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what if I told you apple is selling iPads for only a dollar well that would

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be a scam and only remedial internet users should be clicking on that Banner

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but what if I told you instead that you can get an 8 core Intel processor 16

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gigs of RAM and a motherboard combo for your next gaming rig for under

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$150 that would be me spitting mad truth

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yo so stay tuned and I will show you how

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Corsair's RMI series power supplies feature premium components for great

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performance with very low noise check out the link in the video description to

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learn more so the first step here is CPU

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shopping do a quick search for Arc that's Ark Zeon 5000 and scroll down the

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results until you get to the CPUs with front side bus speeds rather than qpi

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speeds listed that that's the generation we're after they're old enough that due

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to their lower performance and higher power consumption compared to more

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modern products they've lost a lot of their value in the data center so fresh

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crops of used parts are hitting eBay pretty much constantly but they're good

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enough that as you'll see in modern desktop workloads they can perform

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surprisingly well from here it's pretty

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easy to compare specs for some context

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the popular q6600 desktop chips that

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I've used in scrapyard Wars are 2.4 GHz

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quad cores without hyperthreading but bear in mind that I'm usually banking on

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overclocking those to 3 GHz or so so since you probably won't get any

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overclocking out of a Server Motherboard try to find something that can do about

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that out of the box for comparable results topof thee line chips due to

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their Rarity and ongoing value as a way of squeezing a little more life out of

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an old server are usually still too expensive to be practical but once you

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step down a couple tiers you can find some amazing deals here's a listing with

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a bunch of 3 GHz quad course for only 20 bucks a pop note that when you buy your

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CPUs you will need two of the same model for your dual socket motherboard so I

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ended up with a pair of l5420 chips at 2.4 GHz next up is the motherboard here

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things get a little tricky because there's the usual stuff like making sure

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you have the appropriate connectors on your power supply but given how many of

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the secondhand Boards out there are Salvage units from pre-built servers and

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stuff there are some other things to watch out for as well ours is a Dell

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unit and here are some of the things we ran into number one while our board has

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a handful of mounting holes that would line up with a standard eatx case some

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modding would definitely be required to mount it more securely and this is about

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as good as you're likely to find with some boards out there unlikely to fit in

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any off-the-shelf case number two there were some other layout challenges

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including a capacitor right behind the PCI e6x slot that required me to saw off

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the lock on my video card and a four pin CPU power connector that almost

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prevented the graphics card from being inserted number three its expansion

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options are very limited the top PCIe

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16x physical slot is only a PCIe gen 1

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8X slot electrically and much worse than

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that it only has one PCIe slot total on

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the board so if we wanted more than the mere 4 usb2 ports for sound cards Wi-Fi

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usb3 Etc then we're pretty much out of luck since we'll be using a graphics

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card in the available slot and finally you'll need to look out for other

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eccentricities too very few boards will include IO Shields hooking up the front

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panel switches and LEDs may take some Sherlock Homes level sleuthing or even

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trial and error and don't be surprised to encounter some other pretty random

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stuff I mean ours was missing four pin power connectors for the CPU fans since

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in the original server it was designed for the CPUs to be cooled

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passively with the motherboard out of the way it's RAM time and once again you

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need to be somewhat careful here this generation of Intel server motherboards

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could be equipped with slots for normal ECC ddr2 or FB dim ddr2 and while they

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are both available on the cheap it'll hurt the bang for the buck of your

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system if you order the wrong one and end up being stuck with extra and it

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doesn't help matters that many eBay listings don't contain all the necessary

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information here's a pro tip though you can identify FB dims by the full heat

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spreader that was used to cool the advanced memory buffer chip these for

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contrast are regular ECC ddr2 and that's

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what we ended up using for our system but there's another curveball here too

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server RAM compatibility even if you've got the right type can be a bit of a

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bear so either select a RAM part number

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that is on the qvl or qualified vendor list for that motherboard or get the

