This $200 18 Core XEON CPU goes FAST (Part 2)
# Maximizing the Potential of an Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3: A Comprehensive Guide
## Introduction
In today's video, we delve into the world of PC building and tuning, focusing on the Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3, a powerful 18-core processor that can be acquired for just $200. This video is part two of a series, where we take the build from yesterday and push it to its limits, achieving impressive results that exceed expectations.
## The Build Setup
The system built around the E5-2699 v3 includes:
- **Motherboard**: ASUS X99-A
- **CPU**: Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 (18 cores, 36 threads)
- **Memory**: 64GB DDR4 ECC RAM (kindly provided free of charge)
- **Storage**: Samsung 850 Pro SSD
- **GPU**: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti
- **Cooling**: NZXT Kraken X63 240mm AIO cooler
## Unlocking the CPU's Potential: BIOS Modifications
The E5-2699 v3 has a feature known as "Turbo Boost," which allows all cores to run at the same speed. However, this requires exploiting the BIOS settings. The process involves:
1. **Removing Microcode**: Using tools like `mmtool`, remove the 6F2 microcode from the BIOS.
2. **Injecting Turbo Boost DXE File**: Modify the BIOS to enable maximum single-core multiplier across all cores.
Challenges were faced when trying to flash a custom BIOS using USB flashback, as it was rejected by the ASUS bios. However, through research on tech forums, a workaround was found by combining two BIOS files and removing specific microcode sections.
## Undervolting and Overclocking
1. **Undervolting**: The CPU's voltage was reduced to 0.095V (95mV) while maintaining stability.
2. **Overclocking**: Base clock increased by 2.2%, resulting in an all-core speed of 3.46 GHz and a turbo boost speed of 3.06 GHz.
Key BIOS settings adjusted:
- Disabled C3 and C6 states for stability.
- Lowered CL timings to CL12-12-12-31 with a one command rate.
## Component Selection: GPU and RAM
The NVIDIA GTX 1080 Ti was chosen for its balance of performance and value, especially in Adobe Premiere Pro. The system runs on 2133 MHz DDR4 RAM, with no significant improvements seen when attempting to increase speeds beyond this.
## Performance Testing
### Benchmarks
- **Cinebench R23**: Improved from ~13,000 to ~15,500.
- **Fire Strike Extreme**: Showcased a notable increase in physics and GPU scores.
- **Gaming**: Achieved higher FPS across games like CS:GO (from 285 to 352) and Apex Legends.
### Power Consumption
The system's power consumption was tested:
- Idle: ~107W
- Cinebench R23 Load: ~285W
In comparison, the main rig using a 10980XE consumes significantly more power (~580W).
## Efficiency and Value Proposition
The E5-2699 v3 system offers exceptional value for its price, especially when paired with quad-channel memory. It excels in tasks like video editing and gaming, while maintaining low power consumption, making it a practical choice.
## Conclusion
This build demonstrates the potential of older hardware when properly tuned, offering remarkable performance at an affordable cost. While newer CPUs like the Ryzen 5 3600 have their merits, the E5-2699 v3 remains a strong contender for workstation setups and gaming.
## Key Takeaways
- The Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3 can be unlocked to achieve impressive speeds.
- Proper BIOS modifications and undervolting can significantly enhance performance.
- This system is ideal for demanding tasks like video editing and gaming, offering great value.
