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one of my favorite all-time videos is this retrospective look at an absolutely

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incredible eight core Enthusiast PC from

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Intel that held up shockingly well for its age today's subject is it's much

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stupider cousin from AMD on the surface everything about the quad father kind of

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checks out it also looks Flippin badass

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it also shipped with up to eight processing cores and it also supports

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the best Gaming Technologies from the time like high speed ddr2 memory and

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quad SLI gpus luckily for Intel that's

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where the resemblance ends right out of

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the gate it was hot slow and comically

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overpriced to the point where I would argue that quad FX is the worst consumer

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CPU platform of all time okay that's a

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big claim I know but I think by the time we're done here including taking the 4x4

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Out for a Rip even the most Ardent of AMD Fanboys is going to come around to

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my viewpoint and come around to this message from our sponsor MSI MSI wants

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summer sale let them help you check out MSI's summer sale event using the link

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below watching AMT is kind of like those

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videos right where you see the kid ripping down the hill they go flying

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over the handlebars and you're like okay it's okay to laugh they're doing

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fine but speaking as an Enthusiast who

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cheered when AMD brought 64-bit Computing and dual core processors to

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the mainstream in 2006

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we weren't ready to laugh yet it was a painful time first Intel jabbed with the

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Core 2 lineup of dual core processors that made Athlon X2 look slow and

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inefficient by comparison

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quad core versions of those same chips that left AMD's premium offerings

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looking utterly irrelevant so what did

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AMD do this

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I mean it kind of makes sense you know

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you're not going to have a proper quad core offering until sometime next year

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you've got some room to move on pricing thanks to your mature manufacturing

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process and realistically speaking even if no one

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buys it you're probably better off paper launching some limited edition nonsense

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rather than leaving your competitor completely alone at the top of the

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performance charts which is a strategy that AMD has employed more than once

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the issue though is that AMD didn't just paper launch it in November 2006 AMD

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released not one but an entire lineup of

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FX 70 series processors they were dual cores of course since

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they were fundamentally just re-badged opterons with boosted clock speeds but

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they marketed them as a quad core

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solution because they were only available to be purchased in pairs and

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only intended to work in this dual socket motherboard the l1n64 series from

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ASUS and this board has actually pretty cool it uses a one-off version of

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NVIDIA's 680 series of chipsets which gives it some unique selling points over

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the server boards that operons normally relied on first up it had support for

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regular unbuffered ddr2 which could operate at higher speeds than ECC

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registered dims at the time second it

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had much more consumer slash workstation

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oriented i o I mean look at this thing tons of USB got your e-SATA you got your

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optical audio out I guess a lot of people use that 12 SATA ports though my

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goodness and finally it had support for

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multi-GPU SLI technology this is

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actually where our second curiosity today comes in remember how referred to

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quad FX as 4x4 earlier well that was one

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of the earlier code names and it referred to the platform's ability to

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run four cores and four gpus at once the

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name ultimately died presumably when NVIDIA limited SLI to only two of the

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slots on the motherboard but the capability actually remains if you use

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two dual GPU cards mate the ASUS Mars

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GTX 760 an unfathomably stupid product

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that actually came quite a bit later but just felt like an appropriate pairing

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for this thing we'll get into this in a bit more detail later on first I want to

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come back to quad effects the initial reviews ranged from optimistic that it

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could maybe hopefully please improve to

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downright scathing even outwardly mocking AMD's stated intention of

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selling High volumes of this indefensible product but something that

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everyone agreed on at the time was that there could be an interesting upgrade

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path for users who were willing to invest in the platform once AMD started

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shipping true quad-core CPUs that could be slotted into this motherboard's LGA

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1207 socket and that is exactly what

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we're going to be trying today the viewer who lent us his quad effects

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setup included a pair of opteron 2352

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quad cores these didn't arrive until

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2008 by which time both ASUS and AMD had

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formally dropped support for the original quad

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but what they revised slash B version of

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the original board or with a clever hot

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BIOS flashing trick you could unlock the

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raw power of dual quad core processors

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operating at a staggering 2.1 gigahertz and all for the downright

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reasonable price of just 315.99

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couldn't think of it that is pretty reasonable but

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I'll let you in a little secret the price says very little about AMD's

