six years ago when the Intel xtreme edition 4960x ruled the roost there were
rumors of a secret CPU one that was even
faster but that no one at Intel would
ever acknowledge in any way and until about two weeks ago the most
evidence that i had ever seen for its existence was a couple of photos in
weird obscure forums that could have easily been photoshopped
until the ebay listing went up someone listed they had about a couple
dozen of these things the Intel black ops 4.6 gigahertz six core CPU and those
specs don't sound that impressive until you factor in that this thing was
allegedly created way back in 2013 and
they had them on ebay for just 260 dollars
not necessarily a great value by today's standards
but oh man there was no way
that you were gonna keep me from testing this thing out
it's real instantly see your current and past
network activity detect malware and block badly behaving apps on your pc or
Android device with glassware use offer code Linus to get 25 off glasswire at
the link in the video description
while the pricing of the black ops might not make a ton of sense assuming that
you're paying full pop for all the rest of your system components if you were to
pair it up with one of these x79 motherboards that's made using recycled
chipsets we did a full video on this one recently and then maybe some cast off
ddr3 that somebody didn't want there is a pretty compelling argument to be made
for six cores at 4.6 gigahertz on
a budget of about 360 dollars so that's what i'm going to
try first but honestly speaking i have
no idea if this thing is going to boot up because there are a couple of things
about it that are pretty special 4.6 gigahertz six cores was a huge deal
back then this is what is apparently known internally at Intel as an everest
chip that means that it is the highest possible speed bin of a given chip
design on a given micro architecture so compared to the 4960x which was a
broadly available consumer chip based on Intel's iv bridge architecture
this was like the kind of thing that maybe only a tiny percentage of dies were
capable of so they couldn't even make enough of them to sell in a retail box
on the shelf of the local micro center one of the other unusual things about
these chips is that allegedly they don't have any support for hyper threading
which is weird right because that's been a major Intel selling point going back
about 15 years now why would that be
so the rumor again we have no confirmation of this is that these were
used for high frequency stock trading
where single threaded performance is the absolute king and nothing else really
matters for example the everest skew
from the westmire family of products was the xeon x-5698
that was a six core die that actually only had two of its cores active but it
still retained access to its entire 12 megabytes of level 3 cash now as far as
we know no stock exchange ever actually ended up using these for trading and
these days they've moved on to fpgas and in some cases asics but what we don't
know is why one theory is that it was nearly
impossible to tame the inferno that is
this chip because while Intel could build a 4.6
gigahertz 6 core six years ago what they couldn't do is
build it efficiently the listed or well
listed the reported TDP of this thing is
250 watts with some users who have gotten their hands on them claiming that
they need to down clock them significantly just to get Windows to
boot so i do think it's a bit of a long shot
for our weird rando motherboard to boot this thing at all but
hey the only way to know for sure is to give
it a try ain't it uh i don't remember
which pins too short for power so oh those ones
wow okay okay there we go 32 gigs of RAM
uh and it crashed interesting all right
let's uh try that again was that it we don't get another post
that was a short-lived adventure
fortunately i brought a backup plan
this i have a lot higher hopes for this one genuine Intel CPU at 4.6 gigahertz
press f1 to run setup we might just have to reset some memory
all right so reseeding our memory and our CPU didn't help we're still only
detecting 24 gigs but we decided what
the hey let's do a quick boot attempt anyway completely bone
stock settings we didn't even enable an xmp profile for our memory to run at
full speed why is razer gaming software able to run
while like Windows is still initializing devices this thing managed to boot
wow task manager has no idea what it is it just shows up as genuine Intel CPU
i've seen this before with some engineering samples we've got 25 megs
level three cache 4.6 gigahertz six cores six threads so no hyper threading
at idle the heatsinks fine but it remains to be seeing what happens
if we actually hit it with a load it's
curious why are we only getting 80 utilization
oh we need some drivers whoops uh black ops continuation that's
part two we're at just 3.6 gigahertz and our CPU
usage is pinned at 80 percent i thought it was like maybe some kind of weird
driver issue but everything is showing up properly
now so i don't get it that is a bizarre
stock voltage like i have changed
nothing about this thing we might need more cooling too like this thing is warm
it's idling at 60 degrees right now
70. lttstore.com
so in an attempt to fix both of our problems with this system i've swapped
out the board hopefully that'll address getting all four of our memory sticks to
show up and i've run and obtained a liquid cooling
kit this is one of ek's fluid gaming
kits it's not like the most exceptional water cooling on the face of the earth but
it'll be better than an air cooler so i would say who could possibly need this