---
This guide provides a detailed look at the process of building and tuning an Intel Xeon E5-2699 v3-based PC, highlighting its capabilities and efficiency.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwhat is crack-a-lackin papa-loppin and even jerk tech yes citizens because today we have the e5 26 99 v3 the 18 core 16 thread 36 threaded beast that you can get for 200 and in yesterday's video and this is part one we built a pc around this cpu and the whole build ended up coming out better than i expected and the value for money even without tuning this pc was just really impressive but in today's video we're going to take that really impressive step it up a notch and make it just pop a loppin and with the e5 26 99 v3 there's an exploit that exists and in fact this exploit exists on all the v3 haswell zeons where you can essentially get the max single core multiplier which is usually much higher than the all core turbo boost speeds and you can apply that max single core multiplier speed to all the rest of the cores so in the case of the e5 26 99 v3 our theoretical max speed now becomes 3.6 gigahertz on all 18 cores 36 threads but this first step is certainly not an easy process and actually took me over half a day to get around so let's take a look at what happened and if you guys come into the same problem what you can do to get around it any time activate windows closely response snakes has you covered for sales 14 goals using coupon code tyc you can get activated windows 11.2 welcome back to tech yes city and in the past i've done an easy method on how to get that max turbo boost speed on all cores by basically injecting an efi driver and changing one setting in your bios and this then allowed you to get the max core boost on all those cores and it was relatively easy however the problem with this method was if you reinstalled windows or something happened in the core settings it could reset the boost clocks and you'd have to do this whole process again in today's video i actually went down a different route where you actually exploit the cpu from the bios itself and so it doesn't matter what you install after that you're always going to get that max turbo boost whether it's on a linux install windows 10 or even windows 11 this will work beautifully or should i stop there and say it can work beautifully what we had in today's video was a frustrating process where i initially started out following a guide by another youtuber called my coats and i'll link his video up here as it's very informative very straight to the point and there was a three-step plan that they had which i only needed to follow two since my zeus bios had the last features in the bios itself that i could just change those settings but basically i went in and got the bios and made a backup copy of it and then i removed the 6f2 micro code with mm tool after that i injected the turbo boost dxe file with the uefi tool however i came into problems where the azus bios itself has right protection in that zeus doesn't want anyone installing custom biases outside their signed bios however there is a way to work around this and that is using a usb flashback feature on some of the azus motherboards i'm lucky that the x99-a has this feature however i tried doing this with my bios that i made and it just didn't work the bios flashback feature just simply wouldn't accept this modded bios so i then went to trusty forums and dug deep and i kept on digging and i eventually found this amazing person this person had essentially figured out how to get around this extra step that a zeus had by blocking it and it had to do with the removal of the micro code via mm tool where essentially they removed the micro code and then basically patched two biases together which i paused and i scratched my head and i wondered some people are just brilliant in things that they figure out especially when it comes to budget and getting the most out of your tech and so this lovely person on the forum they offered the bios to download and then i downloaded their bios and then used the bios flashback feature and i was now ready to rumble this was now working i was unlocking the system and we were now ready to tune the zeon but this process is usually much easier i'll put some links in the description below and also with the haswell v3 xeons if you're going to buy one of these and you want to unlock the turbo boost multiplier make sure you do not and i repeat this do not get an early engineering sample and you get a either late quality sample or retail sample with stepping two or greater these are the xeons that will work with this exploit now getting on into the tuning stage the azus x99a bios allowed us to do quite a bit and so for the e5 26 99 v3 it has a tdp limit of 145 watts but it has a boost setting of 165 watts and so what we have to do is work with that 165 watt limit and so here's where the fun starts in that on the v3 haswell xeons you'll actually want to undervolt them as far as possible so essentially until it becomes unstable keep dropping the voltage in the bios and so what i found was as i was dropping the voltage the speeds were going up and that's because we were hitting with those 18 cores 36 threads that 165 watt limit at all times and so this enabled us in the end to get the voltage down to 0.095 or 95 millivolts under the default setting and so after finding the 95 millivolt under volt setting i then went through and changed various other settings like disabling spread spectrum as well as upping the voltage limits in the bios even though that didn't really do anything in hindsight but two other important things that i did do within the bios was i did disable the c states the c3 and c6 states which are reported to make the system