Re: Overclockable Server Motherboards

On Fri, 25 Jan 2008 12:54:46 +0000, Anton Ertl wrote:

General Schvantzkopf <schvantzkopf@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
What I
care about is compute speed, memory size and stability. Any
recommendations will be appreciated.

Is there any support for overclocking on a server motherboard. There are
a couple of SuperMicro motherboards that look good, the MBD-X7DWA-N with
8 FB-DIMM sockets and the MBD-X7DWA-N+ that has a whopping 16 FB_DIMM
sockets. Can these boards be overclocked?

We have a dual-Xeon 5160 box with 24GB of RAM based on the SuperMicro
X7DBE+ and are happy with it. The only funny thing is that, when we
turn it on, it does not show any sign of working for about one minute.

Concerning RAM, I recommend that you avoid FB-DIMMs if you can: FB-DIMMs
consume much more power (our machine consumes 280W when idle), and
require special cooling (we have a 5300rpm 80mm fan for our FB-DIMMs,
otherwise the machine would not work). Instead, go for registered DIMMs
(e.g. PC5300R instead of PC5300F DIMMs); if you want to use a dual-Xeon
board, that would mean the 5100 chipset. Supermicro seems to have only a
6-DIMM board (X7DCL-i), whereas Tyan has an 8-DIMM board in the Tempest
i5100X (S5375); you might also want to look at what Intel has to offer.

Concerning overclocking, there's little demand for that in servers, so
server boards usually do not support it. Looking at the manual of the
X7DBE+, I see no way to overclock the FSB. You can set the multiplier,
but that's probably locked on the CPU. One thing that may be possible
is to get a motherboard with a FSB1600, buy CPUs with FSB1333, and try
to run it at FSB1600. That would overclock a 3GHz CPU to 3.6GHz.
Unfortunately the 5100 chipset I recommended above seems to be limited
to FSB1333, and FSB1600 seems to be limited to the 5400 chipset, which
requires FB-DIMMs.

- anton

I read somewhere that SuperMicro does have some overclocking support on
their boards but they don't advertise the fact.

I probably won't build this system until March or April. I'm hoping that
4G DDR2 DIMMs will be available by then which would allow me to use a
desktop motherboard. I was looking at the Samsung and Micron sites and it
appears that they are both sampling 2G DDR2 RAMs which makes a 4G DIMM
possible, in fact Samsung was also sampling a 4G unbuffered DIMM.
.

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