Rampage III Extreme BCLK wall

Hi,

I'm quite new to X58... but I have some older scores with GA-EX58-UD3R, that board did around 215 MHz BCLK with more or less default settings, which I considered acceptable for "lowend" X58. Yesterday I bought R3E and expected something around 230 should be very easy and with the right settings even more Reference Frequency overclocking records @ HWBOT

Turns out I was wrong. I've spent two evenings on this already, studied all kinds of X58 OC guides and still can't get some decent BCLK.

The system is:

Xeon W3520 water cooled

R3E (BIOS 1502 - latest)

3x4 GB DDR3 dual-rank or 1x2 GB single-rank 9-9-9-24

Radeon HD 5500

single sata HDD running in IDE mode

Enermax 630W

win7 64

It seems this W3520 is not as bad as most of my CPUs and it could actually run faster than 4.4 GHz... if the MB would cooperate. I can get 4378 MHz R15 stable (multiple times) running 21x208. havli`s Cinebench - R15 score: 702 cb with a Xeon W3520 After that I got freezing during R15 runs so I lowered CPU and NB multiplier by one notch to make sure CPU is not the limit. Still no matter what I do >210 is not stable. I can boot windows, wprime 32M on 4 threads finishes, on 8 threads crashes and of course R15 crashes within a second after rendering starts.

Tried raising PCI-E up to 120 MHz, changed GTX 465 to HD 5500 and also tried PCI Voodoo3, still the same. Tried HD 5500 in first slot and second slot -> same. Tried to switch RAM to single 2GB module... nothing. QPI slow mode also does nothing.

This CPU can do more I'm sure and also I have other 1366 Xeons with lower multi and those really need as high BCLK as possible. I'm kinda running out of ideas. Most likely it is some obvious mistake... which I don't see. If you have some tips how to get this thing going strong I would really appreciate it.

Just tried Xeon E5620 and this time I can do 217 MHz rock stable... but at 218 windows won't boot.

It seems board is not the problem but CPU is... just like FSB wall with Core2.

havli`s HWBOT x265 Benchmark - 4k score: 3.83 fps with a Xeon E5620

Try setting QPI Link Data Rate to Slow Mode. Otherwise there isn't really much wrong that I see. These boards generally do 250+ 32M on air easy.

Thank you. I have tried that before with W3520 and didn't help at all.

But now i gave it another shot with E5620 and it seems Slow Mode really works Intel Xeon E5620 @ 4503.71 MHz - CPU-Z VALIDATOR It seems the board is quite sensitive to memory timings at higher BCLK and refuses to post with wrong settings (even with Slow Mode). I worked that out using combination of bios settings and setFSB. Now I think actual CPU cores are the limit at >4.4 GHz.

Now I'll return to the W3520 to see what it can do.

given that you have one of the best MBs for x58 the R3E schould be capable of BCLK230+ but the question is: can the CPU keep up with that.

a few thinks you could try:

-try to find VPLL manually as too high/low is counterproductive

-110 pcie should be enough for at least 220 BCLK

- same goes for QPI Link: about 8 Ghz. without slow mode

- for the last 1-3 Mhz. try to fiddle with the skews(same value for both), 100 is a good starting point.

- also the clock amplitude: the x56xx like some more juice here (up to 1000mVs is ok but mind the temps.)

- Vcore OCP enable-> you've got to be kidding

- you sure vQPI that high is needed?

X58 is quite challenging but you sure have the right MB to take it to the limit.

Thank you for the tips.

Now I'm testing E5502 and it seems all voltages and also Slow Mode are once more doing nothing. So far it seems 32nm CPU responds to Slow Mode in positive way... while 45nm doesn't.

Slow mode more to board dependent then cpu. Try asus board and see what it gives