what if I told you apple is selling iPads for only a dollar well that would
be a scam and only remedial internet users should be clicking on that Banner
but what if I told you instead that you can get an 8 core Intel processor 16
gigs of RAM and a motherboard combo for your next gaming rig for under
$150 that would be me spitting mad truth
yo so stay tuned and I will show you how
Corsair's RMI series power supplies feature premium components for great
performance with very low noise check out the link in the video description to
learn more so the first step here is CPU
shopping do a quick search for Arc that's Ark Zeon 5000 and scroll down the
results until you get to the CPUs with front side bus speeds rather than qpi
speeds listed that that's the generation we're after they're old enough that due
to their lower performance and higher power consumption compared to more
modern products they've lost a lot of their value in the data center so fresh
crops of used parts are hitting eBay pretty much constantly but they're good
enough that as you'll see in modern desktop workloads they can perform
surprisingly well from here it's pretty
easy to compare specs for some context
the popular q6600 desktop chips that
I've used in scrapyard Wars are 2.4 GHz
quad cores without hyperthreading but bear in mind that I'm usually banking on
overclocking those to 3 GHz or so so since you probably won't get any
overclocking out of a Server Motherboard try to find something that can do about
that out of the box for comparable results topof thee line chips due to
their Rarity and ongoing value as a way of squeezing a little more life out of
an old server are usually still too expensive to be practical but once you
step down a couple tiers you can find some amazing deals here's a listing with
a bunch of 3 GHz quad course for only 20 bucks a pop note that when you buy your
CPUs you will need two of the same model for your dual socket motherboard so I
ended up with a pair of l5420 chips at 2.4 GHz next up is the motherboard here
things get a little tricky because there's the usual stuff like making sure
you have the appropriate connectors on your power supply but given how many of
the secondhand Boards out there are Salvage units from pre-built servers and
stuff there are some other things to watch out for as well ours is a Dell
unit and here are some of the things we ran into number one while our board has
a handful of mounting holes that would line up with a standard eatx case some
modding would definitely be required to mount it more securely and this is about
as good as you're likely to find with some boards out there unlikely to fit in
any off-the-shelf case number two there were some other layout challenges
including a capacitor right behind the PCI e6x slot that required me to saw off
the lock on my video card and a four pin CPU power connector that almost
prevented the graphics card from being inserted number three its expansion
options are very limited the top PCIe
16x physical slot is only a PCIe gen 1
8X slot electrically and much worse than
that it only has one PCIe slot total on
the board so if we wanted more than the mere 4 usb2 ports for sound cards Wi-Fi
usb3 Etc then we're pretty much out of luck since we'll be using a graphics
card in the available slot and finally you'll need to look out for other
eccentricities too very few boards will include IO Shields hooking up the front
panel switches and LEDs may take some Sherlock Homes level sleuthing or even
trial and error and don't be surprised to encounter some other pretty random
stuff I mean ours was missing four pin power connectors for the CPU fans since
in the original server it was designed for the CPUs to be cooled
passively with the motherboard out of the way it's RAM time and once again you
need to be somewhat careful here this generation of Intel server motherboards
could be equipped with slots for normal ECC ddr2 or FB dim ddr2 and while they
are both available on the cheap it'll hurt the bang for the buck of your
system if you order the wrong one and end up being stuck with extra and it
doesn't help matters that many eBay listings don't contain all the necessary
information here's a pro tip though you can identify FB dims by the full heat
spreader that was used to cool the advanced memory buffer chip these for
contrast are regular ECC ddr2 and that's
what we ended up using for our system but there's another curveball here too
server RAM compatibility even if you've got the right type can be a bit of a
bear so either select a RAM part number
that is on the qvl or qualified vendor list for that motherboard or get the
most generic thing you can and cross your fingers something like this
Kingston set is a fairly good bet because it doesn't specifically call out
that is made four servers from a brand like HP or Dell for CPU coolers we went
with some brand new stock coolers from eBay then because I had forgotten that
this generation of zons requires the chassis itself to have threads for the
Heat snc to bolt into I ended up using some inserts from McMaster car and a
piece of particle board for a back plate but if you're really trying to get your
system built on the cheap a ghetto solution with zip ties might not be
pretty but should work just fine which leads us finally to the big
question all of this is obviously a lot
more work than just going to NCI and ordering a new system so is it worth it
well in part two of this video next week on vessel we'll find out out just
kidding guys so to answer that I ran a handful of games ranging from neish to
just released a week ago in the case of Star Wars Battlefront to see how she
holds up so I paired the system with a modern Enthusiast grade graphics card a
gtx980 and monitored GPU usage while
gaming to see if our graphics card was
severely bottlenecked by our CPU and while in some games I did have to turn
the in-game details down significantly to get it running smoothly uh Crisis 3
ran at medium and Shadow of Mordor performed best at very high both with
motion blur off the results while still
lower frame rate wise than my usual test bench can achieve even though it's
running at higher settings we're still what I would describe as good enough and
the better optimized games even ran what I would describe as very very well I
mean Battlefront ran at 75 or so FPS at
1080p at the highest details only 15 FPS
less than a 5960x and Tomb Raider ran
pretty much the same on both platforms at ultimate settings I mean to put this
in perspective our whole base platform
costs less than a 16 gig kit of Premium ddr4 gaming memory cool right yes but if
buying old server stuff was a magic bullet that killed all your problems
then everyone would do it on top of the
challenge of sourcing the parts and assembling them
there's no warranty obviously there's really no upgrade path to speak of while
backwards compatibility is a godsend like it's great that your shiny new SSD
works at all you can forget about the latest fastest data rates unless you
want to put expansion cards in and it's
not like Intel has been sitting on ass for nine years you can't expect your
budget gaming box to run with newer systems in every workload I mean here's
a cine bench score from this system but back to game again this
shopping strategy is even more interesting than it appears to be on the
surface because our system handles just
barely the last of the single and dual
thread optimized AAA titles then just as
this system was about to get completely outdated developer support arrived for
multicore CPUs allowing it to stay relevant by spreading the workload out
across its eight true processing course
and the future actually looks even brighter thanks to directx12 and Vulcan
promising dramatic improvements to multicore scaling in games yet again so
the answer then to is it worth it finally is that while I lied a little
bit in the beginning it's technically two quad core processor not an eight
core processor yes if you're willing to
put a little work into it and I'm sure you'd find some help on the line's Tech
tips Forum have that linked up there if you wanted to do this this concept was a
lot of fun for me to explore and it is a worthwhile strategy for a budget gaming
box speaking of worthwhile strategies
today's episode sponsor is needfor seat.com makers of the maxnomic chairs
that you've probably seen in a lot of our behind the-scenes videos on the W
show and pretty much anywhere that I Luke or any other member of our team
puts our butts down they've got a wide variety of sizes and styles available
whether you're my size or lukee size and whether you want something kind of black
and professional looking for boardroom or you're more into just you know out
there vibrant colors and if you go to
needfor seat usa.com Linked In the video description and use offer code Linus 50
before December 1st 2015 you can save 50 bucks on any chair on their site badass
right right wrong good ass because comfy
chair I'll let myself out thanks for
watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome
get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by
using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon hey it's the holidays if you're
shopping at Amazon use our affiliate code instructions up there buying a cool
shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution now that you're
done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top
right corner to check out our Channel Super Fun video where I and the team
joust with long cardboard tubes on those hoverboard things and knock each other
off them it's pretty freaking awesome