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magnanimous nature and a lot about AMD's

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Fortunes in the two years since this platform first hit the scene when they

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were hoping to get a thousand dollars per pair of dual cores fun fact by the

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way we've got the coolers on now you can see we actually had to 3D print apart

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for them which I then had to zip tie the bracket onto because the 3D printed

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thing didn't have a hook and that's not even the jankiest thing about this setup

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remember how I said that quad FX didn't need server RAM

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well these are opterons so they do so

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much for the slot and upgrade now we

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could have easily obtained a pair of fx74s on eBay including this delightful

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Factory sealed one but since I didn't feel like spending 600 on E-Waste not to

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mention even more on Dual Channel ddr2

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ECC memory sorry

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I didn't do it not when I could spend the money on the new fleece-lined jacket

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from ltdstore.com it's a shirt it's a jacket it's both a couple more finishing

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touches like adding our second Mars 760.

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honestly just can't believe people bought either of these things like

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literally anyone I remember I was working sales at the time and on more

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than one occasion I saw orders come in for Quad effects and I actually checked

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the invoice called them I got on the phone with

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these people and I tried to sell them something different something faster and

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cheaper but some of them were just such pathetic fanboys

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but I just couldn't do anything to help them I also can't believe I hired one of

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them that's right there is someone who works here whose judgment is so impaired

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that they actually bought a quad effects

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in all seriousness though Gary from the lab is a tinkerer and he goes out of his

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way to subject himself to early adopter pain for the learning opportunities

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that's why he actually daily is an arc GPU as well

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I question his masochism but I do admire his moxie anywho

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time to fire up this mess oh wait no it isn't we're gonna need some power

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connectors imagine having the 24-pin ATX

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power connector there and that not being the worst thing about your platform I

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mean I make fun of it now but at the time I'd have given just about anything for one

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of these I mean not just about not a thousand dollars less than that oh

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it's alive full disclosure I'm not 100 sure if this

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is gonna boot up right now um Gary and Tim from the lab spent

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basically an entire day getting this thing operational they have forbidden me

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from touching anything in the BIOS we

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also had a couple of bent pins in the CPU socket that Dan fixed and refused to

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install Windows XP so we swapped it to Windows 7 which

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I turn on oh also the onboard networking isn't working so we put in this PCIe car

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oh I guess I should pluck a cable into it yes

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everything is working we're gonna follow a similar Playbook to

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last time so the first thing we're going to try and do is just an everyday oh

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uh uh no it is not 2001. one moment

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please oh wow as I was about to say the first thing

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we'll be doing is just generally trying

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to use the computer including playing back a YouTube video

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that took a long time to load

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uh we can search the right oh

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did you see the delay between me clicking that text box and it actually

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highlighting let's start with 1080p video shall we okay

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oh at least It upgraded to 720p but we

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were sucking back 400 watts before we've

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settled into 265 and I'm currently playing back

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720p video okay what happens when I go to 1080p

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did it go up again oh my God 400 okay

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let's switch to 4K no

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no 4K playback season up on my CPU

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Chrome just Chrome I think it's time to move on to gaming

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NVIDIA control panel uh is this supposed to happen

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sir

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screw it I'm playing no wait no wait no oh my God I mean tell

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me this though is the FPS as expected about 40 frames per second okay then I'm

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not gonna worry about oh my god oh wow

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that hitching though this thing's a piece

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why did you buy it because

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it was there my suspicion

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this card is actually defective let's go out to the control panel

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I do know how to configure things now

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because you know but you know you drop things awesome don't worry

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I can text him and we'll as he drops it

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okay fine we'll flip the cards I think that'll probably fix it uh

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this wasn't meant to be part of this video but hey it's a fun little lesson

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anyway you can have a graphics card that's just a little bit defective like

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say for example the memory is no longer capable of running at its stock clock

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speed with stability without corrupting the data and so what can happen is that

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GPU can still be performant right so you

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could hook it up in SLI and if it's not the output

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you can actually get a clean image and

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you can get some if not most of the performance scaling that you would get

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from two fully functional gpus but you won't really notice that the thing's

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broken unless you have the display hooked up to that one unless it's running as the primary GPU I've seen it

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a handful of times hey oh no green

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it could have been right hey it's running on high though I have

