Intel Xeon 5680 and EVGA W555 SR2 benchmarks

LAST WEEK, we looked at the Intel's Xeon 5680 dual CPU cousin of its Core i7 980X, running on the EVGA W555 SR2 mainboard and how far that combination can go under the most extreme conditions.

After suffering through all that 'hell freezing over' for the sake of 5+GHz benchmarks, I put the CPUs back to more ordinary, but still well sped up, paces compared to any generic workstation or server mainboard.

This is what one would call 'productivity performance enhancement', a combination of reasonable CPU overclocking with memory and system level tuning that, using the best CPUs' built-in margin together with top quality componentry, design and cooling, brings anywhere from 15 per cent to 25 per cent extra sustained system performance without substantially compromising system reliability and longevity. That of course means sticking with reasonable voltages for both the CPUs and other important components like the chipset and memory.

A well functioning and reliable system with, say, a 20 per cent additional performance boost for CPU and memory dependent codes, can for instance let an animator complete his movie sequence render in 4 days instead of 5, thus not only earning him the dosh faster, but potentially making a difference between winning or losing the project depending on meeting tight deadlines. This is far more serious than extra FPS in Crysis or any other extreme 3D game because it affects how much money that designer or engineer can make overall. And that's where this EVGA product has the market niche all to itself, for now.

Features

Reliable high overclocking alone isn't enough. Just the base features alone should knock the high end user of his feet as he reads the specs, and the board doesn't disappoint there. Power delivery to the CPUs and memory is exceptional, providing true dual 8-phase digital PWM with fast up to 1,333kHz switching, backed by dual 2-phase VTT uncore PWM at 640kHz and dual 3-phase memory PWM also at 640kHz, as well as more gold content in CPU connections.

The board, with its unique 24+8+8+6+6+6 power connector arsenal, will allow well in excess of the 300 Watts power draw per CPU socket required to run both processors at north of 5GHz, assuming you have a matching strong PSU or a pair of power supplies to deliver the power. We are talking here of the first board that, when filled with 12 DIMMs and four dual GPU cards, can use a 2,000W PSU well. Hey Thermaltake, is it time to dust off that ToughPower 2000 model and start selling it again? However, in the end we did manage to run all of this at 4GHz, plus two HD5970 dual-GPU cards, using a 1,000W PSU.

The board was designed with input from the famous 'Shamino' Peter Tan at EVGA to accomodate extreme cooling from the very start. During the LN2 tests at Antarctic temperatures, the huge amount of condensation in the Singapore testing room - it was +30 C outside air versus -90 C at the CPU heat spreader - left the mainboard almost swimming in water despite all the kitchen towels soaking it up, yet it ran. I do not recommend doing this every day, of course.

The good power and overall board design enabled us to achieve something else, far more important for everyday user - the above mentioned "productivity performance" overclocking from 3.33GHz to 4 GHz, a nice 20 per cent jump, at lower voltages and heat than ever before, as you'll see in a moment. At the same time, this board allows you to use almost any kind of Nehalem-compliant DDR3 memory across its twelve DIMM sockets, from 4GB or 8GB of high capacity registered DDR3-1333 server DIMMs for huge large memory simulations to the current 2GB DDR3-2000 or 4GB DDR3-1600 desktop DIMMs for high speed with low latency.

In our tests, I used three memory kits. The first was a Geil Black Dragon DDR3-2000 set of six 2GB DIMMs, whose unique PCB design and low power remove the need for heat spreaders. Now, with good airflow, you may actually get better cooling efficiency with memories this way. Of course, the second kit, a more expensive but even higher performing Kingston HyperX 2000 six channel 12GB DIMM set, was there too to set some records. The third kit was the massive set of 24 Samsung 4GB registered ECC DDR3-1333 DIMMs for 48GB RAM. Which one looks best in the photos?

CPU support is just as varied, including all dual-CPU capable Nehalem and Westmere SKUs, both quad and six core. As long as they're within the generation of each other you can even mix two different CPUs together, such as X5660 and X5680, though in such cases of course one of them will run faster as it will have a higher multiplier off the commonly shared base clock. The voltages for each CPU core and uncore are separately set, and you can check the key system voltages using easy read points for multimeter probing on the mainboard.

