Windows Gaming PC hardware, building, troubleshooting, & benchmarking

TheBeastie

1 MW
Joined
Jul 27, 2012
Messages
2,095
Location
Melbourne Australia
--Oz-- said:
Been a windows users since win286, and supporting it since then, now I am starting to hate it, the last years win10 updates have been a abortion.

My perfectly good 11yo i7-920, pop in a spare ssd in, load win10, all kinds of driver issues with my gigabyte motherboard, so cant run win10 on it (that I know) so toss a perfectly working pc because winblows updates. :kff: megashaft
The main reason MS do it is that it's cheaper to support only one OS, that being the newest one.
Having security experts code fixes for Windows 7 etc is expensive. This is why they kind of gave away Windows 10 for win7 users its ultimately just cheaper easier for MS.

I too am still on the X58 platform, I used to have an i920 but I bought a 1366 X58 compatible Xeon hex-core X5575 CPU for $45AUD and overclocked the crap out of it to 4.6Ghz
I too installed windows 10 on a newly installed SSD on my X58 but conversely what I love about Windows 10 is that I haven't had to install any drivers, Win10 detects everything perfectly, no driver downloads.
No driver problems, no instability problems.
This is what my is my validate ZCPU post after it went through the heat stressing benchmark https://valid.x86.fr/udz19z
udz19z.png

Every time I went looking at a new PC I realized it wasn't much faster, PCIe v3 is only 1% faster max in games over PCIe v2 (with 1% margin for error :) )
I have long decided I won't upgrade until 5Ghz CPUs become common or IPC at least doubles from what I have, I am still waiting. Computers are similar to cars, you can buy a new v8 but it's not going really go any faster, what I want is v16 I guess.
 
I wouldn't hold my breath on 5Ghz CPUs. We've had 4+Ghz CPUs for like 15 years now, my new Ryzen has a lower clock speed than the (much slower) one it replaced. So, effective IPC continues to climb, but don't look for 5Ghz processors to be a cost effective performace solution.

As for Windows 10 detecting all hardware, not needing drivers and just working. Well that's maybe true in comparison to older versions of Windows, I've still had more than one occasion where it didn't even pick up the network interfaces to allow me to download the rest of the drivers it didn't have.

"Android phone to the rescue" is still very much a thing while installing 10, while I haven't come across a wired ethernet adapter without support in the Linux kernel in a very long time. Windows 10 is better at most things than 7, but it really isn't good when you compare it to anything that isn't Windows.
 
Thanks for the posts guys. I also have a i7-980 with Asus MB (P6x58-e-Pro), and while win10 loads all the drivers, it is unstable. I tried everything I could think of, I generally dont OC, I even tried underclocking, down to 1 ram stick, different video cards, no love. The only thing that sort of help is turning off hyperthreading, yep, turn off half of the cpu, lol, 6 cores doing nothing. Any suggestions?
 
--Oz-- said:
Thanks for the posts guys. I also have a i7-980 with Asus MB (P6x58-e-Pro), and while win10 loads all the drivers, it is unstable. I tried everything I could think of, I generally dont OC, I even tried underclocking, down to 1 ram stick, different video cards, no love. The only thing that sort of help is turning off hyperthreading, yep, turn off half of the cpu, lol, 6 cores doing nothing. Any suggestions?
Yeah just turn off HT, this helps stability a lot.
My CPU gets about 25% hotter with HT on, it shows how much more power is being drawn by the CPU to power those fake CPUs.
Ageing motherboards can struggle to power the beefier CPUs and HT increases power usage/heat creation.

In general usage a HT CPU is only about 10% of a real CPU and in some cases have been known to slow down FPS in games etc. It's the extra real CPU cores that really matter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyper-threading#Drawbacks

Also in the BIOS turn On "LLC - Load Line Calibration" which just gives the CPU a bit more reliable power via the MB.
If that doesn't help try pumping up your Vcore CPU voltage a bit, or start following overlocking guides just for the increased power tips but without the actual overclocking.

Also make sure your memory isn't inadvertently overclocked or is running past its ratings, you don't lose much performance running it at a lower Mhz, try these settings/stability tests via BIOS
https://youtu.be/NItI0J5ZR68?t=1067

Also run CPU-z in "stress CPU" and run Perfmonitor to see how hot it gets, maybe your CPU cooler isn't working properly.
https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/perfmonitor-2.html
 
Instability like that is quite often power related, either the power supply itself or the voltage regulators on the motherboard.

A good way to rule out software is to use a Linux LiveUSB stick, boot from that and run some stress tests with a totally independent software stack.

