BlackArchon

Thank you for the pictures! I have also thought about getting water cooling for the chip, but this would also mean I need a new mainboard. Currently the be quiet! Dark Rock TF is cooling the CPU and the VRMs surrounding the socket. The air cooler is directly blowing air over the VRM coolers and they still get so hot that I can't touch them for more than even a second. This means that their surface temperature is about 40 to 50 °C. If I would use water cooling, than there wouldn't be any direct air flow over the VRMs and I would probably get massive VRM throtteling. And yeah... I don't think it is wise to invest about 400 € into a used Rampage Extreme or a similar board with a beefier VRM solution.

Short update: All problems are gone with the Asus P9X79 Pro (except XTU, it still thinks my Xeon has six cores). Here I can successfully override the 130W TDP, and the CPU multipliers are stable at my preferred settings. The Asrock board is weird.

Sorry for my late response, I moved to a new apartment during the last weeks and so everything was a bit chaotic. I installed XTU 6.2.0.24 on the system and is behaving a bit weird. Here is a screenshot first: With this setting, everything is at "Auto" in the BIOS. I set a multiplier of 38 in XTU and started the stress test. As you can see in the graph at the bottom, the CPU still runs at only 3.4 GHz. Maybe this has something to do with the issue that XTU seems to only detect 6 cores instead of 8, according to the screenshot. When I let AIDA64 show the CPU turbo settings, I can confirm that XTU is only setting the turbo multiplier of core 1 to 6 to x38, but for core 7 and 8 it is x34 - this is the reason for the 3.4 GHz. Concerning this weird behaviour with XTU, I decided to NOT trust this tool. Quite funny that a tool created by Intel doesn't know how many cores their own CPUs have... In addition, now the mainboard won't even run stable with the settings which were completely stable some weeks before. During the next days I will try another mainboard (Asus P9X79 Pro) which I got some days ago. I will post my results here.

Here I have a Xeon E5-1680 v2 (which is an Ivy Bridge-EP processor). Since it has an open multiplier, I'm overclocking it. Currently I'm using it on an Asrock Rack EPC602D8A mainboard - yes, there are Xeon mainboards with overclocking capabilities. As a start, I set the all-core turbo multiplier to 40 so that it should run with 4 GHz on all of its eight cores. In heavy tests like Prime95, it will however clock down to 3700-3800 MHz. The reason is that the CPU won't go over its rated TDP of 130 W. Hwinfo64 and HWMonitor confirm that. I've changed quite some BIOS settings, including the short and long duration power limits, but these values got ignored by the CPU. Also the high performance power plan in Windows 7 doesn't change the problem besides running the CPU at 4 GHz in idle while still downclocking it on high load. The temperature isn't a problem because the internal temperature sensors report about 65 °C maximum for the hottest core: it is really the power limit which is holding back the CPU. My question is: do I really have to get a used X79 mainboard to ignore the CPU's TDP? Or is this a restriction of the Xeons which even X79 mainboards cannot ignore?