we've got no shortage of videos on our channel about building expensive gaming
machines but what about those of you who would rather spend your money on
lttstore.com well for you guys we've got value
machines and you can get a lot of gaming bang for your buck these days
this right here is a test bench made up of the components from our 900 value
gaming build guide a little while ago it's an 8 core 3800 x processor from AMD
a 2060 super from NVIDIA and this b450
board from MSI but
what if i told you that i could get twice
as many cores for my money and all i
would have to do is scour aliexpress and
ebay for refurbished xeon cpus and ecc
memory and this the gian tech jinxa x79 dual socket
bizarre chinese motherboard that definitely they're gonna be around to
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now just because we've got twice as many cores doesn't mean we're going to necessarily have twice as much
performance so we're going to run some benchmarks on our ryzen system here to
give us a point of reference for how much value we're actually getting
because what's interesting about the components that i chose is that once you
factor in the CPU motherboard and memory
they are very nearly the same price
so let's talk through the xeons we chose these are Intel's e5 2667 v2s and they
are a little bit on the older side so these are ivy bridge and they're lga
2011 and what that means is that
you're not going to have the same kinds of aggressive boost clocks that you
would find on modern processors even server ones so their base is about 3.3
gigahertz and their boost is about 4 gigahertz but
because Intel has been so stagnant when it comes to performance per clock
improvements over the last four or five years we are expecting this
to perform reasonably similarly to a modern CPU running at the same clock
speed so when you factor in that we can have two of these for the price of a
single ryzen 3800 it starts to look maybe pretty
compelling our RAM is not that interesting these are just some ddr3
1600 ecc server memory modules these are readily available on ebay but our
motherboard is very interesting so you can find this
on newegg for about 300 or if you're a lot smarter than that you
can find it on aliexpress for about a hundred and thirty dollars and like that
other bizarro chinese motherboard that we checked out a little while ago it
appears as though jingxia is actually
manufacturing these out of refurbished parts so it seems like the chipsets that
they're using in them because it can't be x79 x79 was a single
CPU-only chipset so it appears the chipsets are c-series ones that were
pulled off of either dead or discarded
server boards and then plunked onto
this new design that they've done and it's a pretty interesting one so we've
got dual pci express 16x slots here m.2
which was not actually that common on older boards in the x79 era a couple
more pci express 1x slots are two 2011
slots and then up to eight memory slots
giving us hopefully the full quad channel memory experience per CPU even
though these are color coded as though they would be a dual channel for
whatever reason wow i gotta say the i o on this thing is not impressive
ps2 okay i mean it never hurts to have that but only two usb 3 ports dual
gigabit Ethernet and that super basic three port 5.1 audio
okay now something to note is that i've seen
a fair number of people speculating online that oh because this motherboard
runs an x79 chipset maybe you could put like extreme editions or core i7s in it
but no the x79 chipset is just outright
false advertising and if you want to run two cpus in this thing you will
absolutely need to get xeons they're the only ones that have the extra qpi link
enabled that allows the two cpus to communicate with each other and that is
exactly one of the performance issues that i'm expecting to run into here
because in a perfect world in a workload that supports it
we're going to be able to leverage 16 cores
against a mere eight course for our AMD system but the problem with that is that
many workloads even heavily multi-threaded ones are not what's
called pneuma aware so that is to say
that they are not able to leverage memory that is directly connected to
this CPU for a workload that's running on this one in very very simplistic
terms so what that means is that you will basically in your worst case
scenario only be able to use one of your cpus so that would be eight cores
against eight cores and these are much much weaker cores
all right my render finished in 12 minutes 28 seconds and i got sick so i'm
gonna sound like this for the rest of the video let's go ahead and run a couple of games then we can compare
against our ebay machine i mean that's the good news is i can
talk like this in shadow of the tomb raider here
i've gone with what i think are reasonable graphic settings for a
machine of this budget so we're running at 1440p all high motion blur off and
we're not indulging in msaa and you can see that we're right in
the range of what i would expect for a solid gaming experience 80 90 100 FPS
world builder type rts games tend to be quite CPU bound so i've fired up a i'd
say a mid-level scenario in nano 1800 looking
at about 75 FPS again this is medium settings this time with a little bit of
anti-aliasing because this game tends to kind of have a lot of jaggies in it oh
okay well whatever that's fine i got my numbers i'm using a pair of nhu 12s's
for cooling but it's worth noting that any lga 2066 or 2011 compatible cooler
