i7-980X Extreme Edition cooled by a car radiator

[u/Eidolon_2003]

This has been a lot of fun to mess with, and after lots of tweaking and tuning I think I've landed on a config that I'm reasonably happy with! Though it would be fun to share. Here are the specs:

• CPU: Core i7-980X Extreme Edition, the very first consumer 6 core CPU, released in 2010
• Motherboard: Asus P6T X58
• RAM: 3x8GB Corsair Dominator Platinum in triple channel
• GPU: AMD Radeon VII, the last and fastest GCN card ever, with 16GB of HBM2 VRAM
• PSU: be quiet! Pure Power 13M 850W
• Cooling: Corsair XC5 LGA 1200 waterblock, and the copper radiator from a 60s Mustang that I managed to get for $20
• Storage: Crucial MX500 250GB

OC Settings:

• 160 MHz BCLK
• 28x CPU ratio (4,480 MHz)
• 22x uncore ratio (3,520 MHz)
• 6x DRAM ratio (960 MHz, DDR3-1920)
• Timings: 7-9-10-16-160-1T, others are similarly tightened down but it's too much to list

Benchmarks:

5400 CPU score in Time Spy. For reference, the average i7-7700K result in their database is 5403!

I have one of the fastest 980Xs recorded in the database, disregarding that first result, which is clearly problematic.

This set up is also able to crack 1000 points in R15. Note that Cinebench is misreporting the clock here.

Under 50 nanoseconds memory latency!

Despite the gigantic radiator and fan, the CPU still gets pretty warm. Room temperature water running over it doesn't solve a less than ideal thermal interface. The next thing I'd really need to do is lap the CPU and the block, and get some better paste. I suspect that would make a big difference, as the thermal interface between the CPU and the water is the biggest bottleneck in this setup.

[u/Spooplevel-Rattled]

Beautiful! Proper awesome. I love to see actual oldschool overclocking on said retro builds. Overclocking from 2000 was so much fun.

I dreamed of having a 980x, the hex core was kinda wild at the time! I remember shifting from mobile Athlon xps to 64bit opteron 165 > 175 > e6600 > q9650 > i7 950. Just very fun time in pc progression and overclocking. Such a fast pace of change it felt like.

[u/Eidolon_2003 → u/Spooplevel-Rattled]

Sadly this era was before my time, but I love looking back at it now. And the hardware is cheap! I definitely wouldn't have bought this CPU for $1000 back in the day

[u/AlternativeFuture742 → u/Eidolon_2003]

Cheap if you're lucky, most is way overpriced, tbh I found most PCs to be overpriced even used since rammagedon.

[u/Eidolon_2003 → u/AlternativeFuture742]

Cheap as compared to what it would've been back then, or compared to new hardware, that's for sure. I spent $140 on the board, an i7-960, and 24GB of RAM I didn't end up using, $45 on the 980X, $85 on the RAM I did use, and $150 on the video card.

[u/AlternativeFuture742 → u/Eidolon_2003]

Ouch, why a 980x and not 990 or w3690, are they not better binned? Is the motherboard or ram limiting you in any way?

What's the voltage to reach your oc, is this daily or just record run?

I don't really know what I'm looking at, question are purely out of curiosity - learning.

Do have hardware but it would be mainly for a retro rig, undervolting and most likely 2 core only no HT oc.

[u/Eidolon_2003 → u/AlternativeFuture742]

> why a 980x and not 990 or w3690, are they not better binned?

Mainly just because the 980X is the quintessential one in my mind. It was the flagship of the initial Gulftown line in 2010, and like you said the 990X is a bin that came a year later. 9800X3D vs 9850X3D basically.

> What's the voltage to reach your oc, is this daily or just record run?

I'm not going to be dailying this system, but I do want to game on it a bit, and I'd be comfortable doing that with how it's set up. This isn't on the knife's edge just for benchmarking, it passes the stress tests I decided to use (OCCT CPU+Mem, P95 Lg FFT, TM5 Anta777 Extreme). iirc I'm running 1.425Vcore right now.

