Overclocking a 56-Core Server - Is there ANY point?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,744 words · ~8 min read
0:00
my custom water blocks from swiftech are here
0:04
but perhaps more importantly my email
0:08
from ASUS giving me the guidance that i need to overclock
0:13
the 56 core system is also here so what do we stand to gain
0:19
according to ASUS's guidance anywhere from three
0:23
to nine percent performance and what do we stand to lose twenty thousand dollars
0:28
in cpus 750 dollars in motherboards and about five grand worth of RAM
0:34
so what are we waiting for
0:43
anker's new powerwave 7.5 pad and stand
0:46
both offer faster wireless charging easy alignment for your device and the pad is
0:51
coated with an anti-slip material check them out on amazon through the links
0:55
below so one of the most exciting things about this board to me other than the
0:59
hilariously broken uh web page for it
1:02
with this placeholder text in it is the fact that jesus advertises it as
1:08
overclocking capable so this is the exact same platform that we had set up
1:13
from our holy so we've got a system that
1:17
seems to be locked up and we're back everything seems to be working fine so
1:21
56 processing cores and completely inadequate cooling so we're
1:28
getting some baseline readings here so we're sitting at around 6 700 and
1:31
cinebench let's go ahead and restart it and key in what ASUS figures is gonna
1:36
give us a three percent overclock and then we're gonna go from there so we go
1:40
into ai overclock tuner set that to manual change this
1:44
to 103. spread spectrum gets disabled xeon
1:49
turbocharger gets enabled and then
1:53
wow that's not good oh that's not good at
1:56
all well that didn't work just going to fire them over a quick email saying thank you
2:01
for the instructions by the way they were this is one of the challenges with
2:06
overclocking by base clock rather than by adjusting
2:09
the multiplier when you adjust the base clock you actually throw a bunch of
2:13
other system frequencies out of whack including pci express and what can
2:18
happen is if you go too far out of spec you can make it so that certain devices
2:22
won't be detected anymore i've never heard of
2:26
one percent out of spec causing a storage controller to stop showing up
2:31
but our SATA drive is not showing up at 101 base clock
2:36
i hope it didn't break the drive yeah see there's no there's no drive
2:40
boot options here okay we're gonna go back to 100 and see if this shows up
2:43
again there it's back see ata device
2:47
so that's a good sign you know you could get absolutely like
2:52
shredded if like every time you had to wait around for a server board to post you're
2:57
just like yeah i'm gonna do some crunches
3:03
that seems like a lot of work though okay here's what we're gonna do is we're
3:07
gonna switch over to an m.2 ndme SSD because we know our
3:12
video card was still working so so some stuff
3:16
still might work okay this is good so our 960 pro is here let's go ahead and
3:22
save our changes and see if at 101
3:27
we can boot up into Windows nice
3:30
okay check this out this is good
3:33
101 megahertz 75.94
3:38
wait is that much higher oh
3:43
looks like just some of the things we've tuned
3:47
are we even without any base clock overclocking forcing the processor to
3:51
run at a higher turbo frequency let's see if we can push for more
3:58
so this is it the turbo ratio lock this right here is sort of similar to the
4:04
multi-core optimization that caused that whole
4:07
scandal during the coffee lake launch so it was effectively causing higher power
4:11
consumption but higher performance overclocking the processors out of the
4:14
box now that it's not enabled by default i don't think there's any scandal there
4:18
but that's why we got so much more performance it was taking the expected
4:22
turbo for all cores active and just setting it to like a higher turbo that
4:27
was for not all the cores being active with that said according to ASUS's
4:31
guidance we should expect more than one percent on top of that
4:36
so we're trying three percent
4:39
what the reset button stopped working
4:43
i did i didn't even touch it there i don't know if this is a good sign yet
4:47
it's doing this thing where it like keeps trying and it makes a little bit
4:52
further every time but then it keeps just resetting itself
4:57
this RAM is already running at like the balls to the wall speed for
5:01
this platform 2600 maybe we dial that back
5:05
and see if maybe trying to not run the memory out
5:09
of spec will help us get booted up at 103 and
5:12
i would have thought it possible but i made it worse postcode
5:17
zero i got an email from ASUS different
