X79 and/or rampage IV OC'ing thread for those of us still left....

[dalekdukesboy]

Yeah probably faulty, typical ES cpu. I had a spark too but board was slow after it, even though everything still worked besides the CD Rom drive - was young and tried to connect floppy while pc was on (a p90 or p166 mmx). Had to change the board.

Well the sensors all were closer when I first used it, and at some point one got stuck ridiculously low ( in single digits at load) and this one is stuck high ( so it says 66 at idle). Even when I downclock it and volt it down with good cooling the lowest the sensor ever reads is 64 Celsius I believe. Obviously that isn't what any properly cooled CPU idles at. Yeah I have had shorts before but always due to something just improperly grounded and no harm done other than board wouldn't turn on etc. This event was definitely the most dramatic and only oops I have had other than ironically on my old RIVE 4 board where the cooler wasn't on properly. I've never connected major things like floppy/sata etc while board is on but I have plugged fans in and that never seems to cause a problem. I definitely wouldn't plug in components the operating system has to recognize and sends data around because that is obviously an easy way to cause your issue or just corrupt data etc. Anyway everything other than my pcie first slot appears to work and nothing is slower and stress tests indicate everything is as stable as before, so lesson learned and unlike you I learned the lesson a decade + after I put together my first p4 and fx-55 which I still have btw.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

Yeah probably faulty, typical ES cpu. I had a spark too but board was slow after it, even though everything still worked besides the CD Rom drive - was young and tried to connect floppy while pc was on (a p90 or p166 mmx). Had to change the board.

I also have a question on this board for all who have it....There are lights next to the pci-e lane switches you can switch the lanes on/off with. Never noticed them before but now I have one that is lit up, do they light up when a slot is occupied or the slot is bad? I know I have at least one bad slot and I read the manual and surprisingly I saw nothing even referencing those lights which seems rather silly if you have them and don't even tell the owner what they mean.

 

[Caring1]

I also have a question on this board for all who have it....

I know the answer to this one, but since I don't own the board and i'm not allowed to reply ......

 

[Kanan]

I also have a question on this board for all who have it....There are lights next to the pci-e lane switches you can switch the lanes on/off with. Never noticed them before but now I have one that is lit up, do they light up when a slot is occupied or the slot is bad? I know I have at least one bad slot and I read the manual and surprisingly I saw nothing even referencing those lights which seems rather silly if you have them and don't even tell the owner what they mean.

I have a almost similar or at least related Asus board and I know it just means that there is an "error" with the slot. These lights are pretty useful, there are some more for cpu + ram purely for helping in diagnosing the problem if any.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

I know the answer to this one, but since I don't own the board and i'm not allowed to reply ......

gee thanks and real funny.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

I have a almost similar or at least related Asus board and I know it just means that there is an "error" with the slot. These lights are pretty useful, there are some more for cpu + ram purely for helping in diagnosing the problem if any.

Ah I thought you had exact board the rampage, but yeah if it's a high end Asus of same generation it would be similar. Yeah the light is actually on what looks to be 2nd pcie slot, of course I'm not sure they are in the order I think they are on the board I have to assume the light is on for the slot I messed up which is first one on the board. Since all that I got the cards working in other slots but now it has this weird thing where if I shut pc off or I shut power supply off then restart board it has to give me error code 00 on the board, then it resets and boots just fine. Kinda weird but everything works, it wasn't doing that right after I had the incident either it was later but not right after. No idea why it has to always go through that routine but I have to remove a fan off of the cooler tower to see for sure which pcie slot is lit up and if I can manually switch it off if that makes a difference for how it boots...also I considered that it now does this since I moved card to new slot and maybe something board needs to do to use only 1 graphics card and when it's not in the first slot it normally would be in? I don't know, just surmising.

 

[Caring1]

I would have said it indicates which slots are enabled, and which are turned off in the BIOS.

