plug: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812198032

 

[Socio]

Will the H90 not mount like this in the Define XL R2?

...and is it possible that the second EPS12V connector on the PSU is two four pin plugs instead of a single eight?

I'm not sure exactly which Seasonic 520 you got, but they indicate the S12II Bronze 520W has that kind of configuration. http://www.seasonicusa.com/S12II-Bronze.htm

edit: since you're using a 520W PSU I presume you aren't also using a high power gpu in that system. If that is the case, you could also use a 6-pin PCIE power connector with an adapter like this on your second EPS12V plug: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812198032

That was how it was setup on my old board, my old PSU had four 4 pin power plugs for the CPUs and they fit side by side in the 8 pin plug ins.

 

[NAC]

nitromullet - I think my brain capacity was reduced when I was putting it together. I did not try the configuration with the fan attached to the case pulling instead of pushing from the inside. Indeed - it looks like that would fit! Thanks for the tip.

Regarding the power supply - that picture is like the 8 pin connector that I have - it is two four pins which I can put together. However they are closely connected at the end of the wire so I can't use one of them for each CPU because the motherboard separates the two eight pin connectors about 9 inches apart. And I can't find another wire ending in either an EPS12v 8 pin or 8/4 pin combo. I emailed Seasonic about it, will report back what they say. I'm going to search online if anyone else found that their Seasonic unit differs from the specs - mine has other differences like more SATA but fewer of the old style 4 pin peripheral connectors.

 

[NAC]

Also to note, I'll be using a GTX960, so I only need a PCI-E 6 pin, and I think 520 watts should be sufficient for both CPUs and the GTX960. My power supply has TWO 6/8 pin PCI-E plugs, whereas on the website the specs are a 6 pin and a 6/8 pin.

 

[Socio]

nitromullet - I think my brain capacity was reduced when I was putting it together. I did not try the configuration with the fan attached to the case pulling instead of pushing from the inside. Indeed - it looks like that would fit! Thanks for the tip.

Regarding the power supply - that picture is like the 8 pin connector that I have - it is two four pins which I can put together. However they are closely connected at the end of the wire so I can't use one of them for each CPU because the motherboard separates the two eight pin connectors about 9 inches apart. And I can't find another wire ending in either an EPS12v 8 pin or 8/4 pin combo. I emailed Seasonic about it, will report back what they say. I'm going to search online if anyone else found that their Seasonic unit differs from the specs - mine has other differences like more SATA but fewer of the old style 4 pin peripheral connectors.

For the PSU get two of these:

StarTech.com 8-Inch ATX12V 4-Pin P4 CPU Power Extension Cable (ATXP4EXT)

 

[Burpo]

For the cpu's (EPS 12v.)..

http://www.ebay.com/itm/6-EPS-12V-8...161090?hash=item4acac00282:g:mTAAAOxyGqZSXdZD

 

[nitromullet]

For the cpu's (EPS 12v.)..

http://www.ebay.com/itm/6-EPS-12V-8...161090?hash=item4acac00282:g:mTAAAOxyGqZSXdZD

I'd still prefer to have this if it was me. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812198032

Less power coming through each cable before the adapter, plus cable management will probably be easier without having to stretch the splitter over the 9" span between the EPS12V plugs on the motherboard. Either one should do the trick though.

 

[jumpncrash]

Phanteks Enthoo Pro would be my choice.

that's where mine went

 

[NAC]

So windows is installed, and everything is working ok. Still on one CPU, haven't heard back from Seasonic and the cable I ordered to change PCIe to EPS hasn't arrived yet.

This computer is freakin loud. I guess I was dreaming to think it would be quieter than my old one. Even with every fan on 1, the thing is not quiet. Grump. It may just be my headache right now, but this is upsetting me. I don't mind if it is loud when rending or at full throttle, but at idle I expected better results than this. Grump. Gotta get some earplugs or maybe just an i3.