If it works there you have broken Windows, if it dies you have broken computer.
 
Goop point on the PSU. It's a antec 850 quatro running 17-920, R7850 gpu, 24gb, four 2tb hdd, 960gb ssd. It works great on win7 sp1 on all games I play, just winblows10 it crashes (switching off HT does help, but does not solve crashing, just crashes less), switching back to my win7 ssd, no problems.

Since the first gen i7 has only one chipset (X58), and my gigagyte GA-EX58-UD4P does not have win10 drivers, but my i7-980 on Asus P6x58-e-Pro has win10 drivers (of course has same x58 chipset). Could i use the updated Asus x58 drivers for the gigabyte motherboard?
 
--Oz-- said:
Since the first gen i7 has only one chipset (X58), and my gigagyte GA-EX58-UD4P does not have win10 drivers, but my i7-980 on Asus P6x58-e-Pro has win10 drivers (of course has same x58 chipset). Could I use the updated Asus x58 drivers for the gigabyte motherboard?
To me, this need for external drivers for windows10 seems weird, what device needs drivers?
Are you using the proper original intel ICH10 X58 SATA ports ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I/O_Controller_Hub#ICH10 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:X58_Block_Diagram.png ) for your SSD and main drives? I wouldn't use the extra Realtek?/etc? dodgy SATA ports that are externally put on the MB to boost specs if those are the ones that need drivers.
Also before you install Windows 10 on your SSD, ensure that you have your ICH10 SATA controller set in the bios as "Configure SATA controller as: AHCI"
If you choose IDE then its the older crapper protocol. The other option is Intels RAID, I use to use this but one time it kicked one of my hard-drives out of my RAID 5 system for no good reason and it was very difficult to work out how to restore it all back. I got it all back to normal but I decided I wasn't going to use the Intel RAID mode via bios again.
All you need to do is do something as mundane as hit F5 in bios to reset to defaults and save and Intel won't recognise your Raid setup... You can restore it but like I said its a tedious process, I decided its too prone to losing the config and just run everything in AHCI, if I want RAID again I will just do it via windows or some other way.
https://itstillworks.com/configure-sata-ide-ahci-8424811.html

If you need SATA6 you need a PCIe card https://www.mwave.com.au/product/startech-2port-pcie-sata-iii-esata-controller-ab66958
But I have never bothered and always have just used the original Intel ICH10 SATA ports because it's all about the random read/write SSD drive performance that makes SSDs fast and this is still something even SATA 2 handles well. Even old record player style mechanical hard drives can possibly bottleneck a SATA2 on "sequential" reads/writes but we all know they are useless dog slow on random read/writes, this is only where it really matters.

If I was interested I would skip SATA altogether and get a PCIe x4 M.2 card for next-level speed.
https://www.mwave.com.au/product/silverstone-ecm21-m2-to-pcie-x4-adapter-card-ac09445

Typically the ONLY stuff that Microsoft with Windows 10 won't provide drivers for older hardware is stuff that is broken/ultra crappy. With some hardware the vendors refuse to make any compatible drivers for Windows 10 and for others MS might decide the device is so dodgy that they won't include support, but from my experience it has to be super-garbage hardware.
I don't use the MB sound chipset, I use the proper audio via HDMI out via the video card into my AV receiver amp.
Analog audio is old crap and I have all that stuff fully disabled in bios.
As Linus explains here even though in a kind of crappy way https://youtu.be/7ci7mFBuShQ?t=492 , the best way to get audio is out via your HDMI/DVI/DisplayPorts and its the ONLY way to get full HD 5.1 or higher channel surround sound out. The old analog or optical outs are hacks if they work at all for anything beyond basic stereo and are deliberately not supported by Windows 10 because its old non-standard crap. People who buy audio cards are pretty much being scammed.
I am dubious you would have sound driver problems if you just need simple stereo via analog outs.

Also, another thing to look into is some SSD drives back in the early days struggled with TRIM, it might be an issue where you somehow having something working on win7 but you need a newer SSD driver for win10?
I am dubious this could be a problem but you may want to look into it, you would have to have pretty much an ~8-year-old SSD drive for this to be a problem.
https://www.howtogeek.com/257196/how-to-check-if-trim-is-enabled-for-your-ssd-and-enable-it-if-it-isnt/
 
@TheBeastie
Thanks for your feedback.

I wish i could remember exactly what drivers were missing (it was motherboard related, not add in cards), this was ~8 months ago. I just got a couple of new 480 SSD's, I will try again with all your suggestions.

