one of my favorite all-time videos is this retrospective look at an absolutely
incredible eight core Enthusiast PC from
Intel that held up shockingly well for its age today's subject is it's much
stupider cousin from AMD on the surface everything about the quad father kind of
checks out it also looks Flippin badass
it also shipped with up to eight processing cores and it also supports
the best Gaming Technologies from the time like high speed ddr2 memory and
quad SLI gpus luckily for Intel that's
where the resemblance ends right out of
the gate it was hot slow and comically
overpriced to the point where I would argue that quad FX is the worst consumer
CPU platform of all time okay that's a
big claim I know but I think by the time we're done here including taking the 4x4
Out for a Rip even the most Ardent of AMD Fanboys is going to come around to
my viewpoint and come around to this message from our sponsor MSI MSI wants
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below watching AMT is kind of like those
videos right where you see the kid ripping down the hill they go flying
over the handlebars and you're like okay it's okay to laugh they're doing
fine but speaking as an Enthusiast who
cheered when AMD brought 64-bit Computing and dual core processors to
the mainstream in 2006
we weren't ready to laugh yet it was a painful time first Intel jabbed with the
Core 2 lineup of dual core processors that made Athlon X2 look slow and
inefficient by comparison
quad core versions of those same chips that left AMD's premium offerings
looking utterly irrelevant so what did
AMD do this
I mean it kind of makes sense you know
you're not going to have a proper quad core offering until sometime next year
you've got some room to move on pricing thanks to your mature manufacturing
process and realistically speaking even if no one
buys it you're probably better off paper launching some limited edition nonsense
rather than leaving your competitor completely alone at the top of the
performance charts which is a strategy that AMD has employed more than once
the issue though is that AMD didn't just paper launch it in November 2006 AMD
released not one but an entire lineup of
FX 70 series processors they were dual cores of course since
they were fundamentally just re-badged opterons with boosted clock speeds but
they marketed them as a quad core
solution because they were only available to be purchased in pairs and
only intended to work in this dual socket motherboard the l1n64 series from
ASUS and this board has actually pretty cool it uses a one-off version of
NVIDIA's 680 series of chipsets which gives it some unique selling points over
the server boards that operons normally relied on first up it had support for
regular unbuffered ddr2 which could operate at higher speeds than ECC
registered dims at the time second it
had much more consumer slash workstation
oriented i o I mean look at this thing tons of USB got your e-SATA you got your
optical audio out I guess a lot of people use that 12 SATA ports though my
goodness and finally it had support for
multi-GPU SLI technology this is
actually where our second curiosity today comes in remember how referred to
quad FX as 4x4 earlier well that was one
of the earlier code names and it referred to the platform's ability to
run four cores and four gpus at once the
name ultimately died presumably when NVIDIA limited SLI to only two of the
slots on the motherboard but the capability actually remains if you use
two dual GPU cards mate the ASUS Mars
GTX 760 an unfathomably stupid product
that actually came quite a bit later but just felt like an appropriate pairing
for this thing we'll get into this in a bit more detail later on first I want to
come back to quad effects the initial reviews ranged from optimistic that it
could maybe hopefully please improve to
downright scathing even outwardly mocking AMD's stated intention of
selling High volumes of this indefensible product but something that
everyone agreed on at the time was that there could be an interesting upgrade
path for users who were willing to invest in the platform once AMD started
shipping true quad-core CPUs that could be slotted into this motherboard's LGA
1207 socket and that is exactly what
we're going to be trying today the viewer who lent us his quad effects
setup included a pair of opteron 2352
quad cores these didn't arrive until
2008 by which time both ASUS and AMD had
formally dropped support for the original quad
but what they revised slash B version of
the original board or with a clever hot
BIOS flashing trick you could unlock the
raw power of dual quad core processors
operating at a staggering 2.1 gigahertz and all for the downright
reasonable price of just 315.99
couldn't think of it that is pretty reasonable but
I'll let you in a little secret the price says very little about AMD's
magnanimous nature and a lot about AMD's
Fortunes in the two years since this platform first hit the scene when they
were hoping to get a thousand dollars per pair of dual cores fun fact by the
way we've got the coolers on now you can see we actually had to 3D print apart
for them which I then had to zip tie the bracket onto because the 3D printed
thing didn't have a hook and that's not even the jankiest thing about this setup
remember how I said that quad FX didn't need server RAM
well these are opterons so they do so
much for the slot and upgrade now we
could have easily obtained a pair of fx74s on eBay including this delightful
Factory sealed one but since I didn't feel like spending 600 on E-Waste not to
mention even more on Dual Channel ddr2
ECC memory sorry
I didn't do it not when I could spend the money on the new fleece-lined jacket
from ltdstore.com it's a shirt it's a jacket it's both a couple more finishing
touches like adding our second Mars 760.