Then, as mentioned, rather than using two Tylersburg i5520 southbridges - they are called IOH or I/O Hub now, as the new moniker - to provide for 4 x 16 PCIe slot lanes, EVGA resorted to the slow and hot but tried and tested twin Nforce 200 approach, where each of Nvidia's southbridges expands one of Tylerburg's x16 PCIe v2 lanes to two x16 PCIe v2 ports to the cards, for a total of four x16 true slots or 7 total slots when adding the x8/x16 switching. Now, the added latency from these bridges is partly compensated for by the possibility for GPUs to communicate with each other directly through that bridge, rather than coming out to the chipset and loading it's bandwidth reserves.

This also brings to the SR2 the unique plus of being one of the first two boards - together with the Asus Rampage III Extreme - to be certified for true Quad SLI operation with the new GeForce GTX470 and GTX480 cards. The mainboard - as you'll see in the Part 3 - already runs fine with two Asus ATI Radeon HD5970 dual GPU cards in CrossfireX, with some lovely results to boot.

My comment here would be that, frankly, the slots in between are redundant due to the GPU cards' thicknesses, and that EVGA could have just kept the 4 x native x16 slots as I doubt anyone would on such a board scrimp on low bandwidth PCIe peripherals, yet maybe provide one PCIe x1 - say for a Creative X-Fi - and maybe one old PCI slot just in case.

Talking about sound and other peripherals, the inclusion of native USB 3 and SATA 3 together with dual Gigabit Ethernet and two separate eSATA ports is to be commended. However, knowing this is one of the highest end boards in existence, I'd have hoped for a truly intelligent Dual Gigabit controller such as the Intel 82576 that takes over much more of the TCP/IP protocol stack processing to free up precious CPU cycles. Same for the audio, either put a good DSP-based one such as the Creative X-Fi XRAM onboard to offload the CPUs, or don't put in any sound at all, but just provide the dedicated PCIe x1 slot for the users' high end audio card of choice.
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BIOS

We already mentioned the BIOS, but here are some of the details you can see at the 4GHz settings.

And here, look at the very low voltages for reliable 4GHz 12 core operation.

Overclocking support wise, there's a 2-character LED status display there on the mainboard, and you can connect EVGA's external handy probe tool, too.

Overclocking

This time, I used very special cooling, an Asetek LCLC Dual, a compact sealed liquid cooling kit without any major do-it-yourself required by the user. The two pumps, one on each CPU, link to the radiator assembly with two high speed fans, and that's about it. But, it does great even in an above 4GHz dual CPU twelve core configuration here, while keeping noise fairly low, so high performance does come here without a large size requirement.

I took a different approach than most, by starting out to 'undervolt' the CPU and other componentry. So, the two CPUs ran fine at 3.33GHz at just 1.175V across all benchmarks. In fact, they ran fine at 1.15V on everything save one CineBench 11 run. Then, as we went up, we got the 4GHz setup - dual CPUs but no Turbo or Hyperthreading - running beautifully across all tests at just 1.3V vCPU both core and uncore. The CPU temperature was barely higher versus the default: in Windows. It was 41 C versus 37 C at 3.33GHz default clock when idle, and up to 69 C versus 64 C in the benchmarks I ran, still well within 'normal operating expectations'.

After about 4.3GHz and 1.38V, the voltage required to run smoothly started going up real high. The 4.5GHz maximum I could get on this board stable with the liquid cooling required 1.47V for stability, which for me was a no-no with a 32nm CPU. So I stuck back with a well tuned, low heat, normal power consumption dual Xeon X5680 4GHz configuration with six channel DRAM memory (CL 7-7-7-18 for GEIL at 1.53V, and CL6-6-6-16 for Kingston at 1.60V). No Turbo was enabled to ensure predictable benchmark runs, just Hyperthreading was turned on and off depending on the need.

Benchmark results will follow in Part 3.