Intel Xeon E5-2697 v2 - Test and Slight Overclock Vlog
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2015-05-07
·
2,636 words · ~13 min read
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so this is the most excited I've been about putting something on a test bench
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in quite some time we've got our whole room water cooling setup video series
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and well just doing it building five systems that are all running on the same
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water cooling Loop and then spitting the heat out of the house sort of project
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coming up but of course there's some preparation that needs to be done so I
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always preach to people that especially if you're going to be liquid cooling a
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rig you should really be building it air cooled outside of a case first to make
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sure that everything's working before you go and put a bunch of work into it
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so this is the first one that I'll be testing
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out with the purchase of a qualifying Intel processor SSD or knck you could
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instantly win an Intel gaming Jersey and be entered in the draw for the ultimate
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system click now to learn more so here it is here's the setup that my son is
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helping me with are you going to build that one
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yeah okay good job you work on that all right well I show everyone the hardware
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that we are going to be putting into these rigs now this one is the one that
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I'm uh really excited about cuz it's not quite the same as the others they're all
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getting Kingston 240 gig ssds for the
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boot drives because most of our storage is going to be uh on the nas they're all
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getting Cooler Master V series 750 W power supplies so there are modular
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power supplies 30 plus gold all that good stuff we're not overdoing it on the
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wattage because there isn't really a benefit to that they are all getting
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NVIDIA GTX Titan black edition cards
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zoom out a little bit taking all of its glory and they're all running on ASUS
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x79 Deluxe motherboards ASUS really does a great job of those high-end boards and
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we uh we we really like this particular one quite a lot but while most of them
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will be running cor i7s and then 32 gigs
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of DDR3 memory this one will be running
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ah yes what's that okay it might only say 2.7 GHz on the spreader there but uh
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that's a pretty good 2.7 GHz cuz it's to all 12 of its cores and 24 threads this
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is going to be a Zeon based workstation as opposed to a core i7 based one and
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along with that Zeon we've got 64 gigs
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of Kingston DDR3 because instead of 32
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gigs like the other workstations this one is getting double the memory because
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edzel is a memory hog and needs pretty
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much as much RAM as I can throw at him that's also why he's getting the 12 core
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Zeon because for certain workloads like
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say for example 3D rendering you're going to get more benefit from more
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cores than you will from faster cores so
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unfortunately uh we can't make use of ECC memory which would allow us to get
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higher capacities like 128 gigs on one board um using 16 gig dims but 8 8 gig
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dims for a total of 6 4 gigs hopefully will be enough for him for the time
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being now one thing I've asked Kingston for is some higher speed memory for that
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rig cuz again with the other ones it doesn't matter that much so we'll see if
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they come through and send us some 1866 stuff but for now we're going to do the
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pre-build and validation and get going
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on this so the build process for this rig isn't really anything exceptional I
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mean it's motherboard CPU RAM it's all that stuff it's just the hardware that
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we're using that's pretty darn cool so as always it starts with the board I did
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notice the c CPU was a little bit different is actually um actually wider
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than most LGA 2011 CPUs then putting in
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all that RAM was one of those chores that you have to kind of enjoy a little
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bit there's something satisfying about putting 64 gigs of RAM into a system
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stick by stick by stick by stick um after that it's time to put some thermal
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compound on the CPU then we're going to get our power supply in place get that
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plugged into the motherboard something to note guys I put the power supply in fan side down that would suffocate it
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that's bad make sure fan side is up ignore the b-roll I did fix that before
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I actually turned the system on um after that we're going to go ahead and get the
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water cooling installed so you put in the four posts uh put the block over top
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of the thermal compound we already applied we're using a dual radiator liquid cooling system even though when
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this is done it'll actually be hooked up to something much cooler and much more
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extreme uh we plug in our SSD and then
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the uh cherry on top is the GTX Titan
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Black Edition so that's it guys it's done uh this is this is part of the
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process process we building something outside of the box to make sure that
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everything is running okay and this is it Moment of Truth time so let's go
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ahead and flip the switch on the power supply
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and there we go hopefully everything
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works all the actions happening here until the screen illuminates so uh as
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long as that okay keep doing things yeah there we go okay so let's see if all
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went well we should see something about
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12 cores and uh 64 gigs of RAM on the
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screen at some point here there we go there we go something something 2700 MHz
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okay 65 I guess the round gigs of RAM
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CPU fan error all right everything is
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detected let's head into the BIOS and uh do some rudimentary tuning so the first
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thing that you're always going to want to do is head over to advanced mode cuz
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Advanced Mode's for cool kids and then change it so that it boots in into
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advanced mode every time and now you