will work on these cpus so if you're trying to keep your pricing
close between the platforms you might want to get something a little bit more
value conscious but these are really quick to set up on a test bench and
stuff so i really like using them you know i've always felt like rocking
two cpus is kind of like having like a gigantic hood scoop on your car
like it it could be an indicator that there's lots of performance under the
hood or it could be mostly for show and
i guess we're about to find out which one we're dealing with today
installing this on the bench is actually an excellent reminder of some of the
things other than improved performance that newer hardware yields so you can
see that we actually need two 8-pin CPU power connectors and the motherboard is
physically quite a lot larger than our 3800x
platform so yeah they might cost the same but this
one's gonna cost more to run and it's gonna take up more space
i don't know maybe it's so much faster it doesn't matter though let's find
out just play pour it in and
good luck everybody oh wow
didn't even get a chance to go in the bio so we're kicking right to Windows boys and girls well i can't believe how
painless this was we booted right up 3.3
gigahertz base 16 cores 32 threads
64 gigs around everything is just working so let's go ahead and uh what
did we start with blender let's start with blender
now what i want to see here is how many of our cores we end up using
because i've seen blender struggle across multiple pneuma nodes
but this is not that day or whatever he says
we are getting 100 utilization an unfortunate thing though is we are
running merely at base clock remember these older cpus didn't really have all
core boost the base clock was the clock speed it ran at when you were pushing
every single core i think this thing is gonna slay
that AMD platform oh wow that is not the margin of victory
that i expected 11 46 i mean it's faster
but given that we've got double the core count and we were running at 100 across
all of our cores running quad channel memory even though it's ddr3
i was expecting more than a 42 second
margin of victory here oh that does not bode well we're getting
100 utilization in cinebench as well but it's clear to me that these cores are
not as fast as our AMD ones i was not
expecting this our gaming results are actually looking
really similar so far what the heck
like this is fine i am kind of impressed actually i haven't
seen the final score like i don't know what our 95 percentiles are or anything like that
but so far this looks shockingly viable
all right let's have a look here okay so shockingly our average FPS is
only like six percent behind that is not what i was expecting after how much
slower these cores are but if you check the CPU game FPS the 95th
percentile it's way lower it's more like 12
13 lower i don't know i'm doing this math in my head but it's over 10 lower
so that's more like what i expected just goes to show you guys though that modern
games are really coming a long way in terms of utilizing more core as you can
see we're utilizing at least seven of our
cores pretty substantially although check this out remember i talked about
programs not being aware of multiple pneuma nodes
these cores were clearly untouched while only these ones were utilized
oh lordy now this
is more like what i'd expect as a worst case scenario 42 to 43 FPS looking at
exactly the same scene so what this
tells us is that shadow of the tomb raider was doing an excellent job as we
saw of spreading out the load across course helping to compensate for the
poor per core performance of this machine
this game not so much so when you consider that we
have twice as many cores here versus our ryzen 7 and our multi-threaded
applications still ran at about the same speed it stands to reason that if we're
extremely CPU bound we're gonna run at something close to just over half of the
speed ouch let's just have a look at our task
manager here you can see here it's actually utilizing more cores to a
lesser degree but it's still running like hot garbage
so our conclusions today then are pretty interesting one is that if you have a
particular workload that benefits from lots and lots of cores refurbished
server or old workstation hardware on a used marketplace like ebay can be a
fantastic bet you're going to give up some power consumption but we did get
noticeably better performance in both blender and cinebench and if you manage
to find some ddr3 dimms in a dumpster or
something like that which does happen from time to time that can tip the
balance significantly in favor of a solution like this
but what we also know is that if you want something that's going to perform
predictably like consistently across applications be they single threaded or
multi-threaded something that is architecturally newer even though it
does come with the premium of being brand new is definitely the way to go
not to mention that of course when you buy new hardware you get a warranty to
go along with it so if you have the exact right use case
honestly this looks not bad for everyone
else there's something more modern like
a 3800x
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so thanks for watching guys we've actually got some more great server
content upcoming check this out i'm gonna be building myself a new storage
server we got that 512 gigs of RAM 32
epic cores and over a hundred terabytes
of NVMe storage get subscribed