unstable if you leave them on and then another thing i did was up the base clock and the ram speeds now for the base clock my computer ended up working with 102.2 or in other words the whole system got overclocked 2.2 percent and so this enabled me in games to reach a maximum all core 18 core speed of 3.46 gigahertz as well as being in cinebench r23 i managed to get 3.06 gigahertz on all those threads and so this enabled us to get a cinebench r23 score of now 15 500 versus yesterday's score of a little over 13 000 so we did get a sizeable boost in that score but one thing to keep in mind is that the avx-2 instruction sets will quickly reach that 165 watt limit on this cpu very quickly though when i was tuning the dram i noticed that we couldn't up the speeds at all otherwise that pretty much crashed the system so i was left with tuning the 2133 megahertz with the cl timings as best as i could and here is where i ended up with that 2.2 percent overclock from the base clock but also managed to drop down the cl timings to cl 12 12 12 and then 31 and then one command rate and this did give us a little boost but this is where i was running the games and testing the games with the whole system tuned and i found we got some sizeable increases in some of the games csgo getting an uplift from yesterday's 285 fps all the way to 352 then we had yesterday's apex legends going from the 190 and the one percent and 0.1 percent lows were also lifted just like they were lifted in cs go then dota 2 also scored a boost as well but it was interesting to note that f1 2020 in dx12 did not really fare any better we only got a slight boost in fps and this has to do with the fact that the 1080 ti was being maxed out in this game even with yesterday's benchmarks versus today and that slight boost would have come from the slight overclock from the base clock of 2.2 percent so the numbers are looking really good and if you guys want me to compare this cpu to the likes of say the new ryzen cpus as well as say something like a 10 900k then i can make that happen in a separate video but one thing that you guys were requesting from yesterday's video was the power consumption figures so here we had in idle this system was juicing 107 watts then when it came to cinebench r23 it went up to 285 watts from the wall and all these scores are from the wall when i compare that to the 25 000 uh cinebench r23 score on my main rig here the 10980xe this was going up to 580 watts from the wall so and i do laugh during this video because it's a massive difference in power consumption where it does go to show that the diminishing returns on this system really has hit a brick wall and that now we're just juicing more power for not a whole lot more extra and this came back with the adobe premiere pro results where we tested the 15 minute use parts hunt render and we came in with slightly better scores than yesterday and i think that's because the gpu was starting to do most the brunt when it came to this final render output so something that i learned with adobe premiere pro is that it's starting to get ever more reliant on your gpu as opposed to your cpu and i guess this is a good and bad thing since the total render times are being reduced but gpu prices are still remaining very high which is why i use the 1080 ti but we will talk about the value proposition after the rest of these results where the idle consumption on the 10 980 xe system was 138 watts but i will admit that i do have a lot more rgb running on this system even though when i was testing the power consumption i did turn off this little corsair thing and this top light right here that you see just to get a more fair comparison but it goes to show that even the 2014 haswell stuff is very relevant even by today's standards but the final test i wanted to do was the fire strike extreme because that will tell me in general how much my system has improved from yesterday as opposed to today and here is where we saw a solid increase in the physics scores and then also on the gpu score since i was tuning i did get some better points there too however comparing the power consumption scores yet again on the main rig versus the haswell workstation i decided to put two different sets of results in today's graph and the first set is the graphics card being tuned without under vaulting in mind and then the second set is with the graphics card being under vaulted and you can see with the rtx 3080 system without tuning this thing was going over 700 watts and that's just absolutely massive in terms of power consumption for a desktop system as opposed to the haswell system we're able to drop that to as low as 373 watts that's both the gpu and the cpu being juiced so now after completing this system and going through and tuning it i was just really surprised by how much value you can extract out of these 18 cores and especially at 200 bucks this just makes a complete no-brainer and i know some people who are pinging me on twitter talking about the ryzen 5 3600 and the whole point there is is that this is more geared towards the 18 core is more geared towards a workstation setup where you can get inexpensive ddr4 memory and utilize quad channel whether it's registered ecc or non-registered i managed to get the 64 gigabyte kit for free because the person who gave it to me just gave it to me because they couldn't be bothered selling it to retail so if you are in a position where you can get something like a 64 gigabyte kit of ddr4 ecc memory for cheap and you can come into a good x99 motherboard especially a good used one then you can really get so much out of something like the 18 core 2699 v3 though the final thing i managed to get working on this build was the side panel in that yesterday's build when