Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

[profJim]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

HahA dunno why it's not showing but my hardware is Asus p5qc mobo + x5460(waiting for it)+ 8gb corsair ddr3 1333mhz cl7.

Please create a detailed hardware list in the System Specs portion of your
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Be sure to include brand names and model numbers.
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[profJim]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

My Q9550, EP45-UD3P motherboard and 8GB of memory arrived on Saturday

I took my new hardware to my laboratory and created a new monster system using various pieces and additional parts.

The surgery was successful followed by a loud shot that was heard throughout the village:

followed by music from the damp bowels of my laboratory and soon the villagers were all singing and dancing to the theme song of my laboratory:

[lukevega]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

I, like profJim have also acquired a Gigabyte EP45-UD3P motherboard although mine is (rev 1.0) :)

It looks like my board could do with a good clean up but fingers crossed it will work just fine!

Here is a picture after unboxing, there are a few scuffs here and there but hopefully that's cosmetic. There is also a 1GB stick of RAM installed and a tube of some cheap-looking thermal paste. I unfortunately don't have a laboratory or even any spare parts so I will be taking apart my P35-DS3L system and transplanting in the EP45-UD3P.



profJim also mentioned that I will be using 8GB of RAM - I must thank him with respect to this, as with his help I was able to purchase a second set of Kingston HyperX DDR2 RAM (ebay seller shipped to the US only) to match my current set and he was kind enough to receive, test and then ship the memory on to me and for this I am truly grateful! (I'm hoping the second set will arrive soon so I can get cracking).

Will I need to install a blank hard drive and load a new version of Windows to start overclocking with this motherboard?

[profJim]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

Welcome back Luke, I hope that your vacation was great.
When you abandoned the forum, this thread had been viewed ~ 7,500 times as of right now, your thread has been viewed over 12,000 times!!
I was thinking of banning you from your thread because there was even stronger interest in the thread and no-one seemed to care that you were gone.

When you clean up your EP45-UD3P motherboard, use compressed air to clean out the dust, bit DON't use compressed air in the cpu socket!
Keep the cpu socket securely covered so that nothing can accidentally fall in the socket and damage the fragile socket pins.
Spend some time and do a very thorough inspection looking for any bent pins or the end of pins that are lower than other pins.
This is the first thing I do with a new or used motherboard. I'll post a high resolution cpu socket picture that shows how all the rows and columns of the end of the pins MUST line up perfectly.

I ALWAYS build my systems with the motherboard outside of the computer case, with the motherboard placed on a cardboard box.
Do NOT put any conductive anti-static mats or bags under your motherboard when you first power it up.
I install a minimum amount of hardware when I first power up the system; 1 memory module, keyboard, low end video card (if you have one), no mouse, no ssd's or hard drives, etc., just in case something goes terribly wrong.
Don't forget to first connect a case speaker so that you can hear any error code beeps.

You can run Memtest86+ from a bootable usb, floppy or optical disk, but that's about all until you install windows.
Do NOT have additional ssd's or hard drives connected when you install win7!!

You can install any version of win7 now and you can delay activating windows for up to 3 weeks; there are some techniques described on the web where you can delay activation even longer. Just make sure that you install a 64-bit version of windows. Even though I have two additional licenses for win7 x64, I'm going to delay activating both systems for now. I will do a minimal win7 + SP1 install to keep windows lean and mean. Obviously I will install cpu + memory stress testing and graphics stress testing programs, but little else until I'm done overclocking.

Don't feel bad about transplanting your P35 hardware to your P45, I'm doing it with 3 different systems and moving one complete system from one computer case to another.

Your ram is going out via USPS tomorrow, and I should be able to give you a tracking number.
I won't forget to include the rear I/O shield panel.
Sorry about the delay, but I haven't been able to find reasonably priced rebuild parts for the EFI fuel pump for my motorcycle.

I'm about 20 minutes away from installing my Q9650 in my N.O.S (new old stock) Asus P5Q Premium (P45) motherboard and starting Memtest86+.

I'll have an update about my Q9550/EP45-UD3P and Q9650/Asus P5Q Premium systems in about 5 hours.


A Preview:
My Q9550 @ 3.825MHz (8.5 x 450MHz), EP45-UD3P (rev 1.1), and 8GB of Mushkin XP2-8500 Blackline ram @ 1080MHz completed 7 hours of Memtest86+ with no errors, but.....more on this later tonight.

[profJim]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

Ambient temperatures were 84^o - 91^o (F) or 29^o - 32^o (C) during the tests.

The Scythe Mugen 2 is difficult to install properly unless the are four hands available, and the cpu temperatures were too high at idle and when testing.
A web search provided a solution that should fix the problem.
I think that Scythe eliminated this problem with the newer Mugen 3 and Mugen 4 models.

The Q9550 @ 3.825GHz + EP45-UD3P ran for 7 hours, 18 minutes when the system locked up.

The Seidon 120XL did much better with limited testing in the Q9650 + P5Q premium system.

[lukevega]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

Looks like you're setting the bar high again professor!

I ordered a USB 3.0 PCIe adapter and a 2TB WD My Passport Ultra today so just waiting on them to arrive before going through all of my files and deciding which ones I need to keep!

With regards to setting up the new system I don't have another graphics card so will have to stick with the trusty old 8800GTS... Am I better off starting off with an HDD or my SSD? Also, should I run some tests on my new external HDD to check its functionality in case I need to return it and if so, how do you recommend I go about doing that?

I can't find my can of compressed air so will try to get a new one tomorrow, I'll be starting off booting the system with my Q6600 processor and will be keeping that installed to protect the pins (which appear to be fine). Can you point me in the direction of a minimal Windows 7 SP1 ISO so that I may also keep my system lean and mean? :)

Hope some decently priced motorcycle parts come your way soon!