Also, I can't find a drive in Windows 10 when plugged into the "SAS" ports. I tried to install various drivers without success. In bios I see the drive, but in windows it didn't show up. Just a regular NTFS drive. Dunno. I plugged it into one of the SATA ports and it shows up.

 

[jhu]

At least you have something up and running. I'm still waiting for the heatsink/fan to arrive.

 

[NAC]

So I'm rendering a 2 hour project in Premiere Elements. This was a big pain - I need to finish the project (fix rendering bugs) and have been trying to transition to the new computer over the same time. It rendered on the old PC as BluRay, but it seems Premiere is more picky when rendering in DVD and I never fully rendered it in that format. Anyway, I think I fixed the problems with the project which cause the issue.

So I render it on the new PC...
A couple minutes in: blue screen of death. Repeat, same result. Argh! Note that previous render issues cause the program to not complete, but didn't crash the computer. I used Prime 95 with and without the memory intensive test to determine it is a memory problem. So I upped the voltage of the memory from 1.35 v to 1.4. And I disabled ECC. The problem seems solved - it has been rendering for over an hour without a problem.

The computer is much more usable than my i5 when rendering - that is for sure. As I hoped, all the cores help for multitasking, and I didn't even disable any from Premiere.

CPU temps are in the low 60C, with fans and water pump all on the lowest speed possible. I ordered a fan controller - I'll control it all manually and I suspect I'll be able to turn down the fans even lower than the MB allows. According to HWMonitor, all cores are running at 2999 MHz. Premiere is using 20 gigs of memory.

So far so good. I can't wait to benchmark with two CPUs.

 

[nitromullet]

I've got my Dell Precision T5600 sitting next to me, and I also have two E5-2670's en route. Can't wait to take this thing for a spin.

 

[NAC]

I spoke, or wrote, too soon. After about an hour of rendering I got another BSOD. So I upped the memory voltage from 1.35 to 1.45. I also must have changed another setting because the memory temps are now visible in HWmonitor. And I realized that I may as well turn ECC on instead of off. Not sure why I thought it may be more stable with it off. After this render I think I'll disable a few other memory settings, the bios has a lot of settings.

Also turned all the fans on max.

Now, the job is about 80% done and I think it has been less than two hours. This is much faster than my i5. CPU temps are hovering around 50 - a lot cooler, obviously, with the fans and water pump on high. Memory temps vary a lot - between 56 and 76.

 

[jhu]

Just got the hs/fans today and put everything together. It works! And it's very loud. Good thing it will be sitting in the basement.

According to my kill-o-watt, this thing idles at 92 watts and pulls down 310 watts fully loaded (Povray benchmark). That's better than my FX 8350 (70W idle, 255W fully loaded).

 

[tenks]

Awesome you guys, glad to hear it!

 

[NAC]

What a difference a fan controller makes! All fans are on low, I can barely hear the computer. Much quieter than my last machine. And when I need cooling, I turn up the fans manually.

Did a memory test overnight, everything passed. Still need the power cable for the second CPU.

 

[nitromullet]

You get your BSOD issues figured out?

 

[NAC]

Yes, it looks like the BSOD was memory related. I determined that by running Prime 95 in the "blend mode" which is memory intensive (and quickly crashed the computer) vs. the other mode which is CPU intensive and didn't cause problems. I upped the voltage from 1.35 to 1.45 and it seems to be fine. To be sure I ran a memory test (Memtest86+ 5.01) overnight and it didn't find any problems. I guess I'll run the blend Prime 95 test overnight as another test.

I'm glad I got the 1.35 volt memory, allows me to overvolt it and still stay below 1.5. Note that it is used ECC server memory. Who knows - maybe they always ran it at 1.5 without thinking about it. I read online that according to specs, all DDR3 memory should be able to take 1.8 volts without damage, but not necessarily function. I'm sure a .1 overvolt is fine for it.

 

[jhu]

Now waiting for the 12-core Xeons to come down in price…

 

[nitromullet]

The Dell Precision T5600 took the E5 2670's with no issues. The 2609's that were originally in there didn't support hyper-threading so I had to enable HT in the BIOS, but that was it for configuration.