i finished it i didn't actually manage to get that side panel on due to mounting the 120mm radiator at the rear which then blocked me from putting my 20 centimeter side panel fan on however i then relocated it after drilling some holes at the top of the build to the top and i was able to then mount the 20 centimeter fan on the side which made a slight difference i was actually surprised that it didn't make as much as a difference as it did in that we went on our gpu when we're testing the temperatures we went from 71 degrees with the side panel off down to 70 degrees with the side panel on but at least now the build is complete and also for those asking about the 120 mil radiator and should i put a 240 mil or even a 360 or something bigger on there since we are limited to 165 watts on this 2699 v3 it's pretty much pointless to go with anything bigger a 120mm rad and especially a decent fan on it will do an absolutely fine job of cooling down 165 watts and with that aside that is the tuned xeon 3.46 gigahertz all cores in games and 3.06 gigahertz with avx-2 instruction sets hammering through it but one thing to keep in mind if you want to get these cheap haswell xeons i would definitely utilize the quad channel memory but also less is more when it comes to cpus and overclocking in that you've got that 165 watt hard limit and you can reach it by giving the less voltages to the cores which will then enable them to get higher speeds and burn through the same amount of power but at higher speeds anyhow if you guys have stayed this far and you're enjoying that tech yes content and you know what to do hit that like button and also let us know in the comments section below what do you think of this tune system i just think the value for money it's presenting is absolutely phenomenal and this pc in its current state is perfectly geared up towards editing even heavy 4k video editing and of course gaming with the 1080 ti is a no brainer now we've got the question of the day which relates to this and this comes from fernando martin and they asked brian what is the best gpu for the e5 26 99 v3 for gaming now when it comes to gaming if you're gaming at 4k you could couple this absolutely fine with even something like an rtx 3080 but when you go down to 1080p you'd probably want to just pair it with a 1080 ti like we've done here today i think the 1080 ti still represents decent value for money even in this crazy crypto market because the miners aren't targeting 1080 ti's like they're targeting those new cards but with that 11 gigabytes of vram buffer it does really well in programs like adobe premiere pro but it's still also a very good gaming card at least in its raw performance so the 1080 ti would be my pick to go with the 26 99 v3 hope that answers that question if you stayed around this far and you're enjoying that tech yes content you'll see the moment it drops be sure to hit that sub button ring that bell and i'll catch you in the next one peace out now youwhat is crack-a-lackin papa-loppin and even jerk tech yes citizens because today we have the e5 26 99 v3 the 18 core 16 thread 36 threaded beast that you can get for 200 and in yesterday's video and this is part one we built a pc around this cpu and the whole build ended up coming out better than i expected and the value for money even without tuning this pc was just really impressive but in today's video we're going to take that really impressive step it up a notch and make it just pop a loppin and with the e5 26 99 v3 there's an exploit that exists and in fact this exploit exists on all the v3 haswell zeons where you can essentially get the max single core multiplier which is usually much higher than the all core turbo boost speeds and you can apply that max single core multiplier speed to all the rest of the cores so in the case of the e5 26 99 v3 our theoretical max speed now becomes 3.6 gigahertz on all 18 cores 36 threads but this first step is certainly not an easy process and actually took me over half a day to get around so let's take a look at what happened and if you guys come into the same problem what you can do to get around it any time activate windows closely response snakes has you covered for sales 14 goals using coupon code tyc you can get activated windows 11.2 welcome back to tech yes city and in the past i've done an easy method on how to get that max turbo boost speed on all cores by basically injecting an efi driver and changing one setting in your bios and this then allowed you to get the max core boost on all those cores and it was relatively easy however the problem with this method was if you reinstalled windows or something happened in the core settings it could reset the boost clocks and you'd have to do this whole process again in today's video i actually went down a different route where you actually exploit the cpu from the bios itself and so it doesn't matter what you install after that you're always going to get that max turbo boost whether it's on a linux install windows 10 or even windows 11 this will work beautifully or should i stop there and say it can work beautifully what we had in today's video was a frustrating process where i initially started out following a guide by another youtuber called my coats and i'll link his video up here as it's very informative very straight to the point and there was a three-step plan that they had which i only needed to follow two since my zeus bios had the last features in the bios itself that i could just change those settings but basically i went in and got the bios and made a backup copy of it and then i removed the 6f2 micro code with mm tool after that i injected the turbo boost dxe file with the uefi tool however i came into problems where the azus bios itself has