The Melchior Project - An SR-2 Build - Page 6

Part 5 is online. Yes I know there isn't really great cable management but like I said, there simply isn't an easy place I can put all the cables.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMBbwrC9Gog[/ame]

Also more pics:























More to come once the second batch uploads. Ok there we go, finished overnight.

























The small indent faces the rightside of the heatsink. The guide was so small that I had to take a photo to ID that (as I had put mine on wrong).
























It's the first time I've ever modded a graphics card - I think it worked out pretty well

Edited by The-Real-Link - 12/28/10 at 9:06pm

It definitely seems to be so. I want to have my other 580 come in so I can first test it, then put the AXP on it, then figure out how much OC overhead I have with the GPUs / CPUs. I'll probably OC a little - just taking it a step at a time.

Part 6 is up. Done until 2nd 580 comes in.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9N_GDWQ6W0[/ame]

Good news. Rotated the front CPU cooler 90 degrees and while it hasn't really dropped either processor's temperature by much seemingly, it closed the heat gap from 20C to ~10C. PWM temps are also down by 10 degrees.

Sorry for the updated / repeated posting on this but I figure it's finally time to where I can say I can release all the benchmarks and specs.

The only things pending so far are any OC'd differences and any GPU task where I could give results from one or two GPUs as the second one is still RMA'd and should come back tomorrow. One or two tests compared to my previous system had to be tossed because for some reason, the software wouldn't run or the differences were more in actuality, based on non computational factors such as the amount of scratch disk space available.

BENCHIES!

(Original benched system was a Dell XPS 410 with:
Intel Q6600 Quad Core @ 2.4ghz (Dell / Foxconn MB with ICH8R )
4 GB DDR2 667mhz RAM
EVGA 9800GTX+ @ 728 / 1536 / 2536 (core / shader / memory)
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Sound Card
11-in-1 Multi-card Reader
1 90mm case fan for HDDs, 1 120mm case fan for a push CPU cooling solution w/heatsink (yes 2 fans, that's it).
8 USB 2.0 ports

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CyberLink PowerDirector 7
Encode a 15 minute video with 1080p footage / transitions / music and render it out as an uncompressed 1024x768 AVI file (file size = 37 GB)

XPS = 37 min, 30 secs
SR-2 = 20 min

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SuperPi (Not sure if I thoroughly logged this so might be invalid)

Calculation of Pi to 1M:
XPS = 22 sec
SR-2 = 16 sec

Calculation of Pi to 32M:
XPS = 12 min
SR-2 = 14 min, 13 secs

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Final Fantasy XI Bench v2 (Invalid since it wouldn't run on SR-2)
Final Fantasy XI Bench v3 (fine-ish)

XPS Low = 10,400
XPS High = 8.328

SR-2 Low = 5,165
SR-2 High = 3,840

I can only conclude some kind of chip or driver architectural difference is causing such a discrepency there. Either way the game is hard-capped at 30fps and is poorly coded for PC so probably won't see any real difference in actual gameplay despite a "poor" benchmark run.

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Final Fantasy XIV Benchmark

XPS Low = 3,066
XPS High = 2,000

SR-2 Low = 4,665
SR-2 High = 4,687 (WOW)

Apparently I'm either CPU-bound or even this benchmark isn't too hard a test for a 580. Needless to say the game went from moderately playable before to wonderfully smooth now. That's again with just one GPU and no SLI for now.

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Canon DPP Exporting
A test folder of 50 Canon 5D Mark II RAW files were loaded up with various photo complexities and file sizes. Exported to seperate HDD @ Jpeg Quality of 10 and 350 DPI.

XPS = 13 min, 20 secs
SR-2 = 8 min, 5 secs

Impressive. Wonder how an OC would help that?... I use DPP because it gives me a truly accurate display of the photography I shoot. Lightroom and Photoshop are indeed faster but their RAW importers pre-process my images before they're imported and they do not look correct. As such DPP is the "slowest" program but still fairly fast

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3ds Max Design 2009
Render a Cathedral scene with a few columns and one giant faceted stained glass window with caustics / GI / Final Gather with mr.sun. Scene is comprised of ~1.3 million polygons and uses ~1.5 GB of RAM and is output to an image measuring 2560x1920.

XPS = 6 min, 28 secs
SR-2 = 1 min, 57 secs

*Picks jaw up from floor*. Yeah, I'm happy. Need to try a more intense scene (though I couldn't fairly bench it since the old system is now sold... maybe I have render times noted somewhere).

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Adobe Media Encoder CS4 / CS5
Re-encode a 1 GB *.mov 5D II file and compress it to a semi-online / slower system friendly 720x480 @ 30 fps. H.264 container, Level 3.2, target / max bitrate of 15Mbps, Audio at 192 Khz AAC. Output to seperate HDD. For some reason, outputting an original 30 FPS clip at 29.97 FPS increased the render time significantly so, do keep that in mind to be sure of your I/O parameters.

XPS CS4 = 17 min
SR-2 CS4 = 12 min

CS4 as it turns out only used ~20% CPU power on the SR-2 but maxed my Dell XPS. Odd. Maybe it's simply limited to quad core processing?