 

[Kanan]

Here you go from my manual:

Yep you need to find a way to disable the defective slot if possible.

 

[Caring1]

My mistake, recent models have the ability to disable slots in the BIOS. Your board only indicates an error.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

Interesting and thanks, but my manual and board if I showed you pictures the slots can be turned on/off on the board itself in the upper right hand corner of board where you have RAM led lights roughly is where I have 4-5 switches that are on/off for all the pci-ex slots. I will actually right now cause it's bugging me see which one is lit and shut it off and see if that makes a difference in how it boots. It's really only an annoyance and slows the boot down but it always works.

 

[Kanan]

You're lucky at least your board has that option. I guess the boot problem is gone after deactivating pci-e 1.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

Nope. makes no difference, I shut off that lane and the light only is an indicator of what lane is filled and being used! So I shut off that lane while it was on and screen shut off lol. So no idea what is causing the strange startup but it only started once I moved card to another slot and got it to boot successfully and read the drivers. On the first slot it booted right away, but in windows the more powerful cards simply caused display to shut off once the drivers were loaded and windows started. Then the cards that did work on that slot I noticed even those the display would shut on and off...so I can only assume the first slot is roasted from my oopsie along with the card which I knew. So this whole booting thing no idea why it does that, only thing I can think of is it has other voltages not quite right, OR due to the first slot not being filled it needs to boot differently due to that. But I did stress tests everything works fine once booted so I don't think it's the settings. Weird, glad it works properly just an odd glitch I wish I could figure out.

 

[Kanan]

Maybe its an integral part of the cpu and cant be simply overridden by the board. Mainboards are complex hardware we just take for granted because nowadays everything is so easy.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

True, I'm thinking that whatever it is it has to do with where the card physically is and somehow that throws the board and/or CPU off and it needs to reset itself to boot. I guess I should just be happy everything still works and I had a half decent gpu to stick in there and does most everything I need. My heavily modded Skyrim however would be probably close to unplayable with this card unless I really lowered the settings, and considering most of the mods are 4k models even lowering the resolution wouldn't make a difference the models are rendered in 4k regardless of final appearance.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

Also due to my experiences overclocking and pushing and seeing bluescreens etc plus this latest incident I'm one guy who does NOT take these things for granted except when it does work and it's smooth sailing. So yeah, generally I do take it for granted till something hitches, then I realize how complicated it is and hope it hasn't found a simple death.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

However all that said any of you who have a system even vaguely similar to mine I'd love to see your results because now I feel especially with all my effort to keep this poor ES cpu in business with everything around it being pushed as well as itself that we definitely are in a fairly exclusive "old timer" club. We ourselves aren't old timers but the x79 system certainly is and was one of the few high end intel or AMD systems that lasted several years before there was even a valid replacement x99 for it, and even that is very similar in many ways just added features, few extra cores and die shrink. Yes a lot of changes but architecture and even pin count etc is very similar, oh and ddr4 memory of course but even that isn't all that much different from ddr3 just an obvious step up in speed and voltage.

 

[Kanan]

For me the x79 isnt really old, I have everything i need, usb3, sata3, pci-e 3, a strong cpu. Yeah really nothing I miss from newer platforms, thats why i invested again in it and will use it for at least another 2 years if not more. Best platform i had so far, coming from am2+. A lot of the new stuff is useless marketing anyway.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

True, not like it's not fast enough, most laptops even fairly high end ones can't hold a candle to the setups we've got with an OC'd x79. I just wish I had an ivy bridge e cpu now for better memory oc'ing and pcie 3.0 vs 2.0 because if I get anything 1080 or higher even my pcie 16 slot that is still alive (only 1 left other was fried) may be close to bottlenecking it, and if I put the card in the x8 slot like I have now just for spacing convenience it will definitely bottleneck some cards. But other than those two things Sandy Bridge E is fine...I'd just like Ivy Bridge E long as I got one that had good memory controller along with oc'ing and I know some weren't very good and ran hot even on die shrink from Sandy.