Long long ago I had a rockraid404 controller card, I had four 200GB drives in stripe mode (raid-0, speed), they worked great on xp for 7 years booting from them, until I tried Win7, it corrupted the array when win7 was looking for options to install, granted I was pissed, lol.
 
--Oz-- said:
@TheBeastie
Thanks for your feedback.

I wish i could remember exactly what drivers were missing (it was motherboard related, not add in cards), this was ~8 months ago. I just got a couple of new 480 SSD's, I will try again with all your suggestions.

Long long ago I had a rockraid404 controller card, I had four 200GB drives in stripe mode (raid-0, speed), they worked great on xp for 7 years booting from them, until I tried Win7, it corrupted the array when win7 was looking for options to install, granted I was pissed, lol.
No worries.
Also, you said disabling Hyperthreading helped stability, this is common.
I was just watching a YouTuber review this 12 core 24thread Xeon CPU and he found that disabling Hyperthreading the gaming benchmark FPS/performance improved https://youtu.be/3AR_VgBOMwo?t=553

Also don't be afraid to bump up your Vcore voltage... Disabling HT is almost like increasing your Vcore voltage as far as your CPU is concerned, there is more power being freed up just for your regular cores and thus runs more stable.
I got mine up considerably higher (the bios voltage core goes from Yellow/Purple/Red) I use RED Vcore voltages, as long as it doesn' go much above 70c degrees it seems perfectly safe, been doing it for a while now
I am running my X5675 on my Asus X58 motherboard I bought 10 years ago at around 4.7Ghz with HT on https://valid.x86.fr/j8fj6s
https://valid.x86.fr/9zl95x
With HT off it easily runs at 4.8Ghz https://valid.x86.fr/hkqiz4
This is Xeon CPU I bought off ebay for $45AUD and just popped in my X58 Asus MB to replace the old i7 920 CPU.
hkqiz4.png


It's amazing how a 10-year-old platform can be clocked to almost 5Ghz, and I am NOT using any special expensive fancy gear at all.
A lot of people think a PC older than 3 years is useless garbage but they are so wrong.

While this isn't for most people you can buy "Xeon motherboard set" from Aliexpress that are repurposed Facebook data-centre servers that have been dumped in the 100,000s (apparently) and repurposed by creative people in China to be sold in desktop motherboard format for home computers.
https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-motherboard-set.html
https://www.aliexpress.com/wholesale?catId=0&SearchText=xeon+motherboard+set

Check out PhilsComputerLab for reviews https://www.youtube.com/user/philscomputerlab/videos

The cool thing about this stuff is the amount of cores Xeon's have, normally 6 is the minimum and all the servers use DDR3 Registered RDIMM ram, while any desktop PC can take ECC ram almost NO desktop motherboard can take Registered DDR3 ram, this causes this ram to be incredibly cheap, you can buy a Xeon 8 core CPU/motherboard set with 64GB ram for like $250USD, again its literally impossible to get server "Registered ram" to work in any standard desktop motherboard unless you have a workstation motherboard, the other way is to buy something like a Chinese PlexHD motherboard which has been rebuilt from the ground up to take server RDIMMs ram in a desktop format/case.

Check out the latest video review of Aliexpress server-to-desktop rebuilt hardware, I CAN'T stress enough this gear is only for nerds who do their homework, if you're not a nerd you will probably be an unhappy customer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AQXobsZHNg
[youtube]-AQXobsZHNg[/youtube]
 
@ TheBeastie
I really been taking a hard look at the PlexHD MB, 32GB and the E5-2689 chip, $200 shipped is smoking deal. I have watched several YT videos and all seems pretty straightforward. There was some talk about disabling some server services (septor or something).

I have been a PC gamer since the XT, built all my systems, so I have some knowledge/experience. Have you tried one of these server/PC systems?
Do they come with a MB cd for drivers or a website link or just pray Win10 finds all the drivers or?

Can you recommend a good Aliexpress PSU 800-1000W (I plan on having a bunch of HDD's plus)? I see a bunch of 1000W psu, but they say "max", I am thinking they are lightweight and not really worth the ~$30 and I should get something a little better.
 
--Oz-- said:
@ TheBeastie
I really been taking a hard look at the PlexHD MB, 32GB and the E5-2689 chip, $200 shipped is smoking deal. I have watched several YT videos and all seems pretty straightforward. There was some talk about disabling some server services (septor or something).

I have been a PC gamer since the XT, built all my systems, so I have some knowledge/experience. Have you tried one of these server/PC systems?
Do they come with a MB cd for drivers or a website link or just pray Win10 finds all the drivers or?

