Today, I would like to talk about power-hungry CPUs and “phantom” throttling, featuring 10980XE. Intel’s 10980XE can require more than 500+W to reliably run at overclock speeds surpassing ~4.7GHz. In our testing we found an issue that was more difficult to spot with the 7980 or 9980. At that time we could hit what we saw as the maximum safe daily overclock on the 7980XE with our cooling solution, so we didn’t experience issues with power delivery to the CPUs to obtain the 4.4-4.7GHz they were running at.

In overclocking there is a constant issue of heat created by the CPU. Not only does it lower the stability of a processor as the temperature increases it also can cause damage to the CPU and lowers the tolerance to higher voltages which further causes damage. Inversely as temperatures decrease there is generally an increase of stability and a higher tolerance to voltage before true damage is done.

Earlier this week we announced our release of the new generation of Intel® Xeon® E5 CPUs: E5-2600 v2 “Ivy Bridge-EP”. In contrast to our launch earlier in the year of E3 ‘Haswell’ single CPU systems, the E5 family is designed for dual socket servers and workstations.