5:21
contact this time jacqueline who suggested i try her exact configuration
5:26
but we're gonna need to make a couple of changes first of all
5:30
no say to drive that's gotta go second of all i've gotta rip out most of the
5:34
RAM and she also suggested that i try with
5:37
the onboard graphics wow these are hot cut my computer into
5:42
pieces it is a piece of chin
5:45
oh come on the only thing worse
5:50
than slow posting server boards
5:53
is when slow posting server boards
5:57
post and then reset themselves as part of like i don't know if this is a memory
6:01
training exercise or something i don't know what it's doing did it just turn off again
6:06
so now from a second source yeah no problem
6:10
all i did was dial in these settings and bippity boppity
6:17
well well now i'm in even worse position
6:21
overclocking failed and i have no keyboard detected
6:26
yes i have another idea we're going to give it more voltage
6:32
and we're straight to zero zero so i've got a couple more ideas stop it
6:37
there are a few other things here that maybe we could look at we could turn on
6:41
load line calibration extreme
6:44
phase stop it
6:48
three again get some help it's time for a hail mary
6:52
to be clear i don't think this is thermals related but let's water cool
6:57
this thing let's see what happens
7:01
is this brand new nope and whoever put it back didn't put the
7:05
hardware back with it thank you guys
7:11
wow this was left over from whole room water
7:14
cooling oh gross to be clear the rust isn't from
7:19
the pump itself these don't these don't rust the worst part is i know everything i'm
7:24
doing right now is almost definitely for not okay come
7:28
on okay
7:33
ouch ah
7:37
got myself in the scissors cut my life into pieces and you know what if we're
7:44
gonna go full hail mary let's just put all the RAM back in
7:48
this is an advanced water cooling technique
7:51
this is known as the uh the pump and fill
7:56
look at this mess i better get some good results out of it
8:01
okay cpus are still detected all the RAM is
8:05
still detected bad news is on first boot
8:08
we get an overclocking failed message so that's flipping wow those are much
8:13
better CPU champs 30 and 36 so we have
8:16
dropped just about 30 degrees about 25
8:19
degrees off of our cpus we're going full hem on the CPU voltage
8:24
let's hit it hey 103. it might have been
8:27
the auto voltage not going high enough the whole time holy let's hit it
8:32
with a load we're back to the same score we got
8:35
before we just tuned those bio settings and ran
8:39
it at 101. okay let's try restoring our defaults and
8:45
keying everything in manually again okay here we go we're at 3.3 gigahertz
8:50
this time 75.96 okay even if we could get another four
8:54
percent we wouldn't be able to crack eight thousand but i mean we have to try
9:00
i mean it's funny like we preach the importance of cooling all the time
9:04
around here but i've never seen it have this
9:07
profound impact
9:11
and straight to postcode 0-0 okay maybe i shouldn't have changed so many things
9:15
at once so without tooling around with any of
9:18
that other stuff this time let's go for 105 again
9:22
come on baby come on baby
9:26
and zero zero
9:30
all right you can
9:33
overclock a workstation or a server but
9:37
you're gonna affect your system in ways that you might not otherwise foresee
9:41
like making it so your SATA SSD doesn't show up
9:45
and the performance gains are probably fairly
9:48
negligible my recommendation based on the performance we were able to achieve
9:53
is just go with some kind of like turbo manipulation like ASUS's turbo locking
9:58
thing and if that's stable
10:02
call it a day
10:05
see that's f right there
10:09
rip rip the dream new from mass drop is a new keyboard
10:13
modeled after the super successful k-type it's fully programmable with RGB
10:18
lighting and qmk firmware which makes it much easier to program and gives you
10:23
more control at checkout you can choose between cherry mx kaiwa and halo
10:28
switches which will affect the pricing depending on your choice and there are a
10:32
few first production perks that you get if you join this drop now including a
10:37
free novelty keycap behind the scenes live q a with the designer and 10 bucks
10:42
free for your next keycap set so pick it up today on massdrop for a limited time
10:47
through the link below so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video
10:51
you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the
10:55
stuff we featured at the link in the description also down there is our merch
10:58
storage has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which you should
11:02
totally join