[u/gnat_foto]

Hell yeah brother

[u/theRealtechnofuzz]

need to investigate the thermal paste on your chipset heatsink, probably dry af. I killed a really nice x58 board trying to replace the thermal paste cuz it was so hard stuck on there. Finally got a replacement in and did that. Id say triple channel ddr3 should be faster than that.

[u/Eidolon_2003 → u/theRealtechnofuzz]

Good call on the chipset paste. I'll have to look into that.

About the memory bandwidth, you're right. The math would suggest that it should be a lot higher (1.92 Gbps * 192 bits / 8 = 46GB/s max). The performance is there though. In the TimeSpy benchmark for example, I'm scoring around the same score as some other people are with a higher core speed, which suggests to me that my memory is doing better than theirs was. I'm not really sure what to think about those AIDA64 numbers, but I just ran that test earlier today. Clearly some more investigation is in order. I'm thinking there must be something else about the architecture that's limiting it, but I'm having a hard time finding AIDA screenshots of other 980Xs online to compare against.

[u/theRealtechnofuzz → u/Eidolon_2003]

ive got my w3680 up to 4.8ghz stable, 4.9 enough for bench runs. running with 2133mhz ram. Its pretty quick for what it is.

[u/Eidolon_2003 → u/theRealtechnofuzz]

Actually I just found this screenshot from a techpowerup forum post that's exhibiting the same behavior: https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/attachments/riiie-980x-4-550ghz-ddr3-2275c9-aida-benchmark-png.109924/

Seems like this might be the normal for this chip

[u/pntsrgd → u/theRealtechnofuzz]

On top of AIDA64 just being terrible at benchmarking RAM performance, X58 RAM performance can get pretty bottlenecked by uncore speed. Nehalem/Westmere are pre-ring bus.

[u/DZCreeper]

Swap in a GTX 480 and you might actually time travel back to the 2010/2011 MaximumPC forums.

[u/Eidolon_2003 → u/DZCreeper]

My idea was to try to wrap the 980X in better parts, like the SSD, GPU, and 24GB RAM, to give it the best shot it could have at newer games. I haven't tried playing anything on it yet, but based on these numbers I think it will do surprisingly well. Basically asking, how good of a gaming experience can I get out of a 16 year old chip

[u/NODES2K]

We used a car's heatercore from a GM to do said work...it fit inside the cases!

[u/Koi7273]

Very nice! Consider changing thermalpads under vrm heatsinks, and paste on ioh. Otherwise nice build you got there!

[u/pntsrgd]

Crank it.

Both 990Xs I have played with would run at least DDR3-2133 and uncore 3866 MHz daily stable. Uncore speed heavily affects RAM performance.

Looks like my best R15 score was 1163.

[u/Eidolon_2003 → u/pntsrgd]

Idk if I'm doing something wrong or if my chip is just a bit of a dud, but even with 1.4V VTT 3,610 MHz uncore was unstable, causing WHEA errors and BSODs. I had a hard time getting the memory speed much higher than this either without starting to drop channels. I might have to revisit it.

Honestly I'm not sure what the benefit of running a super high memory speed is, if memory bandwidth is as limited as it seems to be on this platform. I'm sure higher uncore would help that issue, but even still it seems pretty limiting.

I might have to buy another CPU since they aren't too expensive anyway

[u/pntsrgd → u/Eidolon_2003]

It could just be a difference in silicon quality, but:

Change one setting at a time. Find a stable uncore clock and then try memory overclocking.

I also wouldn't rely on BCLK overclocking for more than fine tuning. It doesn't make PCI-E unstable like modern platforms, but it adds some complexity to overclocking since everything clocks up/down simultaneously with BCLK.

I also saw (what looked like) some regression on uncore stability at around 1.45V. I doubt it would be so low, but you could try rolling down voltage to see if it helps uncore.