Can you recommend a good Aliexpress PSU 800-1000W (I plan on having a bunch of HDD's plus)? I see a bunch of 1000W psu, but they say "max", I am thinking they are lightweight and not really worth the ~$30 and I should get something a little better.
Yeah, in reference to "septor", this is a Spectre security hole, apparently its never been officially released/used in the wild. This is a bug in almost all Intel CPU's except for Intels very latest CPUs, by default an up to date Windows 10 will block the vulnerability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_(security_vulnerability)
Ideally, the CPU's microcode is supposed to be updated but for older stuff this is not likely to happen.
Probably only used by true security experts engaged in spear-phishing attacks will ever end up using it against people. https://www.kaspersky.com.au/resource-center/definitions/spear-phishing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectre_%28security_vulnerability%29#Mitigation
according to Dell: "No 'real-world' exploits of these vulnerabilities [i.e., Meltdown and Spectre] have been reported to date [7 February 2018], though researchers have produced proof-of-concepts."

If you plan on using your new build for mission-critical data then maybe the latest hardware would be the best choice.

For recommended PSU's from Aliexpress I don't have any recommendations.
I am still on the same PSU I bought for my PC build from 10 years ago as it still runs great, the Antec Signature, I got it from a review way back then from JonnyGuru who has long been seen as the PSU review god.
https://www.jonnyguru.com/
https://www.anandtech.com/show/2632

I used to only visit traditional text-written websites for tech hardware information but YouTube has taken over this area quite well, most of these YouTubers do have websites and Twitter/Facebook pages with sometimes good information as well.

https://youtu.be/5p1IwK9U7d4
[youtube]5p1IwK9U7d4[/youtube]

Here is a guide on how to choose a PSU for your PC build. I would say buying locally just a major respected PSU brand should go well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXku-gsdyok
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sThQTgDfjVg


A bunch of general PSU buying guides here https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Choosing+a+PSU

The only thing I have bought recently for my PC from Aliexpress was some 8GB DDR3 DIMMs, these were standard desktop ones but there were so cheap I was almost expecting them to not work, but they worked just fine.

I have been eyeing the idea of getting a Xeon CPU+MB+RAM set off Aliexpress but after just upgrading my i7 920 2.6Ghz CPU to the Xeon X5675 Hex core and overclocking it at 4.66Ghz I think I will be just fine for a fair while yet.
I am still on my original Asus X58 motherboard I bought 10 years ago as well.

One thing you should note with those Chinese Xeon desktop/workstation motherboards like PlexHD is they don't support any overclocking, the only overclocking you can possible is if you happen to buy a Xeon server CPU that happens to have its CPU core clock multiplier unlocked. There are some Xeons that have this.. so you can move the X23 multiplier to X26 etc and overclock that way, but there are no bus speed adjustments possible.

That is the advantage of having an original brand motherboard like my Asus X58 motherboard, all the bus speed overclock options in the bios etc, the standard bus speed is 133Mhz but I am running it at 203Mhz, so 203Mhz X23 = 4,669Mhz

So ideally when you buy a Xeon MB set from Aliexpress you want to buy a CPU with the highest frequency possible which of course always costs more. There are Xeon models that have their multiplier officially unlocked, forget which ones they are, naturally they will be more expensive.

The best YouTubers I have found that talk about and give ideas on building Xeon server CPU's for desktop usage has been PhilsComputerLab
https://www.youtube.com/user/philscomputerlab/videos

And "Tech YES City", this guy talks about a very wide amount of subjects.
https://www.youtube.com/user/bryaneasy/videos
He's a big fan of Aliexpress bargains like this newest video here https://youtu.be/urkfXGLFZkg
He also does X58 rebuilds, where he sources an old original Asus/Gigabyte X58 desktop motherboard and pairs it with a cheap server LGA1366 Xeon 6 core CPU and overclocks it https://youtu.be/cMn_zFvlxUo

What this guy loves most and what a lot of these Aliexpress likers all agree on are the performance/value of these "SNOWMAN CPU Coolers" which they claim are comparable to the famous Noctua CPU coolers, but at a fraction of the price.
https://www.aliexpress.com/store/3205069/search?origin=y&SearchText=snowman+cpu+cooler&aff_platform=link-c-tool&cpt=1577629696656&sk=DZjawS8s&aff_trace_key=73d827d241f74ef29424d9e64ba1110a-1577629696656-07720-DZjawS8s&terminal_id=d8fbd41f89d74eab97eaf85a1221b9d6

If you watch enough videos from these two guys you should get a good understanding of what you can achieve.

