Dual Opteron Overclocking on Tyan K8WE

Like the K8N-DL thread, this new Tyan board runs with nVidia's Nforce Pro chipsets. I like the K8N DL, but chose this one because it actually has two nForce chipsets 2200 and 2050 along with the 3rd AMD chipset onboard.

Overclocking out of the box is easy with nTune software. It seems others I compared notes with are limited to 217 MHz on the HyperTransport at stock voltages which brings my Opteron 252's to 2.82 GHz. It is a nice little 8.5% gain. I have clocked it to 2.9+ GHz, but always crashes during the 3DMark05 CPU test at the end.
http://img17.echo.cx/img17/9721/k8we18yn.th.jpg
I also found that by running a clock utility like RM clock I can leverage the AMD PowerNow voltage and increase my stock voltage from 1.40 to 1.45, that brings me to fully stable 2.87 GHz, and near 3.0 GHz unstable... but unfortunately I cannot push the volts higher without a hardware mod. The Tyan BIOS is still in beta and early versions actually showed locked voltage settings within nTune. They were grayed out, but it looks like they tried to allow BIOS voltage mods, so there may be some hope for the future.
http://img85.echo.cx/img85/1550/292ghz2qq.th.jpg
Anyone playing with K8WE voltages yet?

Also, side question, has anyone played with the Zalman VF700-Cu VGA coolers with SLI? I have an NV silencer on GPU 2, but the stock fan on GPU 1 is bugging me with it's noise. Thinking to keep the NV Silencer and install a Zalman VF700 on GPU 1. Looks like enough space, but not sure the Zalman can hack it with 1cm for air intake on the back of another 6800 ultra.

-edited image links-

Nice....but your NUMA doesn't seem to be working according to Sandra?

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Originally Posted by Rave

Nice....but your NUMA doesn't seem to be working according to Sandra?

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He;s using windows, and as far as I know, Windows doesnt support NUMA (yet). U would need Linux.

NUMA works automatically in Windows XP SP2. You just have to enable it in the BIOS, which I have.

Hey, how much does that K8WE cost?

Very cool! Your clock is very good.:D

lol :D

welcome to XtremeSystems :toast:

Why is bandwith so low if NUMA is working?

Thanks saaya, good to be here. I have been lurking forever.

The board costs around $440 for the non-SCSI. Not cheap. I built this beast for a little DV editing moonlighting work I do on the side. The whole setup is not worth it unless you do some serious graphics or processing. A unique point is that it has 42 PCI-x lanes, so it is the only motherboard out there where both PCI-express graphics cards can run on a full 16x lanes.

I will check on the mem bandwidth. It is above what a guy running slower opertons posted lasted week in his K8N-DL post. But K8N-DL does not support NUMA yet. I'm also on my 4th version of beta bios fun, so I may have lost it. I will double-check this and my bios settings. According to this gamepc reviewI should be getting 11.5 GB/sec. Tyan is supposed to release a real BIOS soon.

Benchmarks go up 3 or 4% with NUMA enabled. But in general the board produces standard benchies are in line with what you would expect. Only a few decent multi-processor benchmarks out there.

3DMark05 10,596 (forceware ver. 76.45, 10,2xx on 71.89)
I posted SuperPI in the appropriate thread the other day. 512 = 13 sec.

Tyan released some hardware monitoring software patches yesterday that covered this motherboard. Not all options enabled yet, but it looks like it will support software/bios voltage mods. I guess I'll keep waiting. I would rather use software/bios than hard mod for now. I was hoping others on here might have some ideas or plans to overclock this board.

wow, what a beast! 4 GB ram :slobber:

Nice , Nice 3d 05 score, crushes mine :stick:

Rave and Franky were right, I had disabled my NUMA by accident with mem hole mapping testing! Now it looks normal.

http://img240.echo.cx/img240/2071/sandra7sr.jpg

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Originally Posted by bobbywindel

Thanks saaya, good to be here. I have been lurking forever.

The board costs around $440 for the non-SCSI. Not cheap. I built this beast for a little DV editing moonlighting work I do on the side. The whole setup is not worth it unless you do some serious graphics or processing. A unique point is that it has 42 PCI-x lanes, so it is the only motherboard out there where both PCI-express graphics cards can run on a full 16x lanes.

