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this is what 9 000

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can get you or at least it could you see i bought this 28 core Intel xeon

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platinum 8176 on ebay for just

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999 and it's not only not a bad deal for

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the CPU on its own but it's a reflection of an increasingly favorable CPU market

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for buyers that is if you're willing to get your hands a

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little bit dirty digging through the archives of CPU history and

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if you're willing to take some risks like the risk i take of you skipping

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this message from our sponsor seasonic never skimp on getting a quality power

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their wattage calculator at the link in the video description to find out which

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one will suit your needs

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Intel's first generation xeon scalable cpus launched on july 11 2017 and the

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reception to them was lukewarm largely because AMD

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also launched their first generation epic server cpus around the same time

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see the problem for Intel was for nearly five thousand dollars less you could buy

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a CPU from AMD with more threads and

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more cash if you were willing to overlook some of the growing pains that

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came with it being an all new platform so AMD's return to competitiveness could

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be part of the reason that we were able to get this CPU for just 12 of its

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retail price four years later but

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it's definitely not the whole picture those of you who follow closely the

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secondary market may know this already but for the uninitiated there's kind of

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a pattern to the availability of cheap powerful hardware like this you see many

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data center and enterprise customers upgrade their hardware on a schedule

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this helps them stay more secure by ensuring that their servers will be

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actively supported and patched by the manufacturer and it also allows them to

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take advantage of the better efficiency of more modern processors well that

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retired hardware has to go somewhere so

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instead of just e-wasting it a small amount might be given to employees to

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validate and use personally while the majority will go to refurb server sites

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like bargainhardware.co.uk or more general

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auction sites like ebay because even though it's older gear it's absolutely

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still useful and can be cumulatively worth hundreds of thousands or even

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millions of dollars and these sales are great news for enthusiasts because even

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a single large data center dumping a bunch of cpus onto ebay can have a

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profound effect not just on the models that they're selling but the used CPU

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market as a whole so let's take a closer look at our chip on the surface i would

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say there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about it and in fact if you

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had told me when it arrived that it was brand new i would probably have believed

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you but this isn't quite an ordinary

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chip and that is why it is so

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cheap if you look closely at the listings for this kind of server gear

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you're gonna see that they fall under three general classes let's start with

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the most expensive chips listed as retail were validated by Intel for end

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user delivery and then probably sold in fully built systems for large customers

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they are going to perform exactly as a brand new processor of the same

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specifications other than that you are very unlikely to get any form of

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warranty support now those chips are still going for less than their original

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price around eighteen hundred to two thousand dollars but given that you

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could buy a threadripper 3970x with more

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not to mention faster course for that kind of money i wouldn't recommend it

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now for the cheapest haha this guy

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this is an engineering sample xeon platinum 8176 we happen to have this one

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lying around it's got 28 cores just like

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the retail one but you can buy one of these for under 200.

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wow notice how it says Intel confidential on

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it this is because this chip was intended to be used by engineers to

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develop their own accompanying products so dell or micron might get large

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batches of these prior to the official launch as they work to make compatible

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motherboards and compatible memory and all that kind of stuff which leads us to

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a couple of small problems with es chips

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like this one first is performance you know how the rumors about upcoming cpus

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often get the clock speeds wrong well that's because Intel is actually

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changing the clock speeds based on what they learn as they ramp up production so

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early chips can run at sometimes drastically lower clock speeds another

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big one is compatibility remember how i mentioned Intel sends these out before

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the product launch well if they're not done designing the product yet depending

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on how early the sample was it's possible that it won't even boot in a

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normal retail motherboard this 169

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xeon nice for example only works in a specific subset of hp proliant servers

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and then some of the 400 to 500 versions

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are only supported by some super microboards and some hp boards so can we

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still get a good deal here yes that is

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where our original chip the one that cost us 999 dollars comes in

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this is a qualifying sample and in most

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cases a qs is just a regular production

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xeon platinum 8176 that reports in

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software as an engineering sample it suss like that ours for example has an

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identical stepping to a regular retail chip meaning that everything from

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compatibility all the way to performance should be exactly identical to a retail

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chip though of course there is only one way for us to find out

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first we should put it in the socket correctly big boy chip we're gonna go

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with the Threadripper application method draw the little x on