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no sound but I can do the sounds myself medic

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get on the point it's a really rare

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platform so most people don't have any context for it right

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but guys it's it's really really slow like in games this thing was like

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half the performance of a Core 2 Duo

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yes oh oh it has its moments oh

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remember guys SLI was bad enough for

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NVIDIA to just unceremoniously discontinue it quad SLI

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and the problems exacerbated by running a more demanding game which

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by modern standards Team Fortress 2 obviously isn't but for the setup it

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certainly is okay this is pretty bad I

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don't even think I'm gonna bother with shadow of the Tomb Raider but

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this is a CPU from 15 years ago with a

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small army of gpus from 10 years ago and it was worse before Labs managed to hack

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together the NVIDIA and the ASUS drivers for these gpus which took us from a

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screen Terry 60 hertz Mass to the relatively smooth operation that you

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just saw with all of that said there are some things that are clearly holding us

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back and a big one is these awful Mars

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gpus what a weird product I mean on the

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surface again it kind of made sense ASUS

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recognized that buying two mid-range gpus and running them in SLI sometimes

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was more cost effective than buying a single high-end GPU but then they did

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the whole thing wrong 760s had only two gigs of vram meaning

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that these four gpus in the quad SLI

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configuration had 66 percent as much

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effective frame buffer as a single 780. making matters worse the combined card

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just the individual card never mind four gpus cost more than a single 780 and

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also cost more than two regular 760s

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which you could equally just run an SLI

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if you really wanted to I think you were there

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did anyone at ASUS think of that

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what do you mean convenience you know one card it's easy oh shut up you never

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believed that the only use case that I could imagine

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for this thing is if you could run SLI

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in a non-sli board but then of course

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NVIDIA didn't allow that making the Mars the kind of thing where you just go how

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did this ever make it out of the r d lab but nobody bought these in fact I think

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they were even a limited edition product so where would you be right now if you

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had actually purchased a quad effect setup and we're still running it to this

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day but with a more modern card we're going to throw an RTX 3060 on here and

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find out just that thing what is this PCIe Gen 2 no I I think it is Gen 2 I

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think it's gen one theoretically it's still backwards before it's compatible

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look at this mouse go or rather look at

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it and not go look at it skip oh hey

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we're back uh

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oh why would RTX 30 series be supported

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in Windows 7. wait that was a Windows 7 driver there

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totally is a Windows 7 driver it just didn't work at all

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it doesn't really matter the point is

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the performance would suck these are

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dual quad core CPUs and modern games do

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benefit from higher core counts but their core architecture lagged behind

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the competition even at launch and it hasn't aged well also these are clocked

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a whopping 30 slower than the FX dual

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cores that came two years prior that is a huge problem especially in games at

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the time which heavily relied on single core performance

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imagine getting an upgrade path that is worse than nothing congrats AMD you

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invented Metapod and that is what makes

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this the worst consumer CPU platform of

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all time I mean if it was cheap and cheerful and had a great upgrade path

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I'd be willing to entertain what Pentium

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D maybe Prescott something in the Rambis

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era for that Crown but quad FX made a sucker out of everyone who bought one

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and then AMD promptly rewarded their most loyal fans by offering them a joke

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of an upgrade path so goodbye quadfather it's been an experience

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just like you should experience our sponsor backblaze backblaze has an easy

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to use cloud backup solution for your super secret files we won't ask we don't

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want to know they're affordable with plans starting at just seven dollars a

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month and they make it simple by allowing you to back up almost anything

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from your Mac or PC and access it from anywhere in the world with their web and

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mobile apps you can also easily protect business data through a centrally

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managed admin backblaze even lets you restore your data by mail it will ship

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you a hard drive with your data right to your door and when you're done you can

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return the hard drive for a full refund it's like old school Netflix except

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instead of a movie it's pictures of Mima and if you're worried about accidentally

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deleting files you can increase your data retention history to a year for

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just an extra two dollars a month with over 55 billion files restored and two

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exabytes of data under their management backblaze has got you covered they even

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have us covered we actually back up our servers to backblaze every night so

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don't wait sign up and get a 15 day free trial with no credit card required today

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at backblaze.com LTT

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if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out the last time we built an

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expensive PC from the past it was a lot better