right protection in that zeus doesn't want anyone installing custom biases outside their signed bios however there is a way to work around this and that is using a usb flashback feature on some of the azus motherboards i'm lucky that the x99-a has this feature however i tried doing this with my bios that i made and it just didn't work the bios flashback feature just simply wouldn't accept this modded bios so i then went to trusty forums and dug deep and i kept on digging and i eventually found this amazing person this person had essentially figured out how to get around this extra step that a zeus had by blocking it and it had to do with the removal of the micro code via mm tool where essentially they removed the micro code and then basically patched two biases together which i paused and i scratched my head and i wondered some people are just brilliant in things that they figure out especially when it comes to budget and getting the most out of your tech and so this lovely person on the forum they offered the bios to download and then i downloaded their bios and then used the bios flashback feature and i was now ready to rumble this was now working i was unlocking the system and we were now ready to tune the zeon but this process is usually much easier i'll put some links in the description below and also with the haswell v3 xeons if you're going to buy one of these and you want to unlock the turbo boost multiplier make sure you do not and i repeat this do not get an early engineering sample and you get a either late quality sample or retail sample with stepping two or greater these are the xeons that will work with this exploit now getting on into the tuning stage the azus x99a bios allowed us to do quite a bit and so for the e5 26 99 v3 it has a tdp limit of 145 watts but it has a boost setting of 165 watts and so what we have to do is work with that 165 watt limit and so here's where the fun starts in that on the v3 haswell xeons you'll actually want to undervolt them as far as possible so essentially until it becomes unstable keep dropping the voltage in the bios and so what i found was as i was dropping the voltage the speeds were going up and that's because we were hitting with those 18 cores 36 threads that 165 watt limit at all times and so this enabled us in the end to get the voltage down to 0.095 or 95 millivolts under the default setting and so after finding the 95 millivolt under volt setting i then went through and changed various other settings like disabling spread spectrum as well as upping the voltage limits in the bios even though that didn't really do anything in hindsight but two other important things that i did do within the bios was i did disable the c states the c3 and c6 states which are reported to make the system unstable if you leave them on and then another thing i did was up the base clock and the ram speeds now for the base clock my computer ended up working with 102.2 or in other words the whole system got overclocked 2.2 percent and so this enabled me in games to reach a maximum all core 18 core speed of 3.46 gigahertz as well as being in cinebench r23 i managed to get 3.06 gigahertz on all those threads and so this enabled us to get a cinebench r23 score of now 15 500 versus yesterday's score of a little over 13 000 so we did get a sizeable boost in that score but one thing to keep in mind is that the avx-2 instruction sets will quickly reach that 165 watt limit on this cpu very quickly though when i was tuning the dram i noticed that we couldn't up the speeds at all otherwise that pretty much crashed the system so i was left with tuning the 2133 megahertz with the cl timings as best as i could and here is where i ended up with that 2.2 percent overclock from the base clock but also managed to drop down the cl timings to cl 12 12 12 and then 31 and then one command rate and this did give us a little boost but this is where i was running the games and testing the games with the whole system tuned and i found we got some sizeable increases in some of the games csgo getting an uplift from yesterday's 285 fps all the way to 352 then we had yesterday's apex legends going from the 190 and the one percent and 0.1 percent lows were also lifted just like they were lifted in cs go then dota 2 also scored a boost as well but it was interesting to note that f1 2020 in dx12 did not really fare any better we only got a slight boost in fps and this has to do with the fact that the 1080 ti was being maxed out in this game even with yesterday's benchmarks versus today and that slight boost would have come from the slight overclock from the base clock of 2.2 percent so the numbers are looking really good and if you guys want me to compare this cpu to the likes of say the new ryzen cpus as well as say something like a 10 900k then i can make that happen in a separate video but one thing that you guys were requesting from yesterday's video was the power consumption figures so here we had in idle this system was juicing 107 watts then when it came to cinebench r23 it went up to 285 watts from the wall and all these scores are from the wall when i compare that to the 25 000 uh cinebench r23 score on my main rig here the 10980xe this was going up to 580 watts from the wall so and i do laugh during this video because it's a massive difference in power consumption where it does go to show that the diminishing returns on this system really has hit a brick wall and that now we're just juicing more power for not a whole lot more extra and this came back with the adobe premiere pro results where we tested the 15 minute use parts hunt render and we came in with slightly better scores than yesterday and i think that's because the gpu was starting to do most the brunt when it came to this