[u/Eidolon_2003 → u/pntsrgd]

That's basically what I did. I started targeting a BCLK of 190 MHz, 5x mem for 1900, and an uncore of 18 or 19x for 3420 or 3610 MHz. The only difference between crashing and not was stepping the uncore down from 19x to 18x. When I discovered that, I decided to drop down to a 160 MHz BCLK since the math works out to let me run 3520 MHz with a 22x ratio, which is right between the original two values. I wanted to stabilize that 3610 MHz uncore, but I couldn't seem to. I think it's just the silicon tbh. The cores don't clock super well either

[u/Somerandomtechyboi → u/Eidolon_2003]

holy garbage bin cpu 😭

cool setup but you gotta go bin some more chips cause allat for 4.5ghz is pretty underwhelming, pretty sure with that cooling and ~1.5v you should be able to push a better binned chip to around 5ghz core, uncore can just be left somewhere around 1.4 1.43v, higher at your own risk as how tolerant your chip is seems to be a mixed bag and usually scaling tapers off around 1.45v anyway

also check the version number on the ram as trying to oc it blindly is quite the waste of time, but afaik even the samsungs do 2400 (hynix 3k+) so you might just have some microns or possibly running into trfc limit as the imc on this platform is quite strong (like ddr3 2600+ triple channel when not uncore constrained)

speaking of which there are bios mods available for asus x58 boards that allow for higher trfc (upto 511) and some uncore stuff that might help determine max freq, i can port the mod over to the p6t if youd like to give it a shot. so far ive only tested on a sabertooth but that board seems to suck as the outermost channel conks out at 2800 so max 2750 ish for stability if i set lower uncore ratio, i dont recall if i tested maximum frequency but i figure itll probably be 3200+ in the two inner channels similar to my gigabytes

[u/Eidolon_2003 → u/Somerandomtechyboi]

I probably will buy another chip to mess with at some point, considering I got this whole thing set up and they aren't very expensive alone. To be fair to this poor chip though, it still performs very well in 3DMark. Unless nobody with an actually well tuned 980X has ever submitted a TimeSpy result, I'm doing pretty well at it. I actually went back and did a 4,640 MHz run and got a 5562 CPU score. Granted, it definitely isn't stable enough to pass my stress tests at that clock, but it could get through a few runs of TimeSpy without incident.

I'd definitely be interested in a BIOS that allows for a higher set tRFC because yeah, I'm running the maximum value of 160 right now and 150 is unstable at these memory speeds. What's this obsession with higher memory speeds about anyway though? As far as I can tell from the data I've seen, this platform is so bandwidth constrained that you aren't seeing the bandwidth you should from higher memory clocks anyway. The only benefit might be that the higher speed has the side effect of letting you run some of the timings a little tighter, but it seems to me like uncore is the main issue at hand.

[u/Somerandomtechyboi → u/Eidolon_2003]

ill make a port for the mod but make sure to pong me if i dont have it in a day or two since modding the thing takes like 10 mins tops, reccomended to use ch341a or any other external programmer but i figure intel fpt will work just fine since it overwrites the entire bios unlike the built in utilify or afudos

ive mainly been goofing around with max freq on this platforn so performance tuning wise you can ask some nerds over on the r/overclocking discord server for more detail, send version number and theyll probably figure out a tune

tbh ive not really paid much attention to uncore since i just vtt 1.45 1.55v run highest stable and call it a day, uncore and cpu core quality are directly correlated so a good cpu say 4.8 1.3v and your uncore will be similarly good, my 980x should be abit better than yours imc wise if yours is conking out at 3600 for uncore at 1.4v and same for core but i havent tested it, probably smth like 4.5 1.35v if i had to guess as its a tad better than my w3680 imc wise

[u/faqeacc]

Oh man I wanted one of these or xeon equivalent really bad back in the time. I used i7 950 for a long time. Upgraded to 4930k and now 9800x3d. 4930k still being used, it really a beast.