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Hex core Westmere.

ALXAndy

ALXAndy

ALXAndy

Soldato
Joined
23 Apr 2010
Posts
12,464
Location
West Sussex
Any one running one of these? I forgot I had a X58 MATX board that's been sitting in a box for about two years now.

I bought one today for £48. It's an engineering sample labelled I9.

Now from what I can see they support Turbo of 400mhz. Does this add to the multi?
 
It's clocked to 1.8ghz stock, so only has a 13x multi. The chip I bought is a prototype I9.

I should be able to get it to 3ghz, but with Mantle coming I may not bother. It's a 60w chip with 6 cores, could be brilliant for Mantle :)
 
It's a prototype dude.







60w. I found this when digging online.



If you run the sample number it will take you to a few Chinese web pages, all of which call it an I9. It seems Intel were toying with the idea of an I9 desktop CPU but for whatever reason didn't bother.
 
Martini1991 said:
i9 was just the coined name for Gulftown (6 core CPU's, it made sense, but it never came about)
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Yeah this seems to be a very, very early sample of Gulftown tbh. I would imagine the reason it's 1.8ghz with a 13 multi is because Intel did not want to give too much away when sending out samples.

Either way, at 60w it's going to make for one hell of a low powered Steam box. I've got a lovely MATX board to throw it in too.
 
alex_123_fra said:
Awesome Andy. 12 threads for £48 @ 3 ghz (possibly more). Bargain of the century.
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Yeah it's pretty good going tbh. I was kinda worried the sale would be pulled, but my friend out in the USA just checked and it's been shipped already and is already in his state. He should get it Monday, then a lead time of around 5-7 days before I get it.

I'm going to build a Steam OS box. That way I can skimp on ram, and not worry too much about huge clocks. I've not built a small PC in years tbh.

Some one has donated a stock 980x (Intel Extreme) cooler, and some ram. I've got an enormous pile of modding parts left over from the AMD build too :)
 
kingpenguin said:
i briefly had a xeon l5639 westmere which was clocked at 2.13ghz with a 16x multiplier. it turbo'd to 18x if only a few cores were loaded. it was easy to get up to nearly 3.3ghz ht enabled at 205 bclk at 1.2 volts on a p6t deluxe v2. it ran 70c max and fuss free and had greater performance in cinebench r15 than a 3770 at 3.9 ghz. again it cost around the £50 mark but i got caught for another £18 import duty. note that it didn't work on my dfi x58jr at all despite using the newest bios.
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DFI are no more, so there's a chance that they didn't release a Westmere bios.

Edit. Well they released one for Gulftown. Very very odd then.
 
Th0nt said:
Great chip there andy!
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I'm getting para it won't work now lol. I did some more digging and Wikipedia says that the Aurora (Alienware) supports the Xeons, though Alienware never fitted any.

Must stop myself buying any more parts before I've tested it :D
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
I have noticed there seems to be a sudden upsurge of six core socket 1336 Xeon CPUs in the US - it is rumoured some big companies might be upgrading older equipment. I won't say more otherwise the mods might beat me!:(
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Yes there is an influx at the moment, so 1366 prices are just ridiculous.

My chip is brand new out of a tray though, god only knows where the heck it came from !

And yeah it seems the server industry is scrapping a lot of computers in Silicon Valley atm. I don't want this rig to have a massive clock speed because then you generate heat and it will suck down power. I want it for Sketchup, Photoshop and a Steam OS box, none of which require it to be massively fast :)

I'm probably going to end up using the stock cooler after a little modding.
 
MeatLoaf said:
Im, running a Westmere Xeon L5639 which is a hex core 60W CPU stock speed is 2.13Ghz. Clocked it to 3.4Ghz no problem at all.
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Great to know !

Apparently FSB is not down to the board, rather the CPU. So I'm hoping for a good one :)

Bluecube said:
Can anyone recommend a cheap(ish) motherboard for running one of these CPUs? Seems to be ideal for running a VM setup that I have in mind.
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There isn't one. Any one with a I7 system lying around all want in dude. 32nm hex core 12 thread CPU for £48-£100? would you sell yours?

All I can suggest is to hawk a certain site and hope you catch some one out. Just avoid DFI. Gigabyte and Asus seem to support them but the manu can lock them out if they wish. EVGA boards also support them but are hugely expensive.

