back in december of 2015 we threw together a budget eight core gaming pc
for under 150 bucks for the CPU RAM and
motherboard that is still a great deal almost two years later and we were able
to do this thanks to a couple of things one high-end workstation and server
equipment is often ahead of the technology curve in certain ways like
multi-core processors and two the way that businesses upgrade their it
gear on a regular cycle can lead to big
jumps in the supply of this older tech on sites like ebay where the pricing
often ends up much lower than mainstream hardware because it's less familiar to
the average consumer and nobody's searching for it
so we thought to ourselves well
now eight core cpus are like mainstream
so how do we take this concept to another level
let's build the most badass machine
possible using decommissioned server
gear what could go wrong
nothing could go wrong by visiting our merch store which has shirts hats and
more it even has stickers there's a link below
so this video has actually been ongoing since uh
mid-may i mean what the crap how difficult could it be
to source some junky old stuff on ebay and slap it
together it's story time so way back then Anthony and i was like
way early on in his employment here even we sat down and we first looked for the
biggest baddest motherboard we could possibly find on ebay the most sockets
the most memory slots the most actual
physical size and we settled on this
the super micro h8q g6 f designed for
the proprietary swtx form factor it checked all the boxes
four g34 CPU sockets
32 dimm slots for up to a terabyte of ecc registered ddr3 memory multiple pci
express slots and even an onboard lsi sas controller this thing is in another
league look at all those connectors and yes those are fans on the chipsets
plural chipsets speaking of which the i o includes three
Ethernet ports so two gigabit for data and another one for ipmi which is a
remote management interface you can learn more about here
next up then choosing a CPU or rather four of them as we pointed out
in our hundred and fifty dollar gaming rig video top of the line skus for even
very old servers are still being sold at a premium but
drop down a few tears and
there we go the opteron 6276
with 16 cores each can be had for 30
bucks so we snatched up four of those then we
grabbed a case lot of 16 4 gig sticks of
ecc registered memory giving us quad
channel memory for each of our four
cpus that's like 16 channels of memory
so then at this point we were ready to rip up the performance charts right
not really so not only is this motherboard a crazy
form factor that wouldn't even begin to fit in any case or test bench we have
here at the office we also needed to track down a power supply with three eps
12 volt connectors in order to supply power to all of these bloody cpus i mean
even the highest end consumer units only come with two such cables at most
so what we ended up doing was frankensteining together the cables from
two modular units onto one success
so then with that issue solved we plugged it all in and powered it up
and blank screen the board wasn't
posting now the cpus are on the supported list
so what gives well we ended up shelving it and waiting
a couple of months for a slightly stripped down version of the same board
it lacks the sas controller in a few PCIe slots so that's a bummer but it'll
do at least it came with some 8 core optron 6128s already installed so we were able
to use those to fire it up verify it was working then swap our 16 cores in and
what okay i'm going to skip the long version
here and it turns out that despite the BIOS reporting that it was the latest
revision it was not
so a desperation BIOS flash later and we were finally in business
on an unrelated note anyone want to buy an unexpectedly functional quad socket
optiron board anyone bueller
bueller bueller oh right no uh you want to see how it
performs first huh well with a whopping
64 cores we put it straight head to head
with ryzen threadripper and Intel's latest core i9 i mean this thing's gonna
win with its eyes closed and one hand behind it's back in the multi-threaded
tests right we'll get to those but first let's address the elephant in the video
title gaming it sucks
mike let me make this abundantly clear
this is a 1080 ti running at
1080p so if you've ever wondered what a
bottleneck looks like this is it
rise of the tomb raider and directx 12 got 10 percent of the performance of the
core i7 7700k 10
and it's even worse in cs go i mean at least it was only half as bad in 3dmark
and unigine's superposition but i mean if super micro is to be
believed this is or at least was a machine that was designed to do work
not games so will it blend
actually yeah in blender it's 3d rendering prowess
doesn't put it quite on the level of threadripper or core i9 but it handily
outdoes the ryzen 7 1800x for roughly
the same overall system cost unsurprisingly cinebench and 7-zip show
similar results but a lack of avx-2 support and relatively
low cash per core hinders its high core count significantly compared to its more
modern competition even in these multi-threaded workloads
and there is more to buying a CPU than just performance too so we tested our
thermals with some Noctua nff12s just
sitting on top of the heatsinks that were included with our board and
actually this wasn't bad each CPU hit only 55
degrees at the worst in ida 64. as for that power draw
nelly wow that's a number that only gets
trumped by our overclocked 18 core core
i9 7980xe extreme edition
though in fairness this is 64 cores
across four cpus so bottom line then um
fun experiment but did we get our money's worth well given that we bought
two boards by accident no no we didn't but let's play a game where
we pretend we didn't do that for gaming this setup is super dumb
but for productivity it actually doesn't look that bad
even though it is at the bottom of our charts like so all in we paid about
eighteen hundred and eighty eight dollars for this ghetto workstation as
spec using a motherboard box as an open bench
style case now as soon as you buy modern hardware like a 1080 ti the
bottlenecking of that high-end gear hurts your overall system value but
if all you wanted was CPU performance and you just put like a five dollar
graphics card in then our system here actually delivers better value than
ryzen threadripper and if we had weighted our testing more towards
blender we'd have seen an even better price to performance ratio this actually
makes for a a really cool budget blender
box but if you want to do
almost literally anything else with your machine
especially gaming it shouldn't be your first choice
especially given the headache factor
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the how you heard about us section
so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
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merch store which has cool shirts like this one as well as our community forum
which you should totally join