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there now because functionally the CPU should be no different from a retail

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chip we should be able to use it on any c621 platform motherboard these boards

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can be had for as cheap as 200 if you're lucky but they can be

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significantly more expensive going as high as around five hundred dollars but

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even at fifteen hundred dollars for our CPU and motherboards we could still be

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in pretty good shape here if it performs one thing you might have a little bit of

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trouble with though is finding a compatible cooler that's not

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kind of stupid there's two different ilms or

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hole patterns so there's a narrow one and a square one you can see the board

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that we have you see this is a square ilm because the socket is more square if

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you had a narrow ilm it would be

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more narrow hey there we go all right chips showing up all that good stuff

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we've got our 96 gigs of memory this is a six channel memory controller

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something uh the writer brought up that didn't even occur to me is that it uses

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like a non-user-friendly style non-graphical bio so i was like

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just a BIOS you mean but yeah it occurred to me that you young

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whippersnapper kids might not be familiar with navigating

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those as for kenneth game the answer is a resounding

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yes siree bob we're running at anywhere from 100 to 120 FPS and do maternal uh

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oh wait what the crap why would it default to this how is this game so bad

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at just running at your native resolution okay uh so

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running at native res uh the answer changes somewhat hmm that's unfortunate

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we are dipping down as low as 40 frames per second on this puppy

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is the CPU cooling like working one moment please these things don't

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actually run that hot which is kind of crazy when you consider they've got 28

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flipping cores in them yeah well there's your answer david how many uh cores this

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game is using the answer appears to be a big fat

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i don't know a couple of them look at the frame rates they're all over

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the place like okay yeah we're at 100 and whatever

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but then oh man look at it just tank or 40. okay

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so um not a great gaming experience for a

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thousand dollars ah there's your problem while we're

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getting cores boosting up to 3.1 even as

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high as 3.5 gigahertz that's plenty for

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modern gaming the cores on average are

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running anywhere from 1 to 1.1 gigahertz

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which tells us that this particular game

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anyway is jumping from one core to the next which might explain why it's

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running really well for a bit and then choking on its own vomit in the next

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moment what we can maybe do is pin a handful of cores to this process and see

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if that helps ah that's a big fat no

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as soon as i have to look at anything in the distance it's not the GPU though because it's not

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about what the GPU has to render it's about what the CPU has to

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because it just it must be a draw call thing then which in vulcan is theoretically like

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really well optimized for that but as soon as it needs more draw calls as soon

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as we go off into the distance over here and it has to be like oh yeah there's a

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bunch of stuff over there it's like oh interesting we're up to like 150 200

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now what the heck is going on here

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why is our FPS gradually climbing it's

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really choppy though this frame counter here is not representative of the

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smoothness of this gaming experience like you can see it probably david right

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so yeah we're running well in excess of 200 FPS

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and it smooths out sometimes this must be just kind of the same issue here what

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a bad gaming CPU and not only is it bad

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for gaming but if you needed to do say 3d work or high resolution video editing

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in premiere the CPU wouldn't be ideal for that either that's because many 3d

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engines greatly favored GPU rendering thanks to GPU's vastly superior

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performance in parallel applications also programs like premiere tend to

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disproportionately favor single core performance versus having as many

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threads as you can cram into a socket that's not to say that a mini core CPU

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like a 5950x is a bad idea for premiere

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it's just that the 5950x also has strong single core performance

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and this one just doesn't where you might see some benefit

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would be in anything that involves complex parallel computing so maybe you

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want a personal server that can do everything like host a few minecraft

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servers and some websites and act as a

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media server and do all of it simultaneously well now we're talking

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even then you can also get a lot of other cpus for around the same price or

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less that can perform those functions take for example the xeon e5 2670 v2

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with a board and cooling you can get a pair of those for around 250 us dollars

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that's 20 cores and 40 threads and definitely all that you need for some

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home automation and nas and media transcoding duty though it does come at

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the cost of higher power consumption and check out our sponsor micro center you

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don't wait and check it out today and right check out that uh 400 extreme

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edition video it's pretty sweet so

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all in all neat chip but not nearly as big a find

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as our 400 extreme editions which by the way is a great video so make sure to go

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check that one out now that you're done watching this one