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most generic thing you can and cross your fingers something like this

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Kingston set is a fairly good bet because it doesn't specifically call out

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that is made four servers from a brand like HP or Dell for CPU coolers we went

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with some brand new stock coolers from eBay then because I had forgotten that

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this generation of zons requires the chassis itself to have threads for the

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Heat snc to bolt into I ended up using some inserts from McMaster car and a

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piece of particle board for a back plate but if you're really trying to get your

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system built on the cheap a ghetto solution with zip ties might not be

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pretty but should work just fine which leads us finally to the big

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question all of this is obviously a lot

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more work than just going to NCI and ordering a new system so is it worth it

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well in part two of this video next week on vessel we'll find out out just

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kidding guys so to answer that I ran a handful of games ranging from neish to

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just released a week ago in the case of Star Wars Battlefront to see how she

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holds up so I paired the system with a modern Enthusiast grade graphics card a

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gtx980 and monitored GPU usage while

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gaming to see if our graphics card was

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severely bottlenecked by our CPU and while in some games I did have to turn

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the in-game details down significantly to get it running smoothly uh Crisis 3

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ran at medium and Shadow of Mordor performed best at very high both with

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motion blur off the results while still

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lower frame rate wise than my usual test bench can achieve even though it's

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running at higher settings we're still what I would describe as good enough and

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the better optimized games even ran what I would describe as very very well I

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mean Battlefront ran at 75 or so FPS at

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1080p at the highest details only 15 FPS

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less than a 5960x and Tomb Raider ran

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pretty much the same on both platforms at ultimate settings I mean to put this

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in perspective our whole base platform

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costs less than a 16 gig kit of Premium ddr4 gaming memory cool right yes but if

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buying old server stuff was a magic bullet that killed all your problems

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then everyone would do it on top of the

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challenge of sourcing the parts and assembling them

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there's no warranty obviously there's really no upgrade path to speak of while

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backwards compatibility is a godsend like it's great that your shiny new SSD

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works at all you can forget about the latest fastest data rates unless you

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want to put expansion cards in and it's

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not like Intel has been sitting on ass for nine years you can't expect your

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budget gaming box to run with newer systems in every workload I mean here's

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a cine bench score from this system but back to game again this

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shopping strategy is even more interesting than it appears to be on the

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surface because our system handles just

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barely the last of the single and dual

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thread optimized AAA titles then just as

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this system was about to get completely outdated developer support arrived for

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multicore CPUs allowing it to stay relevant by spreading the workload out

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across its eight true processing course

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and the future actually looks even brighter thanks to directx12 and Vulcan

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promising dramatic improvements to multicore scaling in games yet again so

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the answer then to is it worth it finally is that while I lied a little

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bit in the beginning it's technically two quad core processor not an eight

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core processor yes if you're willing to

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put a little work into it and I'm sure you'd find some help on the line's Tech

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tips Forum have that linked up there if you wanted to do this this concept was a

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lot of fun for me to explore and it is a worthwhile strategy for a budget gaming

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box speaking of worthwhile strategies

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today's episode sponsor is needfor seat.com makers of the maxnomic chairs

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that you've probably seen in a lot of our behind the-scenes videos on the W

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show and pretty much anywhere that I Luke or any other member of our team

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puts our butts down they've got a wide variety of sizes and styles available

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whether you're my size or lukee size and whether you want something kind of black

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and professional looking for boardroom or you're more into just you know out

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there vibrant colors and if you go to

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before December 1st 2015 you can save 50 bucks on any chair on their site badass

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right right wrong good ass because comfy

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chair I'll let myself out thanks for

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watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome

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get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by

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using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon hey it's the holidays if you're

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shopping at Amazon use our affiliate code instructions up there buying a cool

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shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution now that you're

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done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top

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right corner to check out our Channel Super Fun video where I and the team

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joust with long cardboard tubes on those hoverboard things and knock each other

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off them it's pretty freaking awesome