Xeon E5 - 16 Cores/ 32 Thr Z9PE-D8 WS 12TB GeekBench 28,000

[ImmortalJman]

OMG thanks. I will be waiting for your advice on unmodded BIOS because I do not have a backup chip and modding the BIOS scares the sh*** out of me.

Also, I have a ASUS X99 DELUXE/GTX 780 with latest BIOS that boots Unibeast 6.1.1 Yosemite 10.10.5 USB with only "dart=0 npci=0x2000 nv_disable=1 -v". What a contrast! ;-)

I would LOVE to get 10.10.5 running on my Z9PE-D8 Dual Xeon. If not, I will wait for El Cap to get a life with FCPX or a FCPX update past 10.2.2 (I am scared of El Cap also because the open source packages haven't been released and Disk Utility has no support for Apple RAID as of 10.11.1).

Thanks,

Vincent

UPDATE 1: Just to confirm: running just 1 DisplayPort-connected GTX 780 on slot #5 would be fine, you think?

Ok, to address some of your stuff and then my odd discovery.

Firstly, you can install everything without modding the BIOS. The BIOS enables full support for speedstepping and TURBO states. The MSR is locked normally and this keeps it from being enabled. Yeah, I don't blame you. I got a backup chip just in case but found that it wasn't that hard, and it worked. But there might be a way around it thanks to Clover.

So according to Clover:

Some vendors, like ASUS, restrict the use of MSR register 0xE2 in their power management module to ReadOnly. On Sandy/Ivy Bridge systems the kextAppleIntelCpuPowerManagement will try to write to this register and cause a kernel panic. This patch will eliminate the kext's write operations.

This might mean that we can stop doing the BIOS mod, but I don't think we'll get the native speedstepping. So, I will test this theory with my backup BIOS chip. First I will upgrade it to the latest revision so I can include some other information.

This brings me to my next topic. The multi-GPU topic.

I decided to see what would happen if I installed all the GPU's I have. Hey what the heck right?
Well, I put:
Slot 3: 780 Ti
Slot 5: 980 Ti
Slot 7: 980 Ti
Result: Boots up without problems, maybe even faster. The two 980 Ti's are recognized!...but the 780 Ti now lists as Nvidia chip model.

So, before, I could put one card in slot 7 and 3 and it would boot all the way to a black screen, and verified that it didn't actually complete the boot process. And with slots 5 and 3 occupied, I get stuck on PCI configuration.
So, to some up, if I fill up the slots from bottom to top, then it will recognize each in a row BUT it won't load the last one. I'm not sure what's going on here.

Update: After running some tests with the video cards I can confirm that both 980 Ti's are being used in Final Cut Pro. With the BruceX test, with one 980 Ti, I was getting roughly 56 secs; I'll have to check again. I could've sworn that it was a lot longer. Anyhow, with my now enabled 980 Ti's I get 23.44 secs and in the OpenGL monitor I can see that both had equal utilization. Now, to solve the problem of the 780 Ti not being recognized.

 

[up4]

This all sounds yummy. Just to confirm: you are on El Capitan 10.10.1?

Also, by having Clover modify AppleIntelCpuPowerManagement so that it doesn't write MSR 0xE2, does it mean Mac OS X thinks it successfully wrote it and basically leave it in an incoherent state? Is it stable ? Are the performances optimal ? There is this old bug report too. Also, if the Clover "soft" solution doesn't work, do you think it would be possible to patch BIOS revision 5802 (the latest)?

I'd rather buy a GTX TITAN Z than have to hack my way into MultiGPU.

 

[ImmortalJman]

This all sounds yummy. Just to confirm: you are on El Capitan 10.10.1?

Also, by having Clover modify AppleIntelCpuPowerManagement so that it doesn't write MSR 0xE2, does it mean Mac OS X thinks it successfully wrote it and basically leave it in an incoherent state? Is it stable ? Are the performances optimal ? There is this old bug report too. Also, if the Clover "soft" solution doesn't work, do you think it would be possible to patch BIOS revision 5802 (the latest)?

