So I was looking through the 3DMark leaderboards
the other day because Steve over at Gamers Nexus
was talking some smack about our benchmarking skills.
I didn't see it though, I don't watch his videos.
As usual, Kingpin from EVGA is way up at the top
holding the record in 3DMark, Time Spy,
Xtreme and all that stuff.
But when I looked a little closer, I saw what's this.
He's only using a 7980XE 18 core processor
with four GTX 1080Ti graphics cards.
And I thought, this is my opportunity.
My one shot, my mom's spaghetti.
I can't beat him with liquid nitrogen cooling
and like sawed off graphics cards
with custom power delivery boards
soldered to the back of them.
But what I do have is better hardware than that.
So my plan is to use 56 CPU cores
in our ASUS C621E650.
This is the product I bought and it's my challenge.
I'm not going to pay you by the way.
I'm just going to do a quick test.
I'm going to do a quick test.
Let's see how far they go.
We're going to do a little test.
It's a pretty tight nose test,
but it's going to be sort of a rough test.
This is a built-in built-in CPU.
It's not even a full series.
So we'll test that out today.
First we'll test out the chips,
which are my favorite chips in the market.
This is what an old chip looks like.
I'm gonna throw in a quick spoiler alert here. My dastardly plan to troll you guys with this setup
didn't work out, but it's still worth going through the process because it is a pretty unreal rig.
So problem number one, SLI support for gaming on Quadros. The GV100 with its high speed
HBM2 memory and massive 5376 CUDA cores should be a little faster than a Titan V,
which is faster than a GTX 1080 TI or Titan XP, right out of the box. So even though I can't
liquid nitrogen cool these things, I should be able to make up a lot of the difference
in just outright faster hardware, except for one problem. These cards don't support three-way or
four-way cards. These cards don't support four-way cards. These cards don't support four-way cards.
SLI. So this right here is called an NVLink connector, and it is only designed for these
cards anyway to put two of them together at a time. So while you can actually run SLI over NVLink,
it's not really intended for that. It's more for resource and memory sharing in 3D modeling or
compute applications. Fortunately though, I do have a way around that. So this is a Quadro Sync 2 board.
And you'll probably recognize that if you've watched one of our many K, like 16K gaming videos,
where we've used it to game on an array of as many as 16 monitors at once. Now this thing's purpose
is primarily video display walls, like giant digital signage deployments, for example, to keep the monitors
from getting out of sync, which would cause weird tearing issues. But we already know that it works for gaming.
But we already know that it works for gaming, as long as you have a very small amount of time on your computer.
long as the resolution we're running at isn't too much
for the frame buffer of each individual card.
So that got me thinking,
what if instead of plugging multiple monitors
into each one of the cards,
because remember the more pixels each card drives,
the harder it is for you to run the game.
What if instead of that,
we just ran a single 1080p display out of each one
in a two by two grid for a total of 4K?
Well, these are each 32 gig cards, so should be just fine.
Bringing us to problem number two,
even if you had a monitor like this one, it's 1080p,
it's got super thin bezels, it's inexpensive,
you still have a problem.
Nobody wants to game where four bezels intersect
because that's right where your crosshair is.
This was by far my favorite part of my idea for this video
and what prompted me to go ahead with it.
Now I had intended,
like I said, to troll you guys
with some unbelievable benchmarks
with like a test bench under a sheet or something
to make you guys think
that I had RTX cards early or something,
but you'd never buy that
if I had four of these monitors on an ARM,
like we did back when we did our first 8K gaming setup.
So what if we used LG's 43UD79?
It's 43 inches, 4K,
and thanks to its four separate inputs,
it could be split into quadrants.
So let's get it set up, shall we?
One thing I should do while we're setting this up
is give a massive shout out to Benny over at Memex
who did a personal favor,
hooking me up very last minute with one of these guys,
actually two of them, DisplayPort to HDMI 2.0, Active.
Adapters.
The Active part's important because,
well, for one thing,
these Quadros don't have HDMI,
so you have to run DisplayPort,
and we've only got two DisplayPort inputs on this monitor,
only one of which is actually usable because it's a Type-C,
and you can't adapt this to that.
There are cables, but they are directional cables.
They don't go both ways.
The Quadro Sync 2 card here only works
if every one of these cards,
is hooked up to the same type of display.
The card has to think it's DisplayPort,
so that's why the Active signal adapter is important,
so every card thinks it's hooked up to DisplayPort.
Just the amount of hassle that I went through
to get this thing working, just, you know.
But it was totally worth it, sort of.
Here's an example of one of those directional cables.
They only go from a Type-C output,
like on your laptop or something,
to a DisplayPort monitor.
They don't go the other way.
Oh, it totally makes sense.
