Xeon Unlocked Voltage ?

[Mickxal]

I'm looking at a E5-2690 V3 on ebay here and I wonder if they are voltage unlocked ? I could up the base clock to 150-200 MHZ and possibly double the all max core frequency from 2.7ghz to 3.8-4.0GhZ. Before you tell me Xeons are made to be reliable and stuff. Remember they are meant to be used 24/7 which is not my case. Possibly 7-8 hours max each day. I'd be happy if it lasted 2-3 years.

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

Xeons get very unstable when you overvolt them, at least from my experience. I wouldn't bother with even trying to overvolt and instead try and use all of the cores, by parallelising.

 

[Mickxal]

Another thing... Do I need ram with ECC registered ? Or does DDR4 work also ? I have 2400MHZ RAM tat I can downclock to 2133MHZ

 

[Rookie_MIB]

Well, part of that reliability is due to the fact that they are both higher binned chips and run at slower frequencies which allows them that 24/7 rating.

That being said my main rig is a Xeon X3470 clocked to 4.2ghz and it runs solid as a rock. I'm not sure if you can move the clocks on the newer Xeons anywhere near that much. In fact, some searching shows that on average, you will probably only be able to get about 5-10%. The world record overclock for it is only about 3.2ghz in fact.

So - getting up to 3.8-4.0ghz is probably very, very unlikely. Remember, this is a 12 physical core setup and it would be like taking three i7-4770k CPUs and cramming them into the same package. Think about the line from the Disney movie 'Alladin': Phenomenal Cosmic Power! Ittttyyy bittyy living space.

That heat has to go somewhere and it's going to generate a lot of it, especially when overclocked.

 

[PizzaTheHutt]

Another thing... Do I need ram with ECC registered ? Or does DDR4 work also ? I have 2400MHZ RAM tat I can downclock to 2133MHZ

ECC RAM isn't 100% necessary - you can use regular DDR4 if that's what you have, although ECC yields much higher reliability (at a price premium)

 

[Mickxal]

But I could still push it to 3ghz on all cores right ? I plan on making a rendering encoding gaming machine. High clock speeds a kinda neccessary in games.