 

[Kanan]

I don't know what you mean, I have PCI-E 3.0. X79 was the first platform to implement PCI-E 3.0, you only need to do this: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3135/~/geforce-gen3-support-on-x79-platform

Use the exe with DOS prompt and admin rights. Should work and fix your theoretical bottleneck.

The only thing Ivy Bridge changed was a measly 2-5% IPC increase/10% overclock decrease and official PCI-E 3.0 support compared to the unofficial "PCI-E 3.0 ready"-thing on SB.

 

[dalekdukesboy]

Interesting, everywhere I read said Sandy bridge E just didn't have pci-E 3.0....of course that was all older articles I was looking at never heard about any sort of "fix" for it. Ok I just checked it out thanks, however they do say in their actual testing that the actual speeds recorded using the .exe varied widely so it should help but they only guarantee 2.0 speeds with possibly more but not necessarily full 3.0 bandwith. Good to know though...however the memory overclocking is much higher on Ivy Bridge generally so that still is what it is, but with this out there when I get a new card new enough to use with that good to know I have this option.

 

[Kanan]

Signal Timing is not the same as bandwidth. It works with full 8 GT/s but it has "variations on signal timing", whatever that means - I think it's not important, I never had any problems here. You should not have any significant bottlenecks with 8x PCI-E 3.0. It's still a mistery when and if PCI-E 3.0 16x will be really needed, atm it's only ~1% faster than PCI-E 2.0 16x (same as 8x PCI-E 3.0).

 

[FreedomEclipse]

My 3930k is in a rather dire state sadly. Wont hold its 4.6 OC no more and runs hot at idle. Ive had to drop it down to 4.3 to be more or less stable

 

[Kanan]

My 3930k is in a rather dire state sadly. Wont hold its 4.6 OC no more and runs hot at idle. Ive had to drop it down to 4.3 to be more or less stable

Silicon degradation is a sad thing, I think I never experienced it yet, because I never overclocked CPUs very high for a long time. I'm doing the same again, I could bash that 3960X to 5 GHz or more, probably with a 1.48 or even higher voltage, but why? For 10% higher performance? Isn't really worth it. That's why I "just" clocked it to 4.5 and undervolted it a bit. Best of both worlds imo.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Silicon degradation is a sad thing, I think I never experienced it yet, because I never overclocked CPUs very high for a long time. I'm doing the same again, I could bash that 3960X to 5 GHz or more, probably with a 1.48 or even higher voltage, but why? For 10% higher performance? Isn't really worth it. That's why I "just" clocked it to 4.5 and undervolted it a bit. Best of both worlds imo.

I could ebay a new 3930k thats hit 4.7 at 1.3v before lol £160

 

[dalekdukesboy]

Signal Timing is not the same as bandwidth. It works with full 8 GT/s but it has "variations on signal timing", whatever that means - I think it's not important, I never had any problems here. You should not have any significant bottlenecks with 8x PCI-E 3.0. It's still a mistery when and if PCI-E 3.0 16x will be really needed, atm it's only ~1% faster than PCI-E 2.0 16x (same as 8x PCI-E 3.0).

Yes exactly I admit I'm no expert on the particulars of bandwidth versus signal timing versus ham sandwiches. I just know they qualified the statement and said you may not get a full 3.0 performance essentially and that results vary whatever the actual "results" are I have no idea they don't say. Yeah, I can honestly say I have clocked the heck out of every cpu at some point and gone for max clocks and usually do a lot of stress testing with very high memory mhz and I usually keep my cpu running at the highest stable clock I'm comfortable with; that said I've never noticed any degradation in a single cpu from fx-55 to core 2 duo e8600 to this ES 3960x equivalent...only thing that has degraded or died on me is a few sticks of memory and one or two motherboards just quit working which I believe was the motherboard or some circuitry on it just died.