XPS CS5 = N/A (Didn't have it yet but probably wouldn't have been too different of a time IMO)
SR-2 CS5 = 5 min, 30 secs

(wow CS5 uses all cores as task manager is pegged at 100%... woo).

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3D Mark Vantage
Default test settings

XPS = P8272
XPS CPU = 29433
XPS GPU = 6673

SR-2 = P26950
SR-2 CPU = 68824
SR-2 GPU = 22406

SR-2 FTW! (though still only with 1 GPU, crazy)

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3D Mark 2006
Default test settings

XPS = 12603
XPS CPU = 3780

SR-2 = 16093
SR-2 CPU = 5443

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Crysis Island Benchmark
Looped 3 times and averaged, all settings put to Very High, 0x AA, DX9.

XPS 1024x768 = 51 FPS
XPS 1920x1080 = 31 FPS

SR-2 1024x768 = 65.7 FPS
SR-2 1920x1080 = 57.4 FPS

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Photoshop CS5 Import / Export
Take the 50 Jpeg files from before, time them for both importing to PS and exporting with an action to 1024x683, Bicubic Sharper. Saved to different HDD than working files.

XPS Load-In = 2 min, 8 secs
XPS Export = 1 min, 6 secs

SR-2 Load-In = 1 min, 16 secs
SR-2 Export = 31 secs

Times are again nearly halved. Impressed? Oh yes!

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Card Reader / Portable USB HDD read speeds
Card readers are a Dell 11-in-one and a Rosewill 40-in-one respectively. USB HDD is a Colorspace UDMA "Hyperdrive" 300 GB).

XPS Card Reader = 15MB/sec read
XPS USB HDD Read = 35MB/sec read

SR-2 Card Reader = 20MB/sec read
SR-2 USB HDD Read = 35MB/sec read

Chalking this up to interface and the fact that the devices themselves aren't any faster on either system. Cards are the Extreme Series cards and so are still pretty fast overall, but the HDD in particular can only read so fast. Still enough for transferring by me.

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Unigine Heaven 2
All effects enabled, Shaders = High, Textures = High, Filtering = Tri, Aniscopic = 4x, Tesselation = Extreme

XPS 1024x768 DX9 = Avg = 57.5 FPS / Min = 30 FPS / Max = 138 FPS / Score = 1448
XPS 1920x1080 DX9 = Avg = 33 FPS / Min = 16 FPS / Max = 65 FPS / Score = 829

XPS 1024x768 DX11 = ?
XPS 1920x1080 DX11 = ?

SR-2 1024x768 DX9 = Avg = 84.9 FPS / Min = 17.4 / Max = 229.6 FPS / Score = 2139
SR-2 1920x1080 DX9 = Avg = 56 FPS / Min = 17.4 FPS / Max = 122 FPS / Score = 1408

SR-2 1024x768 DX11 = ?
SR-2 1920x1080 DX11 = ?

I blame my crappy writing on this page to figure out what the heck I tested. SR-2 is still faster in general but not maybe overwhelmingly so as it's DX9 VS DX11. Might have mis-labeled something there. I think I scrapped one of the two tests since my old 9800 couldn't run it (probably the DX11 one).

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F@H GPU
Do a simple folding session of the same protein via GPU.

XPS = 75 iterations/sec
~3,500 PPD

SR-2 = 7,500 iterations/sec
~16,000 PPD

Yes, folding performance even with one GTX 580 is superb. I can almost watch the proteins fold in real-time ;p. Really want my 2nd GPU for this, now!

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Counterstrike Source
Simple Netgraph of FPS with CS_Office server, ~24 players playing a few rounds.

XPS = 40-100 FPS
SR-2 = 80-220 FPS

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Data Copying
A large folder copy/paste (photos, movies etc), from my Intel 160 GB SSD C Drive to a 1.5 TB Western Digital Caviar Black G Drive (32MB cache)

XPS = 90-135 MB/sec sustained
SR-2 = 180-320 MB/sec sustained!

Wow.

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Microsoft Security Essentials Quick Scan (~118,000 files)

Both systems are within 10 seconds or so of each other. No real difference here.

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Power Draw
Different loads of power draw (measured with a Kill-A-Watt Meter)

XPS Idle = 125w
XPS CPU Load = 75w
XPS GPU Load = 100w
XPS System Load = 300w
Monitor etc. (consistent at 75 watts)

SR-2 Idle = 300w
SR-2 1 CPU Load = 40w
SR-2 2 CPU Load = 80w
SR-2 GPU Load = 170w
SR-2 System Load = 550w
Monitor etc. (consistent at 75 watts) Speakers, Printer, Scanner etc. are barely anything and are within 5w of fluctuation whether on or off, loud or quiet, idle or printing,

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3D Mark Vantage 11

Invalidated since old card couldn't run.
SR-2 = P6049
SR-2 GPU = 5857

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Temps
Based on BIOS, EVGA Monitoring Programs, Onboard Sensors, and HWMonitor

XPS CPU Idle = 32C
XPS CPU Load = 55C
XPS GPU Idle = 35C
XPS GPU Load = 65-72C

SR-2 CPU Idle = 18-22C
SR-2 CPU Load = 35-42C
SR-2 GPU Idle = 32C
SR-2 GPU Load = 70C
SR-2 AXP GPU Idle = 27C
SR-2 AXP GPU Load = 50C

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DPP Photos Open At Once
Simple compiling of a large RAW folder for display (thumbnails)

XPS = 2,700 Photos
SR-2 = 2,855 Photos

I'm figuring that this is a 32-bit limitation of Canon's DPP as it shows those photos using about 3.4 GB of RAM then it stops with an "out of memory" error (though continues to let you work just fine). Oh well.

