recently we had a look at how you could piece together a pretty darn powerful
eight core gaming rig on the cheap with some older server Hardware namely a pair
of quad core Intel xeons and some server grade ECC ddr2 RAM and a little bit of
creative modding but some of the fans made it pretty compelling that there was
an argument for hey instead of drilling a block of wood to use as a motherboard
Mount and loing off a part of a shiny gtx980 why not just use an 8 AMD desktop
CPU instead indeed why not stay tuned to
find out how our server style Frankenstein rig held up against an AMD
fx8350 freshbooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get
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the twin Zeon processors the ECC RAM and the Server Motherboard only set us back
around $150 total AMD's most popular 8 core CPU
the fx8350 is currently going for
170 by itself on new EG and not all that
much cheaper on the used Market with cheaper am3 plus motherboards going for
around 50 bucks on the same site and 16 GB of DDR3 memory going for about 60 all
of this retaining much of its value on the used Market you're looking at nearly
double the cost for the desktop AMD platform but of course you do get quite
a bit extra functionality for this added cost even lower-end currently available
motherboards support now standard features like USB 3.0 multiple PCI
Express slots and 6 gbit per second SATA
connections by contrast our server board only has a measly pair of USB 2.0 ports
I mean even the freaking Raspberry Pi has more than that one PCIe slot making
any further expansion impossible once you stick in a graphics card and only
support sat of revision 2 speeds we also
needed to separate EPS power connectors with the server board we used so you may
need to find a power supply that has a pair of these as well and obviously you
get the luxury of being able to use your choice of modern CPU Cooler in a real
actual ATX case unless you like that sort of cyberpunk shady ghetto style
piece of tech that was just thrown together kind of look which honestly I I
must admit I kind of have a soft spot for so I would understand but all of
that aside performance is what matters most and we put both of our eight core
setups through a full battery of comparison tests if you're curious about
the exact parts we use for these test benches you can see them on the screen
right now first up we looked at transfer speeds on our Samsung 850 Pro SSD using
the Blackmagic disc speed tests on our AMD bench we got a healthy 513 megabyte
pers second read speed and a 465 mbes
per second right about what we'd expect from a modern SATA 3 Drive however our
server board was a completely different story as on it we mustered only
134 and 128 megabytes per second on read and WR
respectively even though the board is supposed to support say to two speeds of
up to 300 megabytes per second through its connectors although there may be a
way to make this work more quickly we couldn't find anything in the bio that
would allow us to increase the speed there seems to be one Post online where
one dude said that he modified it to work but doesn't actually say how so we
might be able to chalk this up to another one of those server Parts can be
screwy and hard to configure moments that said if you do want to try out the
Server Motherboard as a gaming rig concept you might want to take the time
to locate a board that you know will support SATA 3 speeds as the system was
noticeably a little slower in common tasks like browsing through Windows
Explorer moving on to synthetic benchmarks we saw the AMD desktop setup
perform 40 to 60% faster in a Seuss real
bench Suite which includes image editing video rendering and multitasking
elements the fx8350 based system also
beat on our dual zon setup by about 18%
in the cinebench CPU test and also won the open Gil test which renders a scene
of a car chase by nearly 40 FPS but
would this translate to huge gains in real world gaming situations the two
systems didn't show too much of a difference in our Far Cry 3 Far Cry 4
sorry and Crisis 3 benchmarks with our AMD desktop bench only gaining between 1
and 3 frames per second at 4K however
when we switch to City's skylines a much more CPU bound title the difference was
massive our fx8350 system nearly doubled
the performance of our dual xon setup so with these results does it still make
sense to go for the cheaper server setup if you can get your hands on them it
might if all you're doing with your PC is gaming and you want to keep your
platform costs as low as possible and allocate more of your budget to
something like say a nice graphics card of course that depends on what games
you're going to be playing so don't forget that too as CPU bound titles will
see a significant performance hit on the old server Hardware Although our fx8350
platform costs about twice the price we got roughly double the performance in
City skylines offsetting the additional cash you'd have to Fork out add in a
significantly faster performance and other CPU intensive tasks and even
general computing as well as many more connectivity options and a more
traditional platform with desktop Class 8 core processor and it looks well worth
the additional cost especially if you won't have to spend a ton of time
configuring a server board which isn't exactly designed to be user friendly all
the time but let's be real for a moment if the tinkerer in you really wants to
try out this kind of a cost cutting challenge that's awesome go for it or if
an 8350 just isn't in your budget it's certainly possible to have a satisfying
gaming experience on some old Zeon for a really really good price just remember
that it might take a little bit more patience upes has a wide variety of
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