Even though the original CPU's didn't support 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, the installed RAM is actually 1600MHz so I'm getting full speed RAM after the CPU upgrade. Two sticks of 8GB, so it's only single channel though.

Since I did upgrade to a higher TDP processor than stock (80w to 115w), I do want to keep an eye on load temps for a bit. The only dual Xeon compatible temp monitoring software I found was CPUID's HWMonitor, what are the rest of you using?

 

[jhu]

The Dell Precision T5600 took the E5 2670's with no issues. The 2609's that were originally in there didn't support hyper-threading so I had to enable HT in the BIOS, but that was it for configuration.

Even though the original CPU's didn't support 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, the installed RAM is actually 1600MHz so I'm getting full speed RAM after the CPU upgrade. Two sticks of 8GB, so it's only single channel though.

Since I did upgrade to a higher TDP processor than stock (80w to 115w), I do want to keep an eye on load temps for a bit. The only dual Xeon compatible temp monitoring software I found was CPUID's HWMonitor, what are the rest of you using?

I'm using FreeBSD, so I just read the output from

sysctl -a | grep temperature

My temps are 30℃ idle and 50℃ fully loaded.

 

[nitromullet]

Yeah, I'm running Windows 10. I'm getting inconsistent temp readings between Core Temp 1.0 RC8 and HWMonitor - about a 13C difference between the two.

I also grabbed Intel Processor Diagnostic Tool which doesn't show actual temps, but 32 Prime95 workers at 100% load shows the following in the Temp Mon screen:

[q]Test Result - PASS
Expected Greater than 1 degrees below max
Received 24 degrees below max
Test PASSED[/q]

I'm going to assume max for the cpu is defined at 100C (Tj Case is 80C), so I guess my load temps are somewhere in the mid-70s.

The cpu fans are only 80mm, and the system is not terribly loud. ...It's definitely not silent either... I have the fans set to auto in the BIOS, and they don't spin up a whole lot under load. I know they have some headroom because I set them on med in the BIOS and they got a lot louder. I didn't even bother with high because I'm sure that would be way too loud.

Either way, it seems my temps are perfectly safe, although I don't seem to be able to get a reliably accurate reading.

 

[NAC]

I'm also using CPUID's HWMonitor.

My temps also go between about 30 idle and about 50 load, as long as I ramp up the fans. I can stick around 50 on full load even with the fans not on full, a nice compromise on noise vs heat.

 

[nitromullet]

Yeah, I decided to check how mine would do at med fan speeds, and the Intel Temp Mon screen shows 44-47C to max under load.

It looks like at med fan speed, the temps top out in the 50s as well. I'm going to keep it on auto though. The fans have enough headroom to keep the system safe in the event of a temp spike, and at med speeds the system is too loud for my needs.

The only thing I'll be doing on this system that can even remotely take advantage of all the cores is audio work, so I can't have this thing howling in the background.

 

[NAC]

So I got the PCIe 6 pin to EPS 8 pin for the second CPU. I plug it in and the second CPU and full 64 gigs of memory display. I tried out Blender some, the thing just scorches with both CPUs. I now also have a Nvidea GPU so I can also render with GPU, but previously I only had a i5 and an AMD GPU so it was much slower.

BUT... the power draw is beyond the limits of my APC power supply. So it beeps. Which actually it used to if I used the GPU on full power, but I almost never did since I stopped gaming. Power supply in my house is surprisingly inconsistent - I have a problem several times a year. So before I start using the CPUs on full power I need to get a bigger APC.

Once I get the APC in a month or so I'll run some burn in tests and some benchmarks.

Another note - since I have the fans on a fan controller, they don't turn off when the computer is sleeping. So the computer is never silent unless it is off. I dislike that, not sure if there is a workaround though. Also note that boot up time with this motherboard is quite a bit longer than my old computer. Maybe 30 seconds, I'm not sure. But turning it off regularly is also a pain. Hmm...