honestly just can't believe people bought either of these things like
literally anyone I remember I was working sales at the time and on more
than one occasion I saw orders come in for Quad effects and I actually checked
the invoice called them I got on the phone with
these people and I tried to sell them something different something faster and
cheaper but some of them were just such pathetic fanboys
but I just couldn't do anything to help them I also can't believe I hired one of
them that's right there is someone who works here whose judgment is so impaired
that they actually bought a quad effects
in all seriousness though Gary from the lab is a tinkerer and he goes out of his
way to subject himself to early adopter pain for the learning opportunities
that's why he actually daily is an arc GPU as well
I question his masochism but I do admire his moxie anywho
time to fire up this mess oh wait no it isn't we're gonna need some power
connectors imagine having the 24-pin ATX
power connector there and that not being the worst thing about your platform I
mean I make fun of it now but at the time I'd have given just about anything for one
of these I mean not just about not a thousand dollars less than that oh
it's alive full disclosure I'm not 100 sure if this
is gonna boot up right now um Gary and Tim from the lab spent
basically an entire day getting this thing operational they have forbidden me
from touching anything in the BIOS we
also had a couple of bent pins in the CPU socket that Dan fixed and refused to
install Windows XP so we swapped it to Windows 7 which
I turn on oh also the onboard networking isn't working so we put in this PCIe car
oh I guess I should pluck a cable into it yes
everything is working we're gonna follow a similar Playbook to
last time so the first thing we're going to try and do is just an everyday oh
uh uh no it is not 2001. one moment
please oh wow as I was about to say the first thing
we'll be doing is just generally trying
to use the computer including playing back a YouTube video
that took a long time to load
uh we can search the right oh
did you see the delay between me clicking that text box and it actually
highlighting let's start with 1080p video shall we okay
oh at least It upgraded to 720p but we
were sucking back 400 watts before we've
settled into 265 and I'm currently playing back
720p video okay what happens when I go to 1080p
did it go up again oh my God 400 okay
let's switch to 4K no
no 4K playback season up on my CPU
Chrome just Chrome I think it's time to move on to gaming
NVIDIA control panel uh is this supposed to happen
sir
screw it I'm playing no wait no wait no oh my God I mean tell
me this though is the FPS as expected about 40 frames per second okay then I'm
not gonna worry about oh my god oh wow
that hitching though this thing's a piece
why did you buy it because
it was there my suspicion
this card is actually defective let's go out to the control panel
I do know how to configure things now
because you know but you know you drop things awesome don't worry
I can text him and we'll as he drops it
okay fine we'll flip the cards I think that'll probably fix it uh
this wasn't meant to be part of this video but hey it's a fun little lesson
anyway you can have a graphics card that's just a little bit defective like
say for example the memory is no longer capable of running at its stock clock
speed with stability without corrupting the data and so what can happen is that
GPU can still be performant right so you
could hook it up in SLI and if it's not the output
you can actually get a clean image and
you can get some if not most of the performance scaling that you would get
from two fully functional gpus but you won't really notice that the thing's
broken unless you have the display hooked up to that one unless it's running as the primary GPU I've seen it
a handful of times hey oh no green
it could have been right hey it's running on high though I have
no sound but I can do the sounds myself medic
get on the point it's a really rare
platform so most people don't have any context for it right
but guys it's it's really really slow like in games this thing was like
half the performance of a Core 2 Duo
yes oh oh it has its moments oh
remember guys SLI was bad enough for
NVIDIA to just unceremoniously discontinue it quad SLI
and the problems exacerbated by running a more demanding game which
by modern standards Team Fortress 2 obviously isn't but for the setup it
certainly is okay this is pretty bad I
don't even think I'm gonna bother with shadow of the Tomb Raider but
this is a CPU from 15 years ago with a
small army of gpus from 10 years ago and it was worse before Labs managed to hack
together the NVIDIA and the ASUS drivers for these gpus which took us from a
screen Terry 60 hertz Mass to the relatively smooth operation that you
just saw with all of that said there are some things that are clearly holding us
back and a big one is these awful Mars
gpus what a weird product I mean on the
surface again it kind of made sense ASUS
recognized that buying two mid-range gpus and running them in SLI sometimes
was more cost effective than buying a single high-end GPU but then they did
the whole thing wrong 760s had only two gigs of vram meaning
that these four gpus in the quad SLI
configuration had 66 percent as much
effective frame buffer as a single 780. making matters worse the combined card
just the individual card never mind four gpus cost more than a single 780 and
also cost more than two regular 760s
which you could equally just run an SLI
if you really wanted to I think you were there
did anyone at ASUS think of that
what do you mean convenience you know one card it's easy oh shut up you never
believed that the only use case that I could imagine
for this thing is if you could run SLI
in a non-sli board but then of course
NVIDIA didn't allow that making the Mars the kind of thing where you just go how
did this ever make it out of the r d lab but nobody bought these in fact I think
they were even a limited edition product so where would you be right now if you
had actually purchased a quad effect setup and we're still running it to this
day but with a more modern card we're going to throw an RTX 3060 on here and
find out just that thing what is this PCIe Gen 2 no I I think it is Gen 2 I
think it's gen one theoretically it's still backwards before it's compatible
look at this mouse go or rather look at
it and not go look at it skip oh hey
we're back uh
oh why would RTX 30 series be supported
in Windows 7. wait that was a Windows 7 driver there
totally is a Windows 7 driver it just didn't work at all
it doesn't really matter the point is
the performance would suck these are
dual quad core CPUs and modern games do
benefit from higher core counts but their core architecture lagged behind
the competition even at launch and it hasn't aged well also these are clocked
a whopping 30 slower than the FX dual
cores that came two years prior that is a huge problem especially in games at
the time which heavily relied on single core performance
imagine getting an upgrade path that is worse than nothing congrats AMD you
invented Metapod and that is what makes
this the worst consumer CPU platform of
all time I mean if it was cheap and cheerful and had a great upgrade path
I'd be willing to entertain what Pentium
D maybe Prescott something in the Rambis
era for that Crown but quad FX made a sucker out of everyone who bought one
and then AMD promptly rewarded their most loyal fans by offering them a joke
of an upgrade path so goodbye quadfather it's been an experience
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if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out the last time we built an
expensive PC from the past it was a lot better