mobilenvidia Posted January 3, 2011 Report Share Posted January 3, 2011 This CPU I bought to build my home system around. After some blunders from the man I bought it off it finally arrived. All my other bits had arrived to make the system at least workable, still need to get some other goodies to finish it off. But here is the review of the CPU that started it all. Intel Xeon X3470 ES I choose this CPU as it's something different and the aim of the desktop was to make the driver crunching easier and faster. The poor Laptop tries hard but is no longer up to the job. The x3470 is a Socket 1156 CPU, I choose this to save costs, as Socket 1366 CPU's and Motherboard still cost a premium. Once I choose the x3470 which was an Engineering sample, I needed to find a motherboard that had the BIOS to take the XEON (not many OEM support it, or say they do) I ended up with the ASROck P55 Delexe 3, but this will be covered later. CPU came with no Heatsink or fan, this I had already sorted by getting a Noctua NH-C12P SE14 It came with it's own NH1 thermal compound, which I'll replace at some point soon, as I used it on another CPU first and I ran out. The CPU fan I replaced with a Sythe Slipstream SY1225SL12SH 120mm 1900RPM fan , this blows a heap of air and with the design of the CPU heatsink keeps the Mobo and RAM cool too, but this also is a story for later. So now you know what the CPU is plugged into and what is keeping it cool here are the specs: Base Clock 2.93Ghz Turbo Frequancy 3.6Ghz Cores/Threads 4/8 Cache 8MB Hyper Threading Yes TDP 95w Of course I bought the ES version so there was going to be no chance of running it at stock speeds :) Here is what it's currently running at and will probably keep it at. Here is the Turbo enabled to 24x clock speed (4 cores): Here is the Turbo enabled to 27x clock speed (1/2 cores): So 3.68Ghz (160x23) clock setting in the BIOS, then with Turbo mode enabled, 4 cores in Turbo we get 3.84Ghz and 1/2 cores we end up with 4.32Ghz I tried running the CPU with Turbo off at 4Ghz it did not run stable. Current settings are running stable and also considering RAM is overclocked to 1600Mhz (1333Mhz std) I'm very happy with this :) With the CPU running at 90% on all 8 threads, it draws 91w, not bad considering it's running at nearly 1.4v The CPU will clock all the way down to 9x (1.4Ghz) with nothing to do and then draw less than 10w, good for my remote driver uploads to keep the power bills down. I think I can get the Temperature down, pretty sure I need to reapply some thermal grease I don't think there is enough. The Core i3 I ran for a few weeks, only increased 3deg from idle to running at full speed (4.4Ghz OC) for hours. But even 50deg is not bad for 4 cores running at 3.8Ghz Over all I'm very pleased with my purchase. The x3470 (ES) is the same as the Core i7 875K with unlocked clock, but has the same features as the i7 870 but the x3470 also supports ECC and demand based switching. The Motherboard may not support VT-d, as I cannot see it in CPUID as a feature, the x3470 does support it, but there is no setting for it in the BIOS like VT-x So this will from now on be compressing the drivers you download from here. Also the PNY XLR8 RVCGGTX465XXB GeForce GTX 465 Unlocked to a GTX470 now does the Driver/INF testing, this review will also follow. Any questions/benchies etc let me know, I'll see what I can do. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
samozen Posted January 3, 2011 Report Share Posted January 3, 2011 Congratulations Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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