Anyone else with xeon 5355 and a supermicro x7dwa-n

[stevesideas]

If anyone at least has a dual xeon 5355 system can I please post a test scene to see what times you are getting in comparison to me. I really need to know if my cpus/motherboard are slow...I need to get them rma'ed asap if they are.

Cheers

[RErender]

It's safe to say that something is wrong, there is no way it should be 4x slower that the single quad.

I can't remember if it has been asked but what speed is your memory running at? Sometimes if set to auto it can get it wrong, you might try setting it manually.

My next guess is that they are getting hot and stepping down, maybe try reseating the fans? Did you apply thermal grease or is it using a pre applied pad? Not sure about your MB specifically but you might try turning off the speed step stuff.

[DaForce]

Strange your superpi results are exactly as they should be. Means atleast the Floating point calculations are spot on with your CPU's.

Maybe its something weird with vray, try this benchmark scene.
http://rapidshare.com/files/69590545...nchmark_01.rar

Also try a plain bruteforce render DMC for both 1st and 2nd bounce. That rules out any funnyness with LC passes or IR map. Do it on a simple scene tho just to be sure.

I would also run a few benchmark programs outside of vray. So see if its the cpus in general or something specific to 3dsmax/vray

You could try 3dmark and just run the cpu tests.
Or some video encoding tests perhaps.

[stevesideas]

Just downloading now. Will try that test in a sec.

Just to answer the questions.

My memory speed is 667 mhz. I dont think I can set the speed for the memory in the bios on the supermicro board I have. I can only change the voltage.

Also, i have re-seated the cpus already. Thermal (silver) grease was applied. The heatsinks (even under full load) dont really get hot at all. I have passive heat sinks with fans strapped to them.

SuperPI only tests single cores at a time. The results are the same for both systems.

Dont think its possible to turn off stepping on this motherboard either.

The memory was getting hot, but I put a fan over them and now they are keeping pretty cool to touch.

Ok. Here are some benchmark results from siSoft sandra. Cpu tests.

AS you can see all tests show the xeons about 2x faster.



And here are the results from the benchmark for vray:

[stevesideas]

And this is a simple scene with just brute force. Rendered out at 1500x1000 on both systems. (quad a lot quicker)

By the way, all the time these tests were running (under full load), the heatsinks remained pretty cool and the temps on the superdoctor app (by supermicro) said the cpus were around 40 - 48C.

[RErender]

Hmmm, odd, the Xeon render in the last test has a lot less noise than the Quad Core.

One thing I don't think has been mentioned is that the LC passes should be set to 8 for the Xeons to get full speed out of the LC.

[stevesideas]

Yes, i made sure it was set to 8.

Do you think if my bios had auto shut down the pc, as it did (because the heatsinks were not fitted correctly and it was getting too hot), it could have damaged the cpus ? Im kind of thinking no, cause the benchmark results are still showing 2x..apart from the 3dsmax stuff.

I find the benchmark results compared to the 3dsmax render times very strange.

Xeon 5355's are suitable for max rendering ? Not just for networking stuff..

[DaForce]

Weird. So everything except max/vray is looking ok.
cpus are not designed for any specific service. Your cpu's are fine for rendering.

As RErender said the 2 bruteforce renders are significantly different. But even still the xeon should have been closer.

Perhaps try a scanline scene. Maybe one of the sample scenes that comes with max. THere must be something causing this. Maybe its just vray.

[stevesideas]

The architectural test I did further back in the thread was scanline only:

http://www.tech-report.net/articles.x/11443/6

My quad core rendered in 226 seconds.

My dual xeons rendered the scene in 16minutes 41 seconds.

[DaForce]

oooh right.

mmm maybe its max?

I would be suprised if it were the cpu's... i really would

[thumpa]

Are you sure you have Multi-Threading turned on the the 3ds Max Preferences under the Rendering tab?

[Jacob Hutson]

not much help

but that test.max file renders in 80 seconds on my dual quadcore 3.2ghz
supermicro system xp64, max2008 vray 1.5sp1
id say somethings definitely whack

reseat the ram, try using 4gb ram instead of 8
maybe reseat cpus swap em around maybe?

make sure youa re using 1.30 of the drivers
ftp://ftp.supermicro.com/CDR-X7_1.30...el_X7_platform

this new quadcore system ran 15900 in 3dmark vs 12500 for the 3.0g dual cores

[stevesideas]

Jacob: thanks for letting me know about the times. The cpu's, motherboard and ram have all been rma'ed for testing. Not sure what will happen there. I hope they do find something.

Out of curiosity, which motherboad have you got ? The same one ?

I did install those drivers...well, just the chipset ones....although, not a lot seemed to happen, it just installed the inf files and then didnt do anything. Even after I rebooted, not a lot happened, no new hardware found or anything.

Thumpa: The multithreading was enabled in the render dialogue

[Jacob Hutson]

no the qaud is different

but the dual systems are fast as well
definitely quicker than the quad coreduos we have in the renderfarm

[stevesideas]

Jacob...which Supermicro motherboard have you got for your Xeons ?