Dual Opteron Overclocking on Tyan K8WE

[bobbywindel]

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.

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.

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-

[Rave]

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

[[XC] moddolicous]

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

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

[bobbywindel]

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

[shadowing]

Hey, how much does that K8WE cost?

[linhvndiy]

Very cool! Your clock is very good.

[saaya]

lol

welcome to XtremeSystems

[Franky 4 Finger]

Why is bandwith so low if NUMA is working?

[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.

[Reflex1]

wow, what a beast! 4 GB ram

[hoebloggs]

Nice , Nice 3d 05 score, crushes mine

[bobbywindel]

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

[saaya]

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.

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

[[XC] moddolicous]

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.

[saaya]

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

[Rave]

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

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

[bobbywindel]

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)

[eva2000]

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

that's

what timings ?

[kraggy]

Ahhmm, whats NUMA?

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

[bobbywindel]

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? I can do 1T and 2.5 in the BIOS, but did not change much in early quick checks.





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! 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.

[bobbywindel]

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

[saaya]

only 217 fsb?

[bobbywindel]

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

[IvanAndreevich]

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?

[Demoulous]

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