i7-960... 8 cores???
 

Hi all,

My sister just had a new machine built on a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R board with an i7-960 3.2GHz, 8MB Cache, 1066MHz FSB, Quad Core processor.

Sure enough though, in both device manager and task manager.... there are 8 cores listed.

What the?

Can someone explain?

Hey John, that is HyperThreading.

Really? Wow!

It's good too!

Her 4 real and 4 virtual cores out-perform my 8 real cores on my Xeons by miles on the PPBM.

I am so jealous...

If you are already jealous, by all means don't overclock that 960! It might make you cry. The i7 is a great CPU.

But wait...she might upgrade to 6 cores plus 6 virtual cores total of 12 processors!!!!!

I guess that's the nature of technology. You buy it when you need it, use it, upgrade when you can afford to. My one consoling thought is thy given that I'm using a Supermicro board with Xeon CPUs I figure it's designed to last for twice as long as a regular board and CPUs. Am I right or just thinking wishfully?

Exactly what I thought - but my Supermicro dual Xeon is thrashed by a simple overclocked 920 i7 running at 4ghz -

Paul :-(

The latest incarnation of the Xeons are the same as the i7's and with the new evga dual 1366 motherboard coming out soon, you can overclock them to have dual six cores running at 4.0ghz+ with 24 threads.

*drool*

That's all good and well but they won't fit my 771 motherboard (which, by the way, cost more on its own that half of what my sister's entire i7 system cost to have built).

That's why I suppose I just have to accept that that's the story with technology. You buy it Monday, by Friday you'll wish you'd waited a little longer.

And yes, I am drooling...

That's the only problem. You cant even use the same ram.

Sometimes it's best to stay one step behind technology so you always know where to go afterwards.

Evga classified sr-2
 

You may want to check the evga site there are post with photo's of the SR-2 Board in varoius levels of
build! Havn't gotten mine yet!

Thats the board I'm on about. You can't buy it in th UK yet

Sounds tempting ... BUT ... you better have one heck of a massive cooling system (preferably water) because that puppy is going to generate massive amounts of heat. Here is the system I built this weekend with a Core i7 930:

Case: Antec 1200
Power Supply: BFG 1200 watts
Processor: Core i7 930
Mobo: Gigabyte: EX58 UD-5
HD: Four (4) WD Caviar Black 1 TB 64mb cache
Lite-On DVD/CD Drive (dual layer
Ram: Corsair 12 GB DDR3 PC3-12800 1600Mhz
Video: Zotac nVidia GTX 285
Cooling: Noctua NH D14

I easily overclocked it to to 3.85, and it is running stable on Windows 7 Pro with low temps. Overclocking is sort of a "black-art." Part science - Part art. In playing around with the Bios, I easily got to 4.0Ghz. However, as you increase the voltage to the processor, the temps. go up and you could be facing long-term reliability issues. It is somewhat of a balancing act: You want performance + stability + longevity.

Why are they even still making Xeons if the i7s are out performing them or the same as them? What's the advantage of a Xeon over an i7?

You would have to have a water cooling system but you might be ok if you have lots of fans and something like Corsir H50's.

Xeons are meant for dual cpu configurations. At stock, dual xeons will surpass the i7's but and overclocked i7 will surpass with applications which work apllications which don't take advantage of the extra threads.

The new EVGA board offers overclocking, something left out of the standard xeons boards, which means that the xeon will perform the best.

i7 chips have one QPI bus which means that they can only run in a single cpu configuration.

But my 5450s won't fit on the new board will they? Their socket has been outdated right?

Unfortunatly.

However, they will fit into the Intel D5400XS motherboard which allow overclocking and was the basis of the Skultrail system, unfortunately, it's expensive.

Yes, the outdated Socket 771. That platform also requires the use of FB-DIMMs (aka Fully-Buffered Memory). The newer dual-QPI Xeon 5500s use the same Socket 1366 as the i7, and those Xeon 5500s can use either unbuffered or registered memory (UDIMMs or RDIMMs, respectively, with or without ECC) although the X58 chipset does not officially support the use of RDIMMs. The "consumer/enthusiast"-oriented i7 processors are the same chip as the Xeon 5500s, but have one of their QPI buses and RDIMM/ECC memory support internally disabled at the manufacturing stage.

there are better alternatives to liquid cooling, albeit at higher operational costs.

i have been using a modified mini fridge to keep my machine cool and dry for about 3 years now, with 2 dinky off the shelf fans. plus a cold beverage is always close at hand, and i dont need to spend 10 minutes prying a case off or messing around with cooling efficiency issues.

its effective, reliable, etc. the guts are behind a piece of plexiglass, wires go through a grommet with a sealed hole through the side of the mini fridge for cabling, and i keep some clay based kitty litter in the bottom to ensure it stays completely dry inside, and never put anything other than sealed bottles or cans in it so there is no additional moisture. plus since its a closed system, there is no dust to deal with, and i never worry about temps. the hard drives perform great and i have never had a failure yet (one was a 10 yr old 30GB that i just retired).

yeah its awful looking, but i didnt build it to win beauty contests.