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know normally a normal person's reaction to a rig like this might be wow I've
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never touched a CPU that's worth $2500 I better be extremely careful with it but
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my reaction's a little bit different so we're going to go with can we overclock
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it a little bit now xeons are not overclockable the same way that core i7s
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are on this platform where you just turn up the multiplier and it's Off to the
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Races in fact I'll show you guys if we try to change the multiplier to anything
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higher than 27 it just automatically changes to 27
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so we're not going to be able to use the multiplier to overclock now on Modern
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Intel platforms it's multiplier times base clock equals the overall frequency
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and you can overclock base clock but not much on early x79 boards you were lucky
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to get maybe 105 MHz so we're going to
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see if we can get even 105 MHz because that'll be a 5% overclock on 12 cores so
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I'm going to show you guys uh what we're going to try so first of all we change
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to manual oopsy daisies change to manual we're going to key in 105 here then for
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the ratio we want Auto for the dam
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frequency normally we would leave it at 1600 MHz cuz this is 1600 MHz RAM but in
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this case I don't really I'm not really a huge fan of overclocking memory if you
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don't have to I mean we can play around with it later but first we want to make sure our CPU stable so we're going to
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pick something that is going to give us a frequency that is lower than 1600 MHz
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so that we know that memory is not holding us back here uh extreme over
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voltage we're not going to overvolt the CPU as much as I believe in you know
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trying to squeeze a little bit more performance out of a chip like this it's a 12 core chip we're not going to go and
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just throw more volts at it the last thing we want is to damage the thing so
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we're going to be going for whatever we can get without overvolting it and
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potentially reducing the lifespan this is a a work machine not like a gaming
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rig so we can't afford any uh any
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instability so these are not XMP memory
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module so we're going to key in our voltage manually and uh you know what
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I'm not going to bore you guys with the tediousness of keying in all that other
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stuff manually so let's just go ahead and find the last thing I need where are
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you CPU configuration the last thing I
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want is to make sure that turbo boost is
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on it might be somewhere in
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here CPU performance settings here we go yeah so turbo mode needs to be enabled
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so now what we've effectively done by leaving the core ratio at Auto and
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increasing our base clock is we've made it so that our CPU will continue to
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Turbo all the way up to 3.5 GHz plus 5%
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in a single threaded application and while it would normally turbo to 3 GHz
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with all 12 cores we're going to get 3150 MHz so a 5% Improvement let's see
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how it
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goes all right so here we are at the desktop it's time to validate that the
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settings that we put in actually took because again this is not normal
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Hardware so you know who knows
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um so well look at that okay we're turboing to 3.5 something GHz just yeah
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there you go normally which uh means there it is we are running at 105 MHz
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base clock so yes we have overclocked
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the CPU so the tools we're going to use to stress test it are ID to 64 and we're
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going to just start a stress test and
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assuming it doesn't crash pretty much immediately we're going to start creeping up that base clock and see if
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we can get a little bit higher cuz I think 105 is going to be pretty easy um
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we're not really asking it for much so we're going to we're going to push it and see see how much further we can get
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it one thing I do want to know before we proceed though is what are temperatures
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like huh very comfortable sitting at around 55° that's without the water
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heating up but that won't matter when we're running on a whole room liquid cooling setup now will it so I'm going
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to show you guys once we see that it sort of passes for a couple seconds here
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how we can avoid rebooting into Windows every time in or or rebooting into the
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ufi BIOS every time in order to test new things so we're going to go into the TPU
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tab of AI Suite which is not my favorite piece of software but we're just kind of
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using it to save some time here boop boop yeah I know AI sweet
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you're trying real hard okay and then we can actually change base cloth on the
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Fly setting increment by increment then
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we just apply it do you want to load it yes so we can change all of this stuff
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on the Fly run a new stability test and
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keep going until uh it doesn't go anymore so it ended up pushing a lot
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further than I expected and I had to bring it into the office to continue
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testing I ran out of time cuz I kept expecting at every stage one more be
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clock no it passes so uh this is what we
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ended up with any further than this and we can't we can't push it any further
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it'll just lock up as soon as we try to run a stress test but here it is
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113 mahz base clock that gives us
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339 GHz with 12 cores running utterly
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unfreaking believable so this is going to be one heck of a high performance
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workstation and it is 100% Rock Solid at
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this setting no problems whatsoever very very exciting um so stay tuned guys
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because this is just one of the machines for our five system multi-stem room wide
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liquid cooling setup that we're going to be doing soon it is the most exciting
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one with 64 gigs of RAM as well as that 12 core CPU but the other ones will be
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