much thermal compound but the answer is me
now we've got our water cooling setup and because i'm a little bit concerned
that even you know a decent water cooling setup won't be enough for this
bloody thing i'm just going to go ahead and throw some ice in our reservoir here
man this is going to be really inconvenient if i have to swap a bunch
of motherboards and crap hey 32 gigs of RAM so we solved that problem and that's
weird our voltage is 1.39 at defaults now all
right let's do a quick BIOS update just to
see how that makes us feel yeah that ice has already melted
well i mean mostly i was just filling it with the water that was in my water
bottle and because it's insulated it happened to still have ice cubes in it
lttstore.com latest BIOS overvoltage error is back
and we're back at 1.6 volts super weird how are we at 44 degrees
we're not even doing anything now we're at 84 utilization we're still at 3.86
gigahertz though let's try a different board board number three all our memory
is showing up so that seems to have been an issue with that first board holy crap
it's stuck at 84 again what does this even mean so i don't remember if i
mentioned this already or not but i got my hands on two of them just because
well there were such a curiosity and
i wasn't sure how well this whole thing would go down so i wanted to have a
backup and maybe just maybe there's something
wrong with that first one hold on a second we should well wait
what the what i did notice is we didn't get a CPU over voltage error
yeah this is the latest oh there it is CPU over voltage error
same stock voltage you know i was really hoping that with adequate cooling we
would manage to get this thing booted like at stock speed
let's see if we get past 84 utilization here
82. i think i just need to accept that
no boards designed for at max a 160 watt
TDP CPU are not just gonna plug and play work with a 250 watt one
still only 3.87 gigahertz i don't
i understand that let's try turning the voltage down 88 is
better than 84. clock speed shouldn't be jumping around
like this it should be fixed so basically it just does whatever it
wants and it's just a matter of turning the
voltage down until the system behaves itself
kind of tempted to turn it down even more like turn it down to more like a
stock voltage which for this one is just a hair over one volt or actually under
for some chips
why don't we do that and it behaves exactly the same way
at least it doesn't run so hot anymore though
so i guess there's that so that's it 3.86 gigahertz all core turbo and the
only really quirky thing about it is that it comes with a stock voltage of
1.6 volts assuming some kind of incredible cooling system that you'd
have to put on it so it seems to me that you need specific bio support
for unlocking this chip in order to actually get it to
overclock to its stock speed and whether it's due to the utilization
issue we're running into or just a lack of frequency because it's not
running at 4.2 performance kind of blows like in spite of having two more cores
than a 4770k it is getting beat pretty handily here
so given that you know let's fire up the ebay
bids okay buy it now 140 bucks i definitely wouldn't go through the
hassle of goofing around with one of these
but i have to know if maybe this is just
an ASUS idiosyncrasy and if i try a different motherboard
vendor you know maybe it'll work perfectly so
i dug one last x79 board out of the moth balls it's a Gigabyte x 79 s something
something i can't remember it's just become less about making a
video and more about satisfying my own personal curiosity at this point
oh wow is this not even gonna post
i've got one last hail mary
and i think this is very unlikely to work but i recently got
my hands on one of these theoretically as quad socket capable cpus they should
also be dual socket capable but given that this is not exactly the
world's most amazeballs motherboard i think it's very
unlikely these things are going to boot in it i'm just i have to try i'm
planning a full video about this board by the way because it is really cool so
make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that wait are you going to try and run both
at the same time look i'm out of options this is the last
maybe compatible board that i have
this is the problem with troubleshooting there's always something else to try but
in all seriousness this is the last thing i have to try
whoa no way holy crap that was actually it sorry
can i startle you uh right i'm not plugged wait what the f
how did i get into the BIOS
why is it detected as 3.4
interesting
power management factory long duration power limit there
it is performance
custom let's leave everything default and just
see if it boots well i didn't even plug in a boot drive
i really really did not think that was going to do anything
so this board has no way for me to adjust voltage
so this thing is freaking furnace hot right now
but as a total long shot um i decided to
disable two of the cores per socket and just
see what happens so i've got eight cores
four per socket and it did manage to boot
oh yeah okay so our water cooled one is at like 25-ish
the other one's at like 50-ish at idle
so our speed is slightly higher because we're turboing four cores instead of six
but our utilization is still 86 percent
10 of 10 very weird
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next phone bill well hopefully watching me waste 500 on ebay was more fun for
you guys than it was for me and uh
i guess i'll see you in the next video where we'll take a look at this motherboard with cpus that actually like
work properly