Turbo clock Speed X10DRG-Q

[Myth]

Hi Guys,

I'm trying to figure out how to turn on the turbo boost on my Xeon E5-2630 v4.

I have a supermicro X10DRG-Q (dual core) processor.

I have been playing around in the advanced power management features in the BIOS under the CPU configuration and it is currently set to turbo mode enabled and energy mode is set to performance.

Does anyone know the settings on how to boost clock speed on this board with my chip? I have a software RAID and I need more clock speed to increase performance.

Please any help?

Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2630 v4 (25M Cache, 2.20 GHz) Product Specifications

 

[alex_stief]

Do you mean increasing frequencies beyond the normal turbo boost levels you already have? That is no longer possible with v4 Xeons, it only worked with v3.

 

[Myth]

I guess I'm just confused as to how the turbo boost works with Intel Xeon chips on these super-micro boards. I read that by default the turbo mode is on.

When I boot into Windows ten it says my base clock speed is 2.2GHz. But the actual speed on the processor, as reported by task manager (performance tab) ranges from 2.3 to 3.0 at varios times during idle. When I run my software raid the clock speed seems to stay around 2.4GHZ.

I've set the BIOS settings to performance mode in the power field.

The reason why I'm confused is that on my home computer I have a Ryzen 7 with a gaming motherboard. And in that mother board I can just overclock the CPU ghz from 3.2 to 3.8 and then it just shows up as 3.8 in Windows as the base clock speed.

I was just trying to get more performance out of my software raid, which uses the CPU speed to r/w to the RAID.

-Myth

 

[alex_stief]

Xeon E5-2630 v4 - Intel - WikiChip
Here we have the turbo bins of your CPU. As you can see, it varies with the amount of busy cores and is in fact 2.4GHz for 8+ cores.
With current Xeon CPUs, real overclocking beyond these levels is no longer possible. The multipliers are locked and Intel prevents overclocking via BCLK.
Performance modes you set in the bios can and usually will be overwritten by the operating systems frequency governor.
Even with performance mode enabled, idle CPU cores will sit at the base frequency which is 2.2GHz for your CPU. Only cores that have something to do will increase their frequency beyond that, up to the limit of the turbo bins above.
As an exception from the rule, heavy AVX code might even result in CPU frequencies lower than the nominal base clock.

To sum things up: unfortunately, there is nothing else you can do except from buying faster CPUs. Or stepping down to v3 CPUs and modding the bios to enable higher turbo bins for more cores. No idea if that would work with your particular motherboard.

 

[Myth]

So If I understand that wikichip article, then running the motherborad to set the CPU to only use 2 cores will run my software raid at 3.1Ghz? That might be faster than 8 cores at 2.4Ghz i'd have to test.

 

[alex_stief]

That's not how it works.
If your application can keep 8 cores busy (which will then run at 2.4GHz) that will be much faster than limiting the core count to 2 running at 3.1GHz.
And if your application only uses 2 cores, you will get the higher boost clock anyway even with all cores activated.

 

[Myth]

So I've been able to understand everything so far with the Xeon chip thanks to your help. I do have another question about AMD.

I also have an AMD EPYC 7401p server on an H11 Supermico board.

Here is a link to the processor

EPYC 7401P - AMD - WikiChip

Basically, I'm showing 1.16ghz in the task manager, performance tab. It says maximum speed 2.0GHZ

But I was under the understanding that it was going to be something like 2.0-3.0Ghz not go below 2.0. Is that because of the hyperthreading
?

Also when I use IO meter to run my benchmarks on my software raid, I notice that if I go past 24 workers (each worker is a core) then my total throughput begins to diminish. That's why I'm thinking hyperthreading maybe lowers the ghz and my performance if I run more than 24 workers on IO meter.

What are your thoughts?

-Myth

 

[alex_stief]

Forget the "maximum" speed displayed in Windows task manager, it usually shows the base clock speed of your CPU instead.
There are a few factors that affect actual CPU frequencies. We already covered turbo boost which increases the frequency above the base frequency.
What you are seeing with your Epyc CPU is most likely a power saving feature. When cores are idle, they can reduce their frequency below the base clock to reduce power consumption. This feature is deactivated when you enable "performance" mode (like you did with your Xeons) and causes the CPU to idle at base frequency instead.
Epyc 7401P should be able to boost up to 2.8GHz with all cores active.
It is not totally unheard of that some workloads can actually run slower with SMT enabled. This must not necessarily be caused by lower CPU frequencies. Instead, lower CPU frequencies can be the result lower CPU utilization caused by some other bottleneck introduced by SMT.
AMD Epyc is quite a complicated CPU architecture, getting decent performance out of it can be challenging.