final render output so something that i learned with adobe premiere pro is that it's starting to get ever more reliant on your gpu as opposed to your cpu and i guess this is a good and bad thing since the total render times are being reduced but gpu prices are still remaining very high which is why i use the 1080 ti but we will talk about the value proposition after the rest of these results where the idle consumption on the 10 980 xe system was 138 watts but i will admit that i do have a lot more rgb running on this system even though when i was testing the power consumption i did turn off this little corsair thing and this top light right here that you see just to get a more fair comparison but it goes to show that even the 2014 haswell stuff is very relevant even by today's standards but the final test i wanted to do was the fire strike extreme because that will tell me in general how much my system has improved from yesterday as opposed to today and here is where we saw a solid increase in the physics scores and then also on the gpu score since i was tuning i did get some better points there too however comparing the power consumption scores yet again on the main rig versus the haswell workstation i decided to put two different sets of results in today's graph and the first set is the graphics card being tuned without under vaulting in mind and then the second set is with the graphics card being under vaulted and you can see with the rtx 3080 system without tuning this thing was going over 700 watts and that's just absolutely massive in terms of power consumption for a desktop system as opposed to the haswell system we're able to drop that to as low as 373 watts that's both the gpu and the cpu being juiced so now after completing this system and going through and tuning it i was just really surprised by how much value you can extract out of these 18 cores and especially at 200 bucks this just makes a complete no-brainer and i know some people who are pinging me on twitter talking about the ryzen 5 3600 and the whole point there is is that this is more geared towards the 18 core is more geared towards a workstation setup where you can get inexpensive ddr4 memory and utilize quad channel whether it's registered ecc or non-registered i managed to get the 64 gigabyte kit for free because the person who gave it to me just gave it to me because they couldn't be bothered selling it to retail so if you are in a position where you can get something like a 64 gigabyte kit of ddr4 ecc memory for cheap and you can come into a good x99 motherboard especially a good used one then you can really get so much out of something like the 18 core 2699 v3 though the final thing i managed to get working on this build was the side panel in that yesterday's build when i finished it i didn't actually manage to get that side panel on due to mounting the 120mm radiator at the rear which then blocked me from putting my 20 centimeter side panel fan on however i then relocated it after drilling some holes at the top of the build to the top and i was able to then mount the 20 centimeter fan on the side which made a slight difference i was actually surprised that it didn't make as much as a difference as it did in that we went on our gpu when we're testing the temperatures we went from 71 degrees with the side panel off down to 70 degrees with the side panel on but at least now the build is complete and also for those asking about the 120 mil radiator and should i put a 240 mil or even a 360 or something bigger on there since we are limited to 165 watts on this 2699 v3 it's pretty much pointless to go with anything bigger a 120mm rad and especially a decent fan on it will do an absolutely fine job of cooling down 165 watts and with that aside that is the tuned xeon 3.46 gigahertz all cores in games and 3.06 gigahertz with avx-2 instruction sets hammering through it but one thing to keep in mind if you want to get these cheap haswell xeons i would definitely utilize the quad channel memory but also less is more when it comes to cpus and overclocking in that you've got that 165 watt hard limit and you can reach it by giving the less voltages to the cores which will then enable them to get higher speeds and burn through the same amount of power but at higher speeds anyhow if you guys have stayed this far and you're enjoying that tech yes content and you know what to do hit that like button and also let us know in the comments section below what do you think of this tune system i just think the value for money it's presenting is absolutely phenomenal and this pc in its current state is perfectly geared up towards editing even heavy 4k video editing and of course gaming with the 1080 ti is a no brainer now we've got the question of the day which relates to this and this comes from fernando martin and they asked brian what is the best gpu for the e5 26 99 v3 for gaming now when it comes to gaming if you're gaming at 4k you could couple this absolutely fine with even something like an rtx 3080 but when you go down to 1080p you'd probably want to just pair it with a 1080 ti like we've done here today i think the 1080 ti still represents decent value for money even in this crazy crypto market because the miners aren't targeting 1080 ti's like they're targeting those new cards but with that 11 gigabytes of vram buffer it does really well in programs like adobe premiere pro but it's still also a very good gaming card at least in its raw performance so the 1080 ti would be my pick to go with the 26 99 v3 hope that answers that question if you stayed around this far and you're enjoying that tech yes content you'll see the moment it drops be sure to hit that sub button ring that bell and i'll catch you in the next one peace out now you\n"