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So there we go for now! Will have to bench some things again once I get SLI up and running but needless to say I am very happy with my SR-2. Hope this helps some of you looking at the platform for multimedia and such. It's simply exceptional - and needless to say, Xeons CAN game well too!
Edited by The-Real-Link - 12/29/10 at 9:13pm

Got second 580 in today. Toast. Time to RMA the RMA'd card ;p

Was semi-stable for a brief period as opposed to totally DOA and atleast gave me a signal upon POST. Temps reached 85+C in an open testing case with a simple folding test. Locked the system after not even 10 minutes and did a repeated rebooting crash loop with an error in the Nvidia Kernal Drivers. Of course, rebooted into Safe Mode, cleared out drivers, rebooted to the same errors for some reason despite a driver wipe. Card simply wouldn't be stable at all. No SLI visible whatsoever despite trying all finger connection positions and different slots. Oh well.
Edited by The-Real-Link - 12/30/10 at 9:10pm

Sorry to bump this but while I'm sitting here waiting for my 2nd 580 to come back, I was encouraged by a few folders to OC the system (which I wanted to do anyway at some point). I mean it's pretty bad of me to be on OVERCLOCK.NET and well, not be OC'd right?

Now I know Tom's has that good guide on OC'ing the 5620, but I'm still new to doing it and that Tom's article doesn't have any rationale as to "oh this setting affects that" - they simply say they coaxed their 5620s to 4ghz. Barring my guessing outright, am I correct in understanding:

1. That the PCIe frequency of ~100mhz should be left alone, period.
2. That I can leave Turbo Mode either enabled or disabled and it won't necessarily matter.
3. That as long as I keep the RAM within 1.65v and within my speed rating, I'm fine.
4. That as long as I keep the CPUs within 1.4v for their cores, I'm fine.
5. That the QPI / BCLK (aside from multi and small voltage adjustments later on) are really the only things I need to mess with to OC. I'd like to just leave the multi as default for now (18x is highest on these CPUs).
6. That as long as I keep the Tcase (heatspreader) temperature of the processor below ~70C, I'm fine.

For some reason my IOH PLL voltage seems quite high, is this normal?

@ 2,650 mhz now!

Basically, am I still safe? I really want to phase this in slowly and not suddenly go from 2.x up to say, 4ghz and burn out something.

If I go up by 100mhz increments at 30 minutes at a time while folding on CPU (core stopped, speed incremented, then core restarted - not while live folding I mean), would that be ok or should I run IBT / Prime95 at every few hundred mhz boost? Really new to this stuff I'm afraid.

Next, is there a "safe" speed at what my QPI link should be at?

Finally, RAM is at 2:8. Should I change that or does the 8 indicate the general latency class of the RAM? (EDIT, nevermind. Found an old PM by MushkinSean explaining RAM timings). 2:8 is fine for me for now it seems. Anyway, these sticks are showing up with different JEDEC / XMP profiles. Are they all basically correct for me to use?

Is EVGA Eleet fine to use within Windows or should I really be changing things from the BIOS still (I know, old school days)...

Basically I'm becoming more confident in knowing what settings affect others but at the same time it's still my first time really doing this. Thanks for any advice guys.












Edited by The-Real-Link - 1/8/11 at 5:27pm

@2,596 2,650 2,852 3,042 3,230 3,475 3,600 3,750 3,800 3,990mhz now!

So as to not spam all these victory posts, I'm just changing the screenshots to the most recent OC success. I think that's enough system punishment for one night.

CPU0 in HW monitors (aka CPU1 / the leftmost CPU socket on SR-2) along with the CPU0 PWM are slowly rising and now sitting at about 54C. This would match my old Dell rig under load. Is there any real way to keep that PWM cool? The CPU might show a TJMax limit of 95C but what about the PWM?! Edit - guess EVGA forums say it's designed to take the heat. No worries I guess as now my processors are getting fairly hot. Low to mid 60s @ 3.2 and now still right around 60C at 3.5. Getting warm but still ok. Same at 3.75... Will hold there until more testing is done.

Hitting a major wall after 197 BCLK, at 200 stable at the moment only after a lot of testing and tweaks. Will probably be starting a "help my OC!" thread soon.

Edit - Updated on Page 8 to current settings. Reached 200 via tweaks and past 200 via a changing of MCH Strap.






Edited by The-Real-Link - 1/19/11 at 1:58am