I would give almost anything for a photo and an explanation of how this works.... Sounds quite ingenious.

when i get back ill post some up; its literally just a stripped chassis shoved inside a minifridge, the stock cpu cooling fan, and a relocated exhaust fan just to keep the air moving over the hottest spots, RAM and processor, and the grfx card has its own fan which is fine.

my folks had a restaurant, and the very first time i was overclocking, it was with a pentium 4 big fat beast, and i knew nothing of fan control, so i stripped off the plastic chassis and worked on it inside a big walk-in refrigerator, and thats how the idea started. this was maybe 2000 or 2001; before even liquid cooling was popular.

refrigeration cooling might actually be up and coming now; but ive been ahead of that curve for a while now. im working on a pair of machines now, mostly in the planning and design phase, but they will use a hybrid system of refrigeration cooled liquid and normal air cooling, both in a sealed system environment but outside of the refrigeration space, and insulated from ambient temperatures. my reasoning was simple; i dont like to have to leave the room for a drink, and a good 60% of the fridge space in our office wasnt used, but we were paying for it anyways, and air/liquid cooling is still dependent on ambient temps, and subject to dust, static, hair, pollen, etc. as long as humidity does not become an issue, ie ensuring the moisture inside is collected and removed, you can even power the whole system down safely without condensation creating havoc; hence the clay which is kitty litter.

My way

Ah, got it. Brilliant. But if you have to open the door to get to the CD or DVD drives (or to get a tasty beverage) then it's not really a closed dust-free system, is it?

lol i have been doing this for years; the plexiglass separator has a HEPA filter installed in front of the exhaust fan, as well as another HEPA filter in front of the intake fan. i bought a $7 HEPA filter at a home improvement store and chopped it down to size, and the PC unit has sufficient ventilation well as VERY snug foam sealing; and the DVD and Blu-Ray drives are externals, mounted on top, screwed in with foam dampeners, same as the PC rig, so that mild vibrations from the fridge unit do not affect it. I use dual solid state drives and have the entire unit mounted on foam rubber and rubber feet to absorb any vibrations whatsoever, so there is absolutely no issues in that respect. The PC unit is totally sealed off from the 'fridge' area, and other than upgrades and hardware swaps, i havent ever had to open up the case.

i thought a LOT about this years back before i first attempted it; now its practically a science for me. btw this is the main machine we edit on. by stripped chassis, i mean nothing but the non-removeable gear is in it; the wifi adapter, my iPod cable, and a few extra USB, SATA, MOLEX power adapters, and firewire cables are plugged into the PC unit, but empty outside the fridge area, so i can hotswap or coldswap as i need, without having to tear it apart. the hard drives i would like to put in a separated shelf so i can swap them more easily, but keep them cooled and dry. the SSD's are simply the boot and scratch disks; all the rest are SATA drives, 1TB and up, in a RAID config.

i wanted basically the highest end quad core i could get, and i wanted to modify it to its limits. on top of that i wanted reliability and top performance, extremely fast boot and render times, and no real issues. i built it to perform how i felt PC's SHOULD perform; flawlessly (i cant help driver/OS/program stuff tho lol), fast, and reliable, and i wanted it damn cheap. no one else offered anything remotely close, so i made my own.

I would rephrase: your options are performance, stability, longevity.

Choose any two.

OK. Now things are getting crazy. You have to see this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aoot...layer_embedded

Two (2) Xeon X5680's (basically the server version of the Core i7 980X processor ... but the processors talk to each other) in the new EVGA SR-2 mobo ... 24 cores!!!! He has it gently overclocked to a little over 4.0GHz. (He could probably get over 5.0 GHz if he wanted to.)

One guy commented that it would take 100 of his computers to achieve the same CineBench test score!

Link is dead
 

"The URL contained a malformed video ID."

Try this: YouTube - CineBench 11.5 Benchmark Run (EVGA SR-2 Classified w/ Dual Intel XEON X5680s @ 4GHz)

Don't know what happened.

OK, that's better.

What's the price tag on that beast?

The two Xeon X5680 CPUs by themselves cost a total of $3,400. Add to those $650 for the motherboard, $1,700 for a Quadro FX 4800 to $3,000 for an FX 5800, plus the usual costs for additional drives, memory and other parts, and you're looking at a minimum of about $7,000 for such a build. And that does not even include the cost of the operating system or any software you're planning to use with such a rig.

I priced out just the 2 processors and the mobo at around $4,000.00. It also takes a special case ... only 3 or 4 that will fit the form factor of the board, and I would imagine that you also need a monster PSU and water cooling.

Slightly over-kill for most standard video editing, but I could see how this sort of box would work if you were a vfx artist or did a lot work with 4K files.

Even at $7,000.00, that is a lot of computer bang for the buck. I was going over old receipts, and I shake my head thinking that I paid well over $6,000.00 for a custom Dec Alpha box-w-a DPS Perception card, and a heck of a lot more for a Silicon Graphics Octane when I was running Flint.