When I was doing research and decided to upgrade my current PC to the Xeon X5675, but I also checked out a fair amount of this guys videos, this guy is Finnish so everything is subtitled and there is little point listening to his videos with sound on, but he's got some great comparisons of what can be achieved and the benchmarked results of performance of games you should get.
https://youtu.be/_XL-m6n16pU
https://youtu.be/8kfdKq5b6sk
https://youtu.be/YJVxpZHQaS0
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you are really uncomfortable about buying from Aliexpress I have noticed some of these "xeon motherboard set" packages on Ebay as well.
Look on Ebay for something like "motherboard set X79 LGA 2011" or "X79 LGA2011 Motherboard Combo"
https://www.ebay.com.au/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=X79+Xeon+set&_sacat=0&LH_TitleDesc=0&_osacat=0&_odkw=X79+Xeon+Set

It looks like they charge more when going via Ebay...
Here was the main keywords I would search for on Aliexpress when I was looking at these motherboard+CPU+Ram combos "X79 motherboard set with Xeon"
Here are some bookmarked Ali stores I had when I was doing research.
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33031210794.html?spm=2114.12010612.8148356.24.2440392ffSvcIy
https://machinist.aliexpress.com/store/3666028?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.18141aebK1k0xk
https://www.aliexpress.com/item/33057546983.html?spm=a2g0o.detail.1000023.3.441573b1TIjzWo
https://www.aliexpress.com/af/X79-motherboard-set-with-Xeon-.html?d=y&origin=n&SearchText=X79+motherboard+set+with+Xeon+&catId=0&initiative_id=SB_20191106064646
Overall these stores look less dodgy than the store I bought my ram from but I dont really know.

One idea I had was to try and find a bargain old X79 LGA2011 desktop PC on Facebook market place
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/melbourne/electronics/?sort=BEST_MATCH
There must be some people who are just hoping to get rid of their old PC so I can pick it up for a bargain, and then replace the CPU with a Xeon 8 core 20MB cached monster. But this turned out to be difficult, most people are asking for a lot of money for their old PC and a lot of them don't say what motherboard they have so its hard to know how to make a good match, and then you have to wonder if their old motherboard, while it might be a quality overclockable MB, might be on its last legs.

This was why I stuck to my old X58 PC and just upgraded the CPU to a Xeon, I still know exactly what I have.

For your question on driver hunting, I would expect that as long as you use Windows 10 and are connected to the internet all the drivers will be found and installed automagically... Sometimes it takes a few reboots and clicks of the "update windows" button of a fresh windows 10 install for windows to kick in and find any missing drivers for hardware.
 
re PSUs, you'd be surprised at how little power modern hardware requires.. it will only get lower over time.

My gaming rig has a high efficiency rated 250w seasonic power supply that powers 2 SSDs, a Nvidia 1060, and a 3.5ghz intel quad core from 2013, which is a watt guzzler compared to say, a newer 7/10nM CPU.

TDPs are on the way down, while computing power is on the way up..
 
I ordered the E5-2689/32gb/MB for less than $200 shipped and a rx580-8gb for $145 shipped (mainly for the 5 monitor output), I will report back when I get them and fired up.
 
--Oz-- said:
I ordered the E5-2689/32gb/MB for less than $200 shipped and a rx580-8gb for $145 shipped (mainly for the 5 monitor output), I will report back when I get them and fired up.

I got all of it, not bad 15 days shipping to California.

Loaded win10 pro in 8 minutes :D .But it's old win10 1709, I am going to make a new usb win10 setup and start over.

Do you recommend installing Radeon video drivers or just use the win10 installed version (22.19.162.4 date 4-24-2017){Radeon ver 17.1.1)?

What is the recommended cpu and gpu test benchmark software?
 
--Oz-- said:
--Oz-- said:
I ordered the E5-2689/32gb/MB for less than $200 shipped and a rx580-8gb for $145 shipped (mainly for the 5 monitor output), I will report back when I get them and fired up.

I got all of it, not bad 15 days shipping to California.

Loaded win10 pro in 8 minutes :D .But it's old win10 1709, I am going to make a new usb win10 setup and start over.

Do you recommend installing Radeon video drivers or just use the win10 installed version (22.19.162.4 date 4-24-2017){Radeon ver 17.1.1)?

What is the recommended cpu and gpu test benchmark software?
Cool, glad to here..
When it comes to video card drivers I always would recommend the latest from AMD https://www.amd.com/en/support
When it comes to other drivers I basically exclusively just stick to what every driver MS Windows 10 provides.

I don't know if Windows the pre-built Windows 10 downloads always are the latest version, but you can try.

