Since 2009 I have an Intel Socket 1366 system running. So over the years I overclocked the built in Core i7-920 to (nearly) 3.5 GHz.

Everything as usual

But this week I got the Xeon X5650 on ebay for 65€. First I did a few benchmarks (see below) with the Core i7, at stock clock rate and 3.5 GHz. After I switched the cpus, I booted the Xeon with its stock speed. Then with the original Core i7 bios settings. It worked perfectly fine with a bclk frequency of 166 MHz. Again I did the same benchmarks at a clock rate of 3.65 GHz.

Here are the Benchmarks, details below:

You can see clearly, that the hardware AES instruction set boosts up the encryption and decrypting speed for files and hard drives.

In comparison with a current Intel quadcore cpu (mid 2013) and Hexacore from AMD (2010), the X5650 is clearly faster if all cores are used. In single-tasking it is clearly slower compared to the 4770K.

Power consumption of the whole system stays nearly the same, due to the more advanced 32 nm producing process of the Xeon cpu.

Used versions:
Cinebench 15.0
Truecrypt 7.1a 1 GB Mean AES
SiSoft Sandra Lite 2015 v21.27

Weird things happen

After rebooting I wanted to try a higher clock rate. Small steps towards the 4 GHz barrier. But then, when using any blck frequency over 150 MHz, it didn’t even POST. If this frequency was below 150 MHz it still booted perfectly. After some googling it turned out that my mainboard (Gigabyte EX58-UD4P, F13) has some problems with this processor (family?). So currently I’m using my computer with just 3.3 GHz.

If anyone has a hint for me, I would be very thankful.
And as always, feel free to comment, if you liked this post or have questions.