How to get 4 GHz stable multi-core?

[mmganga]

So I'm thinking of getting an upgrade from my trusted Opteron 165 (a few years old ;-)...

I noticed the 1055T Phenom II are priced reasonably well and they overclock nicely.

Question -- do most out of the box 1055Ts reach ~4 GHz?

I also saw the Gigabyte MA790XT-UD4P motherboard gets good reviews...

Question -- is this a good mobo to overclock on?

Finally...

Any recommendations on RAM to get (somewhere between budget price and good performance);

and...

What are the options to keep the system quiet without paying a bundle?

Thank you!

 

[jvroig]

Question -- do most out of the box 1055Ts reach ~4 GHz?

The harsh reality is that no overclock is guaranteed because each chip is different. Furthermore, the 1055T is a non-BE chip with a low multi. You will be at the mercy of your board's HT ref clock capabilities, as you will need to crank it up very high due to the low multi.

Question -- is this a good mobo to overclock on?

Just as good as any other board within its relatively cheap price range. Anecdotally, I've had good success with Gigabyte boards, but that's no endorsement or guarantee that it will do an HT ref clock of 286 to let you achieve 4GHz.

Any recommendations on RAM to get (somewhere between budget price and good performance);

RAM is a commodity item. Get whatever is the cheapest you can find. You can limit how much OC your RAM gets by lowering the divider, so it won't be limiting your OC, and it won't matter that you will be sacrificing RAM OC because it contributes almost nothing to real world applications, unless your job is benching SuperPI or memory-intensive benchmarks all day long.

What are the options to keep the system quiet without paying a bundle?

Case fans - relatively slow 120mm fans
CPU HSF - Corsair H50/H70. If you need something cheaper, the venerable CM Hyper 212+ comes with a fan that is also very quiet, and you can add another fan to it (naturally, you should add a quiet fan; the crowd favorite here seems to be Gentle Typhoons when it comes to quiet but effective fans). The same recommendation applies to its Thermaltake clone, the Thermaltake Contac 29 (it is much cheaper, but performs identically; locally, they are practically giving it away for the equivalent of $21 in my country)



All in all: I would generally say that the 1055T is a good buy. But if you only want it because you expect 4GHz, you need to be warned that it may not come true. If there is nothing specific that really needs six cores that you use, you may be better served with higher-clocked quad-cores such as the Phenom II X4 965/970 BE. I am assuming you have decided on an AMD system, but of course there are Intel alternatives that may or may not be more expensive.

 

[mmganga]

Hi, thanks for your thorough response.

In fact, the reason that I am looking for such a system is to do extensive math simulation using Finite Element codes. I've had very good results with AMD systems over the years and the defining factors in terms of speed are:

-- CPU speed;
-- CPU cores/multi-processing (if the problem can use this; not all problems can take advantage of the multi-processors);
-- memory size;
-- memory speed;
-- hard drive speed;


With this being said, would it still make sense to get cheap(er) memory as you had mentioned? I was thinking about 8 - 12 Gb of RAM would be appropriate for my application and would definitely like to get 6 cores instead of 4.

 

[jvroig]

Then just get 8-12GB of RAM that fits your budget.

Also, if hard drive speed is the weakest link, then perhaps a better investment would be in an SSD that is just the right size.

I am not familiar with your use case, so I can't determine which of the factors you mentioned will contribute more (I am sure they have differing weights), hence I cannot tell you where to make sacrifices and where to focus your money/efforts on.

 

[wwswimming]

nothing wrong with 2 or 4 cores at 4 GHz.

unless you are using it for heavy multi-threaded work that benefits
from 6 cores.

but the AMD Black Edition 4 core Phenom 2's are pretty awesome.

 

[mrcmtl]

Nothing is guaranteed but something above 3.6Ghz is pretty much given on a 1055T.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If you are doing finite element analysis for work purposes, then for the Love of God, please don't overclock. I don't want buildings falling in on me.

 

[Cogman]

If you are doing finite element analysis for work purposes, then for the Love of God, please don't overclock. I don't want buildings falling in on me.

😀 pshh, 9 times out of 10 the correct answer comes out 😛. Thats pretty good odds for most buildings.

 

[Concillian]

Some modeling work we do at work switched over from multi-core CPU to using GTX480s and saw rather extreme speedups. Didn't really matter what CPU we had in there with the video card. With a 480 it was ~10x faster than our C2Q quad cores. I don't know what speed they were, probably 3GHz-ish.

If speed really matters, switch over to GPU processing.

 

[Cogman]

Some modeling work we do at work switched over from multi-core CPU to using GTX480s and saw rather extreme speedups. Didn't really matter what CPU we had in there with the video card. With a 480 it was ~10x faster than our C2Q quad cores. I don't know what speed they were, probably 3GHz-ish.

If speed really matters, switch over to GPU processing.

Yep, that would be my recommendation as well. 1000's of discrete elements = ideal for GPU computing.

 

[Highmodulus]

😀 pshh, 9 times out of 10 the correct answer comes out 😛. Thats pretty good odds for most buildings.

Yeah, and with nothing but lowest bidder contractors and materials the shoddy design hardly matters-- OC that puppy!

 

[mmganga]

Yep, that would be my recommendation as well. 1000's of discrete elements = ideal for GPU computing.

Ok, but the software that you use has to be modified to take advantage of the GPU, correct?

Using commercial software may not have that advantage as they are not necessarily designed for GPU computation...

Or am I not understanding this right?

Thanks!

 

[Concillian]

Ok, but the software that you use has to be modified to take advantage of the GPU, correct?

Using commercial software may not have that advantage as they are not necessarily designed for GPU computation...

Or am I not understanding this right?

Thanks!

Again. This is where the following phrase comes into play:

"If speed really matters"

If speed really matters, you hire someone to come in, look at the code, and re-write for GPU processing. We did this and it took someone 3 months to do it. I have no idea how much he was paid, but a 5-10x speed improvement is quite large. Commercial software probably is not as flexible in this regard, since it probably has no code for someone to look at.

now we have each modeling engineer with a GTX480 in their machine so they can do much larger "small experiment" jobs on their office PC, which frees up time on the large cluster which is time-shared across sites.

 

[JETninja]

Case fans - relatively slow 120mm fans
CPU HSF - Corsair H50/H70. If you need something cheaper, the venerable CM Hyper 212+ comes with a fan that is also very quiet, and you can add another fan to it (naturally, you should add a quiet fan; the crowd favorite here seems to be Gentle Typhoons when it comes to quiet but effective fans). The same recommendation applies to its Thermaltake clone, the Thermaltake Contac 29 (it is much cheaper, but performs identically; locally, they are practically giving it away for the equivalent of $21 in my country)

This^ Just put together a new system in a Antec 900 (200mm top, 2 120mm Front, 1 120mm rear) with the Corsair A70 (2 120mm) (looked at the H series, its fine, but not cooler or quieter for the $$) and the Corsair 650W (120mm) and this thing even with the side panel off is almost silent. A huge difference from my old 8 80mm fan Antec unit....

This week that A70 is dirt cheap at the Egg too.....