I like to always do a basic test with CPU-Z
https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html
And run through the CPU-Z benchmark, it can show off multi-threaded performance and single-thread performance quickly, here is my at maximum overclocks https://valid.x86.fr/udz19z https://valid.x86.fr/9zl95x
You can see here on their website I scored
Single-Thread 423
Multi-Thread (12T) 3288

Cinebench R15 is my second favourite, you can keep running this in different hardware tweaked configurations and it records your score so you can compare. The latest is Cinebench R20 but creates a completely different test/scores than R15 version, and because there are so many hardware review sites/videos that have built up scores to compare with R15 numbers aIl, still use R15
https://www.guru3d.com/files-get/cinebench-15-download,1.html
https://www.maxon.net/en-us/support/downloads/

PerfMonitor is good just to see how hot/loaded your PC is... Note that merely running this program in the background while benchmarking Cinebench R15 can reduce the total score, because even just showing temps can eat CPU cycles.
https://www.cpuid.com/softwares/perfmonitor-2.html

The other great one for synthetic tests and checking out and testing your hardware is AIDA64 Extreme https://www.aida64.com/downloads
It has a 30 day free trial, but as you have pointed out you can buy a recycled key on ebay etc with Paypal protection for like $3 dollars.

You can also use AIDA64 for stress testing various system parts like RAM like this guy shows on his Xeon testing video https://youtu.be/NItI0J5ZR68?t=1210

Good luck.
 
My stock E5-2689/32gb/rx580-8gb

Passmark
cpu 13,904
single thread 1765
Memorymark 2217

CPU-z
multi 3252
single 330

cinebench
cpu 1111
opengl 108

The spy
4577
cpu 5974
gpu 4396

My new system has run for about a day, time to toss it in a case, pretty happy for such a low cost.
I bought the $21 snowman heatsink/fan with the 6 heatpipes (the $18 has 4 pipes), max temp showed 50 degrees C (realtempGT), of course this was not a torcher test.

I am wondering if the old win10 (1709) I tried on my i7-920 a while ago was the reason it was bsod, I may try to load the 1909 win10 version. I found the x5675 for $20 or the x5680 for $30, very tempting.
 
--Oz-- said:
My stock E5-2689/32gb/rx580-8gb
cinebench
cpu 1111
My new system has run for about a day, time to toss it in a case, pretty happy for such a low cost.
I bought the $21 snowman heatsink/fan with the 6 heatpipes (the $18 has 4 pipes), max temp showed 50 degrees C (realtempGT), of course this was not a torcher test.

I am wondering if the old win10 (1709) I tried on my i7-920 a while ago was the reason it was bsod, I may try to load the 1909 win10 version. I found the x5675 for $20 or the x5680 for $30, very tempting.
Looks great, that's a great Cinebench R15 score too.
rx580 will do well in games too.

I think the 32gb ram is a great bonus to have, I noticed when upgraded from 12gb to 24gb I noticed everything was loading up a bit noticeably more snappily, even though I already have all my programs on an SSD drive, the Windows 10 Memory Manager Subsystems will suck up anything you touch on your storage devices and use your 32gb of ram to load them even faster if you try to run them, the OS will quietly ditch stuff out of its ram cache if you start to load up programs that actually need more ram transparently. While this is typical memory management for any OS, more memory helps it all work better.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/performance-tuning/subsystem/cache-memory-management/

Yeah, last time I installed windows 10 I just used the "Create Windows 10 installation media" tool which seemed like a pretty up to date version release, and then just used the builtin windows update features from there.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-au/software-download/windows10

Yeah I would buy one of those CPUs if you got the X58 motherboard, as I have shown, if you got an original premium motherboard you can overclock the absolute bejesus out of the 1366LGA X58 platform.
But as far as I know, I have overclocked my X58 further than I have seen anyone else do it, without getting into liquid nitrogen etc of course..
It makes a good hobby for spending some time on, when you're not afraid of killing your PC you can really learn a lot more about overclocking and what the limits are.
 
The cpu-z seems pretty good, your smoking it in single thread with your 4.6ghz, verse my 2.6ghz clock (~25% faster).

gigabyte ga-ex58-ud4p with the i7-920, when I first got it I OC it to 3.66 (from 2.66) with ease, but I noticed my games did not require the extra speed so i just been running it stock for a decade, been a awesome reliable system, it started with 6gb ram, now it has 24gb.