I will check on the mem bandwidth. It is above what a guy running slower opertons posted lasted week in his K8N-DL post. But K8N-DL does not support NUMA yet. I'm also on my 4th version of beta bios fun, so I may have lost it. I will double-check this and my bios settings. According to this gamepc reviewI should be getting 11.5 GB/sec. Tyan is supposed to release a real BIOS soon.

Benchmarks go up 3 or 4% with NUMA enabled. But in general the board produces standard benchies are in line with what you would expect. Only a few decent multi-processor benchmarks out there.

3DMark05 10,596 (forceware ver. 76.45, 10,2xx on 71.89)
I posted SuperPI in the appropriate thread the other day. 512 = 13 sec.

Tyan released some hardware monitoring software patches yesterday that covered this motherboard. Not all options enabled yet, but it looks like it will support software/bios voltage mods. I guess I'll keep waiting. I would rather use software/bios than hard mod for now. I was hoping others on here might have some ideas or plans to overclock this board.

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crystal cpu and clockgen for nf4 should both work and let you change multi fsb memory pciE clocks as well as vcore, all in windows :)

wow, really nice. Thats an expensive setup. Nice bandwith and 3d score. Now, get that crunching for D2OL, and then it will be the perfect comp.

yeah! can you run the d2ol bench and see how much this rig can crunch? :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bobbywindel

Rave and Franky were right, I had disabled my NUMA by accident with mem hole mapping testing! Now it looks normal.

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That's more like it:toast:. That is an utterly awesome rig and I'm very jealous:slobber:.

crystalcpuid also can't push volts above 1.45. I use it to get the extra .05, but that's all. Still hope for a bios rev soon from Tyan.

Some guys are cooling the three chipsets on this board and finding their FSB can be more stable above 217. On stock chipset heatsinks, which I have, it seems 217 is the stable limit. That gives me 2.82 Ghz standard overclock from stock 2.6. I can go over 2.9 GHz, but not stable under heavy load after a few minutes. It seems to be the two nvidia chipsets get hot. I'll see what I can find to cool them.

My NTOL dBench score looks like this at 2.82 Ghz:

Target: SARS IV
Candidate: nci_340557.aq
Number of Atoms: 15 Rotatable Bonds: 0
1: 325 -5.87 00:04 11: 342 -5.87 00:05
2: 357 -5.85 00:05 12: 332 -5.88 00:05
3: 353 -5.39 00:05 13: 348 -5.88 00:05
4: 341 -5.88 00:05 14: 340 -5.91 00:04
5: 372 -5.87 00:05 15: 349 -5.85 00:05
6: 351 -5.85 00:05 16: 342 -5.88 00:05
7: 353 -5.88 00:05 17: 362 -5.85 00:05
8: 339 -5.87 00:04 18: 345 -5.88 00:05
9: 350 -5.88 00:05 19: 346 -5.85 00:05
10: 326 -5.91 00:05 20: 356 -5.91 00:04

10 May 2005 11:36:44 AM 0 nci_340557.aq SARS IV 15 0 -5.91 -5.39 00:01:36 2 29791 00:00:29 00:02:07

Total Time: 127 seconds

(I'm in Japan time zone)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bobbywindel

Rave and Franky were right, I had disabled my NUMA by accident with mem hole mapping testing! Now it looks normal.

http://img240.echo.cx/img240/2071/sandra7sr.jpg

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:slobber: :slobber:

that's :cool: :D

what timings ?

Ahhmm, whats NUMA?

BTW, I will be building a friend of mine a very similar setup soon for his workstation.

Just stock timings. I have not yet tested much with my timings, except to determine that slower timings did not increase my overclockability. Any suggestions? :confused: I can do 1T and 2.5 in the BIOS, but did not change much in early quick checks.

http://img174.echo.cx/img174/4268/cpuz23wb.jpg



What is NUMA? AMD only. It can improve performance on MP systems through sharing hypertransports accross procs. NUMA directs memory traffic to the node with the lowest queue. This can speed up perf, but can hurt perf by adding latency in some situations because traffic is routed to node farther away. But in most cases, it's all good. The more procs, the better implmentation of NUMA. So once I go with two dual-core 3.0 GHz Opterons (4 cores! :banana: someday before the Opteron changes sockets!), numa should do even more for my perf in some apps.