I'd rather buy a GTX TITAN Z than have to hack my way into MultiGPU.

Yes. I am on 10.11.1.
I haven't had a chance to try the software only approach. But it I will try that this week. I know, however, that after doing my BIOS mod and adding the ssdt file, my geek bench score jumped from 28,000+ to what it is now. I also get the really low power states when all that horsepower isn't being used. So, that'll be my comparison when I use an unmodded chip with the ssdt and the clover hack.
Now, the video card thing. I'm not sure what performance would come out of that card. Supposedly all of the card would really be recognized as one whole gpu thereby passing the problems of multi gpu, but it doesn't have Apple's blessing so I'm not really surprised anymore when something doesn't work.
I'm hoping that with an updated BIOS chip my fix my video card problem.
With the holiday approaching and the amount of time I'll need to play around with this setup, I might not finish til next week or so. So, here's hoping.

 

[up4]

Thanks for letting me know. For now, I will finish my X79 build and re-install Linux on the Z9PE. But I'd love to see both of them on Mac OS X. So I will wait until you report on your experiment before I retry anything on the Z9PE. Good luck.

 

[kylec]

I'm psyched about where you all are at with this thread! I think I may join you here! I'm still just at the budgeting phase though, so far.

Good luck on the triple GPUs. That's what I hope to achieve - or at least dual. I will be using AMD though, because I've got a 280x and some 290s lying around, from when I was mining.

 

[ImmortalJman]

I'm psyched about where you all are at with this thread! I think I may join you here! I'm still just at the budgeting phase though, so far.

Good luck on the triple GPUs. That's what I hope to achieve - or at least dual. I will be using AMD though, because I've got a 280x and some 290s lying around, from when I was mining.

Welcome to our thread.
That's a great set of cards for Final Cut Pro.
However don't get too excited. I'm still trying to figure out some bugs related to the multi gpu problem. Right now I have a very nice card going to waste just to make the other two work. I'm still trying to pin down the problem to see of its a BIOS thing or Clover.

I did use my spare chip and updated it to the latest version. So far results are not promising but it's still early because I went for broke first changing nothing to changing little. It's still frustrating nonetheless.

 

[kylec]

We mostly use Premiere, but yeah, it will be nice to have FCP also performing well.

Good luck with the GPU hacking!

edited to add: 1 and 3 are CPU1 and 5 and 7 are CPU2. Do you think it's possible that >1 card will only work connected to CPU2? When you take the 780 out it doesn't work? Or did you have them on slots 3 and 5 before?

 

[videlam]

Hello all,
Juste to let you know that I'm bought some 2nd hand 2670 Matched pair very cheap!
389,99 USD for the pair!!!! (well the shipping for Europe and customs taxes cost me almost the double of the price, but it's still cheap)


http://www.ebay.fr/itm/262075934252?_trksid=p2060353.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK:MEBIDX:IT


I was able to boot with my configuration but I'm struggling with GFX cards...

Z9pe-8D WS
2X E5-2670
8x8GB G.Skill L7
CORSAIR AX1500i
------------------
PNY Quadro 4000
HP Quadro K5000
PNY GTX 660 Ti

None of them worked 1,3,5.
The K5000 is bootable but is not recognisable by the system, it very slow and flickering.
What can I try?

 

[kylec]

I do not know about Quadro cards, but I would think the 660 would work in slot 5.

Also, if you have any AMD cards, maybe one of those will work on CPU1 (slot 1, say) for main display and boot purposes, but then with your Nvidia on CPU2 (slot 5 or 7). Take a look at... this post.

A question for everyone: is there a recommended BIOS version on this board, when using E5-26xx v2? Or just go straight to the latest? I am ordering a BIOS chip for my used Z9PE that I'm getting, in case it has an old BIOS, since I don't have any LGA2011 sandy around.

 

[videlam]

I tried but it's not working!
I need a maximum of Cuda cores for rendering. I'm not fan of AMD card.
I'm thinking to buy a 980ti, if someone can confirm that's actually works! I will buy 3.