[Success] Geminii's HexaBeast | i7-3970X | ASUS Rampage IV Extreme | GTX 760

[geminii]

Wow, thats impressive! NICE!

Yeah. I am loving it! I am going to start working on my very first graphic novel soon, and fast rendering speeds is A MUST! I just made a new piece of 3D art and it took only 13 mins to do a 4K render. The speed varies naturally based on the lighting and shadow depth as well as camera settings in the 3D app I use. But I am seriously pleased with this machine at this point.

 

[jenue]

Yeah. I am loving it! I am going to start working on my very first graphic novel soon, and fast rendering speeds is A MUST! I just made a new piece of 3D art and it took only 13 mins to do a 4K render. The speed varies naturally based on the lighting and shadow depth as well as camera settings in the 3D app I use. But I am seriously pleased with this machine at this point.

Thats amazing!

Geminii, did you build your computer alone?, its complicated to mount with the processor?

Thanks!

 

[Solidww]

Congrats! There is nothing like a new machine that just blows away what you had in the past.

 

[geminii]

Thats amazing!

Geminii, did you build your computer alone?, its complicated to mount with the processor?

Thanks!

I actually didn't find it all that complicated. The only thing I struggled with at first was getting my water cooler locked down onto the CPU. It seemed like it wasn't lining up but I eventually got it locked down.

 

[jenue]

Cool, I thing with the motherboard manual should be ok, hows working the computer, any crashes? 100% stable?


Thanks!

 

[geminii]

I have had several weeks now to put this machine through it's paces. I decided to drop my overclocking and go back to defaults temporarily just to be safe since I am not so experienced with OC. I will need to revisit the overclocking once I learn a bit more and figure out how to get my temps lowered. But so far so good with everything else.

Final Cut Pro X rendering is massively improved and even FCP 7 is overall faster and a bit more stable. For example I had a large project (1:45 min indie film) that used to hang at 41% loading and take like 30 mins just to open and now it opens within minutes. My 3D rendering has also been super quick, which is great cause now I don't need to wait an hour to see if I do/don't like something and then make a change and wait again. Transcoding has been way faster. So far I have had not one crash with this system.

 

[shilohh]

Hey Shilohh,

So I tried once again to overclock. In BIOS I have it set that it shows up as 4500 but it doesn't display in the system as anything higher than 3.5Ghz. I ran a Geekbench and my score jumped up to 22463. I also used HWmonitor while running Geekbench to see the temps and nothing went above 77 degrees at any point. The idle ambient seems to be hovering at around 53 but during geekbench it jumped up to around 65 max.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

About this Mac is cosmetically incorrect for CPU info. It will show the stock speed of the CPU and not turbo or OC. HWMonitor should show your multiplier and frequency but it averages and it's going to show power states that don't actually get reached if you have limited speedstep working. You can tell system profiler to show any CPU speed up to 4.2GHz by adding:

<key>SMmaximalclock</key>
<string>4200</string>

to your smbios.plist but change 4200 to whatever your CPU speed is in Mhz.

Those temps are high. Especially especially because it will get a lot hotter using prime95 torture test or rendering video using an app that fully utilizes the CPU for 20 min or longer. What was your vcore? You get lower temps by dropping the voltages but if you go too low you'll become unstable. I'd start with defaults then raise your vcore till you hit the desired max temp under extended full load (prime95 torture test for at least 10 min) Then raise the multiplier until you become unstable. Then bring the multiplier back down 1 and run an extended stress test overnight. If you crash during the test, drop it one more and try again. Use prime95 not geekbench. If you have a win install to boot to, try aida64 for stress testing. Also HWMonitor is not very trustworthy for critical monitoring of temps so it would be a good idea to do a stress tests and monitor in winblows to see where your temps are after you get stable.

Also, multiplier overclocks are not working in OS X with BIOSs newer than 4206 so try reverting to 4206. If you can't use 4206 with your CPU, you'll need to use CPU strap for OC instead of multiplier. I also highly recomend geting speed step going. We can only get 2 states right now but it's nice to have the CPU drop to 1.2ghz at idle and light load. Once you have speedstep going you'll want to use offset mode for vcore. Offset mode allows your voltage to drop with CPU speed so when you hit 1.2ghz, you vcore and therefor your CPU temp will drop significantly at idle and light load. When I had my system running 4.2ghz full time, my idle was 40-42c. Now I idle at 35-38c and I have more power under load. I've elected to scale back to 4.4ghz and a max vcore of 1.250-1.288 for my 3930k which keeps me under 70c after 12 hours of torture test.

 

[trs96]

I have had several weeks now to put this machine through it's paces. I decided to drop my overclocking and go back to defaults temporarily just to be safe since I am not so experienced with OC. I will need to revisit the overclocking once I learn a bit more and figure out how to get my temps lowered. But so far so good with everything else.

Final Cut Pro X rendering is massively improved and even FCP 7 is overall faster and a bit more stable. For example I had a large project (1:45 min indie film) that used to hang at 41% loading and take like 30 mins just to open and now it opens within minutes. My 3D rendering has also been super quick, which is great cause now I don't need to wait an hour to see if I do/don't like something and then make a change and wait again. Transcoding has been way faster. So far I have had not one crash with this system.

@Geminii

Glad to see you went for the socket 2011 build. When you are earning your livelihood from work
you do everyday with your computer, it makes a lot of sense to build something this powerful to
run professional applications with more speed. I've seen some of the benchmarks for the six core
new Mac Pro on the Geekbench site and they only come in at a little over 18,000. So you've
got much better performance for a lot less money. It definitely was worth all the research and
work it took for you to build the Hexabeast. Congratulations ! TRS96

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/179463

 

[geminii]

@Geminii

Glad to see you went for the socket 2011 build. When you are earning your livelihood from work
you do everyday with your computer, it makes a lot of sense to build something this powerful to
run professional applications with more speed. I've seen some of the benchmarks for the six core
new Mac Pro on the Geekbench site and they only come in at a little over 18,000. So you've
got much better performance for a lot less money. It definitely was worth all the research and
work it took for you to build the Hexabeast. Congratulations ! TRS96

http://browser.primatelabs.com/geekbench3/179463

@trs96
Sweet! So, even after dropping my system back to standard setup (no overclock) my bench marks are neck and neck with the new 6-Core 3999.00 MacPro. My Single Core Score is a bit lower but my Multi Core Score was just a bit higher than the official MacPro. I can live with that! lol

@Shilohh - I am running on 4206 BIOS currently but can point me in right direction on how to get speedstep working? Thanks

 

[shilohh]

@Shilohh - I am running on 4206 BIOS currently but can point me in right direction on how to get speedstep working? Thanks

This is how to get the Mother Board to control stepping. Should have OS controlled stepping soon which will require different settings but for now this works giving 2 states. 12 and whatever you set your turbo ratio to be.

In BIOS:

Ai over clock tuner = manual or auto
EIST (SpeedStep) = disabled
C1E = enabled
All other C states = disabled or auto

Make sure NullCPUPowerManagement kext is installed.