In rough tests, NUMA produced 4 to 8% increase, but not controlled tests yet. Didn't do anything for 3DMARK05 et al.

Oops, I just remembered dual-core chips share the same hyper-transport I think... no NUMA advantage there....

only 217 fsb? :(

That's the 100% stable limit so far. Still working on it. That's why I'm posting! (:

Nice stuff. Got some photos of the setup? I hope Tyan fixes the bios good. What chips is your RAM based on - any way to run tighter than 8-3-3-3?

http://www.k8we.com/ has some damn nice tweaks for getting the very best speed out of her and also the latest bios's

Have fun with her, I'm green with envy ;)

My mem is based on Samsung TCCC mem. Seems to do pretty good for the required Registered ECC. It does run tighter, and have, but latency does little if not nothing for perf on AMD/Opteron platform with HyperTransport.

I'm on the latest bios, but still very beta. I'm usually one of the first to upgrade. My buddy runs k8we.com.

Pics? Well since you asked... :cool:

http://img28.echo.cx/img28/8797/aimg11805bf.th.jpg

http://img28.echo.cx/img28/1374/aimg11810lu.th.jpg

http://img28.echo.cx/img28/9073/aimg11887by.th.jpg

damn thats nice! :o

Hi Dave! :)

bobbywindel
Well, TCCC should run pretty good @ 7-3-3-2.5 I reckon. The performance increases should be similar to those that are found in single-CPU systems.

Hehe those CPU coolers sure look funky! What does the top PSU do?

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Originally Posted by dsecrieru

Hi Dave! :)

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:stick: - I can't hide anywhere with those heatsinks :p:

ivan, the top PSU runs the graphics cards and some fans. I think you are right on the memory speeds, but I have not seen any real benchmark gains at the tighter timings...

I will make my decision this week on a basic water cooling plan for my GPU's and chipsets, or whole setup, or maybe just get a few fans for the chipsets... I can't decide yet!

Yoooooo Bunda man, you can run but you cant hide hehehehe.

From my experience, watercooling the chipset is a waste of space and time. I would just get big passive heatsinks on and insure good thermal contact and airflow :)

Apparently, the K8WE's chipsets get really hot and they're are also poorly placed, making the choice for "bigger" heatsinks very difficult.

Weather or not being so hot is an issue, I have no idea. Otherwise, I would agree with you :).

looks great! did you try any 3d benchmarks like cinebench etc?
should be pretty good to have 2x2.8GHz power ;)

I decided not to water cool the chipsets since everyone who tried it said don't do it! Actually, now I'm only going to water cool the GPU's with Koolance 6800 coolers and a Thermaltake Bigwater pump and radiator. Should be ready within a week.

lv_88, benchmarks are pretty good. 3dmark05 is around 10,400+ with the latest drivers, but those are all single proc benchmarks. I did cinebench awhile ago, but don't remember the results.

bobby, i would recommend a silverprop fusion or maz4 block to you over the innovatek or dangerden 6800 blocks any day... they perform better and are smaller and lighter, a LOT smaller and lighter, and they cost less as well...

and who told you not to cool the chipset and why? because its easy to crush the chipset and kill it?

Maze4 was my first preference, but I was doing some testing and there is a benefit in cooling GPU memory too. DDR3 does not put out much heat, but testing my nv silencer 5 on both cards, I can get 60Mhz more memory speed with nv silencer that cools the memory too. So it is a trade off, the maze4 types provide higher GPU clocks, but memory speed does not increase much. I think it comes down to preference and situation. My computer is near a window and gets toasty in the summer. Anyway, I got my Koolance 6800 blocks already, at least it will LOOK cool.

I got Thermaltake replacement parts from a local shop on the cheap. The thermaltake bigwater system looked crappy to me. Both display models I saw were not even working anymore:D, but for $70 for pump and radiator, I can't do any better for just a small GPU cooling system in my location.

The amount of work required is the trouble with chipset cooling. Over time, blocks tend to come loose unless you can find exact fits. Nforce 4 chips may be some of the hottest and most justified for water cooling though. If I can find someone with a tight setup, I might add later. It would not be out of the question for one of these companies to release chipset coolers designed for Nforce 4 chip size soon, would it?