It's just not something that I thought about
when this video was in the early conceptualization stages.
Can we all just stop and appreciate for a moment
that this is $36,000 worth of graphics cards here?
I guess, you know, props to NVIDIA for lending them to us,
even though we're totally not doing
what we said we were gonna do with them.
NVIDIA gets real cagey about, you know, this.
NVIDIA gets real cagey about gaming on Quadros.
They just, they don't like people talking about it.
Okay, so, HDMI 4, HDMI 3, that's right.
Boom, boom, done, finish.
And you can see how seamless it is as you move between them.
See, you'll get a little bit of tearing.
We got a little bit vertically there.
Generally, actually, that's probably
about the worst I've seen.
But then you can see here, moving between these two,
we get nothing.
Oh, and now.
You can see its behavior.
Oh, yeah.
So, it's not perfect,
but I figured it would be good enough to trick you guys.
Bring up some 3D Mark here.
And there it is, Time Spy Extreme.
I think this would have been believable.
Yeah, you can see.
The character's walking right through the intersection
of all four of them, and you can't see any tearing.
Pretty mean.
Yeah.
So, that's pretty underwhelming.
But, perhaps, but, perhaps,
if we weren't so CPU bottlenecked.
So, while our CPU score is actually really good,
like 10,000,
that's just because we got a great score in the CPU tests,
not because that CPU is actually not causing a bottleneck
for our overpowered graphics setup.
So, maybe what we can do is transfer the whole thing
onto a bench with a 7980 XE.
So, why don't we do that?
Maybe we can alleviate the CPU bottleneck a little bit
because we've got lots of cores here,
but they're not particularly fast.
You know, you do enough bench swaps,
you get pretty fast at it.
And, as expected, this is really not a lot better.
Also, I'm having another weird issue
where the color is a little bit off
on the bottom left quadrant for some reason.
I've actually run this before on both of these setups.
I have no idea what it's doing.
it's doing this time.
As you guys can imagine, by this point
in this whole process, I was feeling pretty discouraged
because we are a far cry from the results
that I was expecting.
I mean, it's not like the entire thing is terrible.
Like here, we can fire up a game here
and see that actually like in-game performance
looks pretty darn good.
We're just gonna ignore this weirdness
because this is the first time I've seen that.
But this is not the benchmark breaker
that I was really hoping that it would be.
Oh, I know what it is.
It's the whole zero to 255 versus 16
to whatever black depth thing.
How do you adjust that?
You know what, I bet I have to break down the mosaic.
You can see not in mosaic, I'm not having the issue.
So I think it's just a matter of like,
it just went wonko.
For a second there.
Yeah, see, it works perfectly this time.
So let's run a game or two on this thing.
Not bad.
So what I can hope for here is that
we will get some pretty awesome frame rates in GTA V.
Why is this game so bad at running in full screen?
Hey, Anthony, can I borrow you for a minute?
No, I don't wanna, like, can I just change more things?
GTA V is so horrible.
There's more things than one at a time, like.
Okay, how do you crank it?
All the settings first before resetting it?
You can't.
You can reset it if you say no.
So the good news is throughout the process
of getting all of our GTA V settings cranked,
this tearing line down the middle is gone.
So that's pretty cool.
Now we can see if our 4K performance is impressive
because we have got this thing dialed in to hurt
anything other than a godly graphics card setup.
Why is that off?
Did it even, oh, it did.
It registered everything else, just not the MSAA.
So that's neat.
Multiple reboots later, we've got all that on.
Yes, I wanna keep the new settings.
Yes, yes, yes.
And then we should be able to do
extended shadow distances now.
Now let's find out if in a situation
where we're not quite so CPU bottlenecked, this thing can.
Knock our socks off.
Anthony, are you ready?
Am I ready?
Yeah.
Are you ready?
I'm ready.
It's loading still.
So what would you expect?
I would say this will do.
You think so?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's stuttering.
It's suffering.
So I still maintain this was a pretty cool idea.
Perhaps works in GTA V, DX11, yeah.
Yes.
Let's just throw it on here.
Okay.
So how impressed are you?
How impressed are you for a $36,000?
All right, let's see what it's actually running at here.
Yeah, no, no, it's just only running at like 30 FPS.
Okay.
What is a Peltzer V8 something or other?
Oh, 15 FPS.
Oh, oh, oh, okay.
Well, I mean, that was clearly the frame rate drops.
This is very realistic car physics we've got going on here.
I'm saying that they probably wanted this car in their pool
and I'm doing them a favor.
So basically between the amount of GPU horsepower,
we have and the difficulty of synchronizing them
and managing resources between them,
there are many, many bottlenecks
that prevent this theoretically cool setup
from actually performing well in the real world.
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Thanks for watching, guys.
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