Associate
- Joined
- 23 Sep 2020
- Posts
- 6
Hi folks
New to the forum but not new to the world of building PCs and overclocking. Built my first PC in 1994 and overclocked it - a Cyrix soldered on board 486 clone that I ran at 40Mhz instead of the stock 33. After that followed a long line of self built and overclocked systems such as a Cyrix 586-133 running at 160, a dual Pentium 75 running at 100, an SL32A Celeron 300A running at 464, a Duron 600... you get the picture.
Since the hot running Netburst days put me off overclocking and secondhand ex-corporate hardware became easily available I've been using HP workstations bought cheap and upgraded, I don't remember all of them, but there was an XW6400 with dual 604 Xeons I was fond of, currently using a z400 with an X5687 and 24Gb of triple channel DDR3 to run Linux Mint 20 and it's stable as a rock and still powerful enough to do all my productivity tasks.
However, I have a hankering to do some building and overclocking and would like to have a Windows 7 system to play a few old games like Freelancer, Football Manager and Civ 5, that I used to play until a couple of years ago when I finally got sick of Micros**t bloatware and switched to Linux.
The monitor I intend to use is a 32" 1080p LCD TV, so the graphical requirements are nothing too major.
My current thoughts are something like this:
Cheap secondhand LGA1366 X58 motherboard such as an ASUS P6T (the Chinese junk boards made from recycled e-waste and bottom of the barrel quality components don't interest me, they don't have triple channel memory and the OC potential with their dodgy VRMs is probably non-existent)
Cheap ATX case
Secondhand AIO water cooler such as a Corsair H60
12800E ECC unbuffered RAM (already have a few assorted 2Gb and 4Gb sticks of this)
Cheap secondhand LGA1366 Xeon, one of the 6 cores with HT.
Now, it is in the choice of Xeon that I am in a quandry. My understanding is that there are basically two approaches to overclocking on X58, firstly by increasing BCLK and reducing the RAM multiplier; secondly by changing the multiplier, which requires an unlocked Xeon.
But which Xeons are unlocked? I have been able to find out that the W3680 and W3690 are, but those chips are still costing 40 quid or more from the Far East.
Other, much cheaper options - the E5640, E5645 and E5649 are all 6c/12t chips but have a 5.86MT/s QPI, which is less than ideal. Same goes for the L5638 and L5640 low power chips, they are 6c/12t but they use a 5.86 QPI speed.
Why is the QPI speed an issue? Well, the X56xx series have a 6.4MT/s QPI and it seems silly to settle for less. 6c/12t chips are the X5650, X5660, X5670, X5675, X5680 and X5690.
So, I'm thinking one of the cheapest 6c/12t, 6.4 MT/s QP option is my best bet - an X5650, X5660 or X5670, depending on what I can find at what price. These have locked multipliers as far as I'm aware, so it's a case of increasing the BCLK to overclock them, which is why I will use 12800 RAM instead of 10600 - it will run a bit faster so I might get away with more aggressive setting of the memory speed divider.
I'm just looking for advice from people who are familiar with the X58 platform and the Xeons for it, to make sure what I propose is going to work and spot any pitfalls I might have overlooked. Issues I foresee include VRM and southbridge cooling, so I expect to have to add some heatsinks and airflow to those.
New to the forum but not new to the world of building PCs and overclocking. Built my first PC in 1994 and overclocked it - a Cyrix soldered on board 486 clone that I ran at 40Mhz instead of the stock 33. After that followed a long line of self built and overclocked systems such as a Cyrix 586-133 running at 160, a dual Pentium 75 running at 100, an SL32A Celeron 300A running at 464, a Duron 600... you get the picture.
Since the hot running Netburst days put me off overclocking and secondhand ex-corporate hardware became easily available I've been using HP workstations bought cheap and upgraded, I don't remember all of them, but there was an XW6400 with dual 604 Xeons I was fond of, currently using a z400 with an X5687 and 24Gb of triple channel DDR3 to run Linux Mint 20 and it's stable as a rock and still powerful enough to do all my productivity tasks.
However, I have a hankering to do some building and overclocking and would like to have a Windows 7 system to play a few old games like Freelancer, Football Manager and Civ 5, that I used to play until a couple of years ago when I finally got sick of Micros**t bloatware and switched to Linux.
The monitor I intend to use is a 32" 1080p LCD TV, so the graphical requirements are nothing too major.
My current thoughts are something like this:
Cheap secondhand LGA1366 X58 motherboard such as an ASUS P6T (the Chinese junk boards made from recycled e-waste and bottom of the barrel quality components don't interest me, they don't have triple channel memory and the OC potential with their dodgy VRMs is probably non-existent)
Cheap ATX case
Secondhand AIO water cooler such as a Corsair H60
12800E ECC unbuffered RAM (already have a few assorted 2Gb and 4Gb sticks of this)
Cheap secondhand LGA1366 Xeon, one of the 6 cores with HT.
Now, it is in the choice of Xeon that I am in a quandry. My understanding is that there are basically two approaches to overclocking on X58, firstly by increasing BCLK and reducing the RAM multiplier; secondly by changing the multiplier, which requires an unlocked Xeon.
But which Xeons are unlocked? I have been able to find out that the W3680 and W3690 are, but those chips are still costing 40 quid or more from the Far East.
Other, much cheaper options - the E5640, E5645 and E5649 are all 6c/12t chips but have a 5.86MT/s QPI, which is less than ideal. Same goes for the L5638 and L5640 low power chips, they are 6c/12t but they use a 5.86 QPI speed.
Why is the QPI speed an issue? Well, the X56xx series have a 6.4MT/s QPI and it seems silly to settle for less. 6c/12t chips are the X5650, X5660, X5670, X5675, X5680 and X5690.
So, I'm thinking one of the cheapest 6c/12t, 6.4 MT/s QP option is my best bet - an X5650, X5660 or X5670, depending on what I can find at what price. These have locked multipliers as far as I'm aware, so it's a case of increasing the BCLK to overclock them, which is why I will use 12800 RAM instead of 10600 - it will run a bit faster so I might get away with more aggressive setting of the memory speed divider.
I'm just looking for advice from people who are familiar with the X58 platform and the Xeons for it, to make sure what I propose is going to work and spot any pitfalls I might have overlooked. Issues I foresee include VRM and southbridge cooling, so I expect to have to add some heatsinks and airflow to those.