I also have Asus P6x58-e-pro with i7-980x (gets 8742 in passmark) with 24gb ram with two gtx480 cards in sli, I got all this for fixing a high end home theater SUBwoofer, the power supply was humming (60hz) bad, I replaced the 6 power supply output caps, haha. That mb was a $350 unit when new, the cpu was a grand. Not really sure a x5675 would be an improvement (but not sure).

the 4 sticks of ram i got are
samsung m393b1k70dh0-ck0 8gb
https://www.samsung.com/semiconductor/dram/module/M393B1K70DH0-CK0/
Looks like 1600 speed and thats what I seen in my bios. CPU-Z shows pc3-12800 (800mhz), same if bios changed from 1600 to 1800mhz), so is it not really changing speed or? EDIT: passmark shows no speed change, doh, lol.

Since my xeon 2689 is locked, if i OC the ram (133mhz increments), I think that will also OC the cpu (somewhat), is that true?
Passmark memo test went from Memorymark 2217 at 1600 to 2405 at 1800mhz, not really a improvement and the

What ram do you have that runs at 200mhz fsb? Sorry, it's been awhile since I OC

What is memory "rank interleaving"?
 
@ TheBeastie

1. My gigabyte MB (GA-EX58-UD4P-rev-1.0) does not show the x5675 as compatible (I have the latest bios f14k), it shows upto x5570, do you think the x5675 is compatible or the x5680?
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-EX58-UD4P-rev-10/support#support-cpu

2. If I replace my i7-920 with the x5675, can I use my current ddr3-ram (not server ram)?

And guess what, the couple of months I was trying to get win10 not to bsod (every fricken hour) about 2 years ago (with win10 1709), I loaded win10 1909 and it has run for 2 hours without a glitch tonight, time will tell.
 
--Oz-- said:
@ TheBeastie

1. My gigabyte MB (GA-EX58-UD4P-rev-1.0) does not show the x5675 as compatible (I have the latest bios f14k), it shows upto x5570, do you think the x5675 is compatible or the x5680?
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-EX58-UD4P-rev-10/support#support-cpu

2. If I replace my i7-920 with the x5675, can I use my current ddr3-ram (not server ram)?

And guess what, the couple of months I was trying to get win10 not to bsod (every fricken hour) about 2 years ago (with win10 1709), I loaded win10 1909 and it has run for 2 hours without a glitch tonight, time will tell.
Q1) For your Gigabyte motherboard, I am pretty sure the X5675 will work anyway, it will just show up as similar CPU like a x5570.

Q2) You can use your current DDR3-ram just fine. You will >never< be able to use "registered/RDIMM" server memory in your original Gigabyte desktop motherboard, even if you have a working Xeon CPU in the motherboard.
With that PlexHD MB you have, even though it "looks" like a desktop motherboard it's really a server/workstation motherboard, so it can take registered server memory. I think one of the reasons why the Plex HD BIOS's look so plain/boring is because they are using a server/workstation MB bios, which doesn't have all the fancy overclocking/tweaking options you see in desktop motherboards.

Some people have gone to extreme lengths to get more out of their Xeon CPUs on original Asus X58 motherboards like flashing an Asus Workstation motherboard bios onto their Asus desktop motherboard that was a very similar design, and while it all works with the Xeon CPU, they still were NOT able to get "registered server ram" working on it, its still a physical design difference issue, even if the pins/DIMMs fit in the desktop motherboard it just doesn't work, for registered server memory.
--Oz-- said:
Since my xeon 2689 is locked, if i OC the ram (133mhz increments), I think that will also OC the cpu (somewhat), is that true?
You can try, after LGA1366 Intel jumped down hard on overclockability, with the LGA2011 they made overclocking via ram bus speed increments very limited, you will be lucky to get it to 136Mhz stable as far as I know compared to the insane roughly 215Mhz working limit on X58.
The best thing you can do with LGA2011 is try to find a way to unlock the CPU multiplier, if that is possible.
 
Thanks for the replies.

My i7-920 with a fresh latest win10 (1909) loading, it lasted two days w/o any issue, then tonight it bsod death "driver_power_state_failure", bummer. It happened when copying USB3 HDD to internal 2TB HDD, not sure if its related.
I have the power manager to never turn off the display or system, that bsod talks about changing power states (sleep/hibernate/etc), which it was not doing, ideas (I dont think under clocking or over volting will do anything as it runs fine with winxp/7 for a decade)? (driver/setting)
I tried disabling fast start, same.
I want to try the x5675 in the gigabyte, but if win10 is unreliable, not worth it.

Comparing my:
i7-920 4,900 passmark, handbreak re-encoding 25.4fps, max cpu temp 94C (I think I need to redo the paste)
e5-2589 13,900 passmark, handbreak re-encoding 62.1fps, max cpu temp 59C, half the size cooler (6 pipe snowman)
 
--Oz-- said:
Thanks for the replies.