Ooo forgot to say that mine arrived safely with my friend out in the USA.



He sent that to my phone to tease me lol. It's being sent in a couple of days and should take about a week to arrive :)
 
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I can't say where I got it from obviously. What I can say (I think) is just put the model number into a search engine. Q3NW...

Mine is on its way ;)

 
Well mine came but my board did not support it. It would boot from a cmos reset but not afterwards.

So I bought a Dell workstation to put it in for photoshop and video editing etc. Can't overclock it but don't really need to. 60w means the rig is as quiet as a mouse.
 
almighty15 said:
Pictures dude!!! And I'm sure you can email your motherboard vender and ask if they'll send you a BIOS that supports it?
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Not likely given that it's basically MSI making them for Dell. Dell don't do anything by request really. The only company ever to respond to my calls for a bios update were Asrock..

Any way the machine is up and running. I've braided most of the wiring and done a few mods to get the hard drives in.



I've also wrapped the internal fascia panel.



The front alu panel is going off to B-Negative to be painted.

As for performance? hmm, tough call. Basically my 8320 absolutely spanks it. It's not even close. I score 804 in Cinebench with my 8320 @ 5ghz, the Xeon comes back with 393.

In Firestrike it was a bit better. The Xeon hit 6900 Physics, my 8320 does around 10k.

However.. Normally I would be bummed out. Thing is, before I even bought the Xeon I had no illusions it would come anywhere close to my FX. But. I would strongly imagine my FX is chomping down a good 200w at least when overclocked. It also ends up resulting in noise, because to tame a 5ghz FX you need a dual length rad AIO with the fans running pretty hard.

The Dell I built is absolutely silent. I mean, you need to put your ears to it and even then it's a whisper. It also uses 60w, which for the power it delivers is very, very good.

The only mishap I had was accidentally pushing in the PCIE lock (it's a plastic thing) and damaging one of the fans on the Lightning. Basically if the fans go over 30% now one of them hits the shroud. The blade isn't snapped, it's just floppy and loose.

After longing for one (480 Lightning) for 6 years and finally getting one this was a real bummer. Basically the 480 Lightning is completely custom. They never re-used the cooler, fans or anything else on any other card. Later they basically slapped the same TFIII (different to the TFIII on the Lightning I may add) on any Lightning, Hawk, Thunder or just regular TFIII card.

So completely stuck (because the fans on it are 90mm and all of the others use 65-80mm) I ended up finding these in Hong Kong...



So I am going to have to mod the card. Not a problem given everything else in the machine is going to be modded but yeah, a little depressing.
 
Flashheart said:
Any news on how these clock?
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Sadly I can't do that given I'm using a Dell board. Even XTU is blocked lol.

There may be another way around it but tbh? I don't really want to clock it. I was a silent workstation with enough balls to throw around images and video and I've pretty much got it.

Years ago I used to design for an emulator that only works properly in XP, so I've set the rig up running XP 64. I did have 7 on it briefly and will put 8 on it when I get another SSD but for right now the machine is perfect for what I needed.
 
Hmm, hmm and thrice hmm. So today I have to be quiet. My lady had a rough night and is still sleeping.. Any way, I looked into overclocking the Dell board. Of course, I hit the obligatory brick wall but... There is a but.

Old Andy here likes to learn. So I spent the morning reading up on how a clock generator works. It's done by a PLL which is managed by an ICS chip. So I found two overclocking apps that can work if the PLL is correct. First up was Clockgen, the other is called SetFSB.

Then I did some more reading and more studying and it appears the PLL can be found on a chip on the motherboard. It's located nearby a crystal on the board. I looked up a pic of my board.. Basically the red arrow points to the crystal, and sure enough next to it is my ICS. On the ICS is the PLL..



So I got out my torch and read off the PLL.. 932S421BGLF. And what did I find? Firstly you can see the datasheet for the chip in the background.. Then you will see me with SetFSB open and what do you know? we actually have a match :O



So what does this mean? well hopefully due to SetFSB matching my PLL I may (note may, not tried it yet but will shortly) be able to control my FSB meaning an overclock..

I would say I'm about 5% confident right now but of course I will report back with my findings :)
 
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