[SmOgER]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

Please create a detailed hardware list in the System Specs portion of your
forum profile at the bottom of the profile page or in your forum signature.
Be sure to include brand names and model numbers.
When you are done editing or creating your hardware list, save the settings.

You must save the changes!

Ok I just did that (was away for a week).
But unfortunately it will take some time to arrive for my X5460 from China to Lithuania.
Current estimate July 17 - Aug 7.

But it surely is gonna be fun, since there is no point in babying those cheap-to-replace chips. :P
And unlike newer gen chips, they even have some nice thermal potential/reserve in them.

The ultimate goal for me is to match FX-8150/FX-8350 in computing power.

Honestly, I was even a little shocked when I looked at the numbers of LGA775/LGA771 12MB quads at 4.25Ghz+
With good LGA775 DDR3* board you can have performance of i5 Sandy Bridge rig (minus some extra features) with little to no expense.



*or DDR2 1200Mhz CL5 (in theory should clock even higher with CL7-CL8)

[lukevega]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

Woo - USB 3 PCIe and 2TB WD My Passport Ultra arrived yesterday and I finally have everything backed up and ready to format, dismantle and re-build :D

If only I wasn't going on a family trip haha!

Here are the benchmarks from the new external drive (taken after I put 500GB of data on):



Any idea why the write speed is so low? Will the data on it have slowed that down Jim?

Looking forward to cracking on with the re-build after my trip but I'll keep checking to see how everyone else is getting on!

[SmOgER]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

50MB/s is a bit slow, but that's a 5400RPM 2.5inch drive so don't expect miracles from it ;)

[lukevega]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

Thanks for the oh-so-useful information there smoger...

[SmOgER]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

haha.
Ok after futher notice (looked at some reviews), that thing on seq should be hitting 100/100 or close to that. The performance certainly shouldn't decrease unless the drive is full (or close to being full).

You may want to look at drive policies.
My computer - right click on partition of the drive - hardware - properties - change settings - policies.

[profJim]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

....AND THEY'RE OFF.....

First out of the starting gate is ProfJim and he has a commanding lead....uh wait a minute, the other three contestants haven't even entered the race track yet.

I got my Q9550, EP45-UD3P and Mushkin ram system up and running today and it passed an 8 hour Prime95 Blend stress test with no errors running at 3.409GHz. Yes it's only a 20% overclock. I'm trying a new o/c approach where I'm letting the bios do it's own thing with mostly AUTO voltage settings unless I see something that is too high or if some of the AUTO memory settings are too loose. I have a pretty good idea of what settings are often needed but there can be quite a bit of variation that depends on how "good" your hardware is. EasyTune6 (aka ET6) is an incredibly useful tool to verify the applied voltage and memory reference settings for Gigabyte P45 and newer motherboards.

The Turbo performance setting is working ok so far and it gives somewhat tighter settings compared with using the Standard performance setting. My one and only attempt using the Extreme performance setting resulted in a BSOD before I got to the desktop at 3.409GHz.

The ambient temperatures were close to 90^o (F) for most of the day but things cooled down nicely later at night. The Mugen 2 cpu air cooling setup is doing nicely so far. The next step will be another 10% increase in cpu speed at 3.680GHz using 8.5 x 433 MHz. The following o/c step might use 8.0 x 500MHz for 4.00GHz and to ultimately try for 8.5 x 500MHz for 4.250GHz.

I'm in no hurry and I'll be running each of the three Prime95 stress tests for at least 8 - 10 hours or longer.

[profJim]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

[SmOgER]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

I dare you to try intel burn test (normal preset) for 10 min at least. :)

Would be interesting to see how big the temp delta is compared to prime95@blend on your chip.

PS. Still, in your place I would sell that Q9550 for $100 and get X5470 E0 for $60-80 without thinking :P
X5470 is the best chip ever made* for LGA771/LGA775, and yet it's cheaper.


*You may argue that QX9770 is better since it's unlocked, but I'am afraid it has only C0 stepping, so clock-for-clock with Xeon you will need less vcore and it's good for up to 10*500FSB=5Ghz.

[profJim]

Re: Socket 771 Mod Xeon X5460 GA-P35-DS3L Overclock

Excuse me! Isn't an 18 minute and 12 second 5 loop LinX test using 4096 MB of memory as good as if not better than a 10 minute IBT test? Most of my earlier LinX tests using 5 or 8 loops used over 5000 MB of memory and ran for about 23 minutes. I prefer LinX over IBT; they're pretty much the same thing, only different.

With decent air cooling, no matter what chip I use, Prime95 usually runs with core temperatures in the low 50^o (C) range and LinX or IBT typically run about 10^o (C) hotter.

Once I'm done overclocking my Q9550 and Q9650 chips in my P45 motherboards, I really don't have any desire to go through it all again with a Xeon chip. For my needs, my E6850 overclocked to about 3.80GHz with 8GB of memory moves me out of the the half-fast system category.

I'm curious to see how much faster your DDR3 memory might be able to zip and unzip a 10-15GB collection of files or to see if there is a noticeable difference in encoding tests.

I wanted an EP45-UD3P motherboard, but the ebay auction that I won also included the Q9550, 8GB of high quality ram, the Scythe Mugen 2 cpu cooler and an Asus HD 6950 2GB video card where my winning bid was only 50% of the total value of all the hardware.

I'm looking forward to unlocking the 6950 to nearly 6970 specs and seeing how it compares to my overclocked N460GTX SLI setup when I boot using HyperSLI with my P45 motherboard.

5.0GHz versus 4.25GHz?
Different strokes for different folks.
I'll probably end up running with an everyday 3.80GHz setup after I'm done.