My i7-920 with a fresh latest win10 (1909) loading, it lasted two days w/o any issue, then tonight it bsod death "driver_power_state_failure", bummer. It happened when copying USB3 HDD to internal 2TB HDD, not sure if its related.
I have the power manager to never turn off the display or system, that bsod talks about changing power states (sleep/hibernate/etc), which it was not doing, ideas (I dont think under clocking or over volting will do anything as it runs fine with winxp/7 for a decade)? (driver/setting)
I tried disabling fast start, same.
I want to try the x5675 in the gigabyte, but if win10 is unreliable, not worth it.

Comparing my:
i7-920 4,900 passmark, handbreak re-encoding 25.4fps, max cpu temp 94C (I think I need to redo the paste)
e5-2589 13,900 passmark, handbreak re-encoding 62.1fps, max cpu temp 59C, half the size cooler (6 pipe snowman)
Don't know how to fix your "driver_power_state_failure" error problem, I just googled it and got some recommendations to try that are similar to what you tried
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THPtTlqnEPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCXuk55NumU https://blog.pcrisk.com/windows/12741-how-to-fix-driver-power-state-failure-error https://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch001152.htm
Could also try resetting bios to "DEFAULT", just remember of taking note of any specific settings you need to restore.

This YouTube video has some dubious instructions to run but also some good details in the videos description area about the problem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCXuk55NumU
Basically says you got an "incompatible driver installed", maybe a fresh/latest install of Windows 10 is needed.
Driver Power State Failure is a Blue Screen of Death error and occurs mostly as a result of an incompatible driver installed. Depending on what caused the error, you can fix it with a simple restart or by using one of the solutions below.

Great passmark score BTW, the e5-2589 is just killer multithreaded performance value.
 
@ TheBeastie
I always appreciate your comments.

I finally swapped my PlexHD setup into my i7-case (had had zero issues with it), man the PlexHD board is tiny compared to a full size ATX, only 5 screws holds the MB in, verse 9 on the gigbyte, I added some support under the power connector and the pci-e (farthest from cpu), I didnt want the board flexing while installing cards.

Everything went well on first boot with just my ssd boot drive. Then I added two HDD (2TB and 1.5TB) on the sata-2 ports, it would not see either of the HDD's. I swapped sata cables, same, I swapped to two other sata-2 ports, same. I went into disk management and it did show the 2TB, but it did not have a drive letter (like it was not formatted, both of these hdd are full of data and has worked with Win7 and 10). Then I tried the 2TB in the sata-3 connector (other sata-3 is working on the ssd boot win10 drive). Same, does not see it in file explorer. I also looked into the bios, the sata port is set to ahci by default, so I tried IDE ENHANCED mode, now the ssd boot drive was not recognized, switched back to ahci, it booted, but not 2TB. Any suggestions?

On the i7 win10 lockup issue, I watched all the videos, thanks, I then installed the i7 setup in a spare case, I only added the ssd win10 fresh install and the R7850 gpu. Since the bsof death has only happened a couple of times over a few days it hard to test (mush better than once a hour win10 v1709 was giving). Both times it did bsod, I was copying drive to drive (sucks because you can lose data), I dont recall if it was to a USB drive or not. The gigabyte drive does not have usb3 or sata-3 above 2TB limit, so i had two pci-e usb3 cards installed (High-point rocketU 1022A (2-port), another card (4-port usb3 and a 4 port sata board (SI-PEX40064, to get above 2TB limit the gigabyte on board controller has, at the bsod, there was no drive connected to this card)). I am wondering if one of these cards is the bsod issue, I think I am going to run it without the cards for a while, and if it bsod, then try the suggestions in the videos, time will tell.
 
--Oz-- said:
Same, does not see it in file explorer. I also looked into the bios, the sata port is set to ahci by default, so I tried IDE ENHANCED mode, now the ssd boot drive was not recognized, switched back to ahci, it booted, but not 2TB. Any suggestions?
Don't have many suggestions, changing it from AHCI to IDE or back is what I would have suggested...
I have had a similar problem (from memory, I think) where I formatted it a drive with the bios SATA set to one of either AHCI/RAID/IDE and the drive was totally unreadable if I changed the bios over to one of the other SATA modes.
Maybe on the previous PC the bios was set to RAID? Maybe you dont even need a raid setup for it to be unreadable in Windows again.

I would say if you could plug the drive into a USB to SATA converter and if you can view the drive in windows that way, then copy its contents to another spare drive and then format the original drive in the new PC under AHCI.
 
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