Intel Xeon x658 - 24 cores and 8 memory channels of speed?

11.11.11 · May 10, 2026, 1:57am

If my experience with W790 shares any relevance whatsoever then:

brandon.c:

I did a tiny bit more experimenting, setting the By-Core ratio limits to what I think are the factory defaults, and saw slightly different behavior (although still not what I was expecting).

Previously they were all set to Auto. With this setting in the screenshot, I saw the a speed of 4.4GHz (instead of the prior 4.3GHz) running the same steps as above. Also, all cores reported a scaling_max_freq of 4900000 instead of only selected cores.

I had a load average <2 during the test, so I would expect the “Turbo Ratio Limit 1” to be in effect (or Limit 2 at the very least). I don’t have experience with Xeon and its turbo boost settings, so it is very likely I am misunderstanding how boost rates are determined and with research it seems like there are many factors that determine it. I do not particularly care about the boost rate hitting the 4.9GHz other than concern that this may be a symptom of a hardware problem.

I wouldn’t suspect a hardware fault (yet) this boost behavior seems very similar to that often observed on W790 2000/3000 - removing default “Auto” values or using a Asus OC profile is necessary on some bios revisions, to actually get the chip to freely scale per-core instead of only boosting CPPC preferenced cores or cores with a VIF curve it considers “sustainable”.

This is a likely culprit, but do not rule out that the default PCIE Redriver profile for W890 may simply be a “manufacturer recommended default” rather than a “optimal setting for this board” as it was commonly on both the W790 ACE, SAGE and WRX80E.

Nefastor ‘s excellent post on this was instrumental to me resolving issues with PCIE device drop out in the last slot on my W790-ACE Help with WRX80E-Sage SE Render server - #6 by Nefastor