this is what 9 000
can get you or at least it could you see i bought this 28 core Intel xeon
platinum 8176 on ebay for just
999 and it's not only not a bad deal for
the CPU on its own but it's a reflection of an increasingly favorable CPU market
for buyers that is if you're willing to get your hands a
little bit dirty digging through the archives of CPU history and
if you're willing to take some risks like the risk i take of you skipping
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Intel's first generation xeon scalable cpus launched on july 11 2017 and the
reception to them was lukewarm largely because AMD
also launched their first generation epic server cpus around the same time
see the problem for Intel was for nearly five thousand dollars less you could buy
a CPU from AMD with more threads and
more cash if you were willing to overlook some of the growing pains that
came with it being an all new platform so AMD's return to competitiveness could
be part of the reason that we were able to get this CPU for just 12 of its
retail price four years later but
it's definitely not the whole picture those of you who follow closely the
secondary market may know this already but for the uninitiated there's kind of
a pattern to the availability of cheap powerful hardware like this you see many
data center and enterprise customers upgrade their hardware on a schedule
this helps them stay more secure by ensuring that their servers will be
actively supported and patched by the manufacturer and it also allows them to
take advantage of the better efficiency of more modern processors well that
retired hardware has to go somewhere so
instead of just e-wasting it a small amount might be given to employees to
validate and use personally while the majority will go to refurb server sites
like bargainhardware.co.uk or more general
auction sites like ebay because even though it's older gear it's absolutely
still useful and can be cumulatively worth hundreds of thousands or even
millions of dollars and these sales are great news for enthusiasts because even
a single large data center dumping a bunch of cpus onto ebay can have a
profound effect not just on the models that they're selling but the used CPU
market as a whole so let's take a closer look at our chip on the surface i would
say there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about it and in fact if you
had told me when it arrived that it was brand new i would probably have believed
you but this isn't quite an ordinary
chip and that is why it is so
cheap if you look closely at the listings for this kind of server gear
you're gonna see that they fall under three general classes let's start with
the most expensive chips listed as retail were validated by Intel for end
user delivery and then probably sold in fully built systems for large customers
they are going to perform exactly as a brand new processor of the same
specifications other than that you are very unlikely to get any form of
warranty support now those chips are still going for less than their original
price around eighteen hundred to two thousand dollars but given that you
could buy a threadripper 3970x with more
not to mention faster course for that kind of money i wouldn't recommend it
now for the cheapest haha this guy
this is an engineering sample xeon platinum 8176 we happen to have this one
lying around it's got 28 cores just like
the retail one but you can buy one of these for under 200.
wow notice how it says Intel confidential on
it this is because this chip was intended to be used by engineers to
develop their own accompanying products so dell or micron might get large
batches of these prior to the official launch as they work to make compatible
motherboards and compatible memory and all that kind of stuff which leads us to
a couple of small problems with es chips
like this one first is performance you know how the rumors about upcoming cpus
often get the clock speeds wrong well that's because Intel is actually
changing the clock speeds based on what they learn as they ramp up production so
early chips can run at sometimes drastically lower clock speeds another
big one is compatibility remember how i mentioned Intel sends these out before
the product launch well if they're not done designing the product yet depending
on how early the sample was it's possible that it won't even boot in a
normal retail motherboard this 169
xeon nice for example only works in a specific subset of hp proliant servers
and then some of the 400 to 500 versions
are only supported by some super microboards and some hp boards so can we
still get a good deal here yes that is
where our original chip the one that cost us 999 dollars comes in
this is a qualifying sample and in most
cases a qs is just a regular production
xeon platinum 8176 that reports in
software as an engineering sample it suss like that ours for example has an
identical stepping to a regular retail chip meaning that everything from
compatibility all the way to performance should be exactly identical to a retail
chip though of course there is only one way for us to find out
first we should put it in the socket correctly big boy chip we're gonna go
with the Threadripper application method draw the little x on
there now because functionally the CPU should be no different from a retail
chip we should be able to use it on any c621 platform motherboard these boards
can be had for as cheap as 200 if you're lucky but they can be
significantly more expensive going as high as around five hundred dollars but
even at fifteen hundred dollars for our CPU and motherboards we could still be
in pretty good shape here if it performs one thing you might have a little bit of
trouble with though is finding a compatible cooler that's not
kind of stupid there's two different ilms or
hole patterns so there's a narrow one and a square one you can see the board
that we have you see this is a square ilm because the socket is more square if
you had a narrow ilm it would be
more narrow hey there we go all right chips showing up all that good stuff
we've got our 96 gigs of memory this is a six channel memory controller
something uh the writer brought up that didn't even occur to me is that it uses
like a non-user-friendly style non-graphical bio so i was like
just a BIOS you mean but yeah it occurred to me that you young
whippersnapper kids might not be familiar with navigating
those as for kenneth game the answer is a resounding
yes siree bob we're running at anywhere from 100 to 120 FPS and do maternal uh
oh wait what the crap why would it default to this how is this game so bad
at just running at your native resolution okay uh so
running at native res uh the answer changes somewhat hmm that's unfortunate
we are dipping down as low as 40 frames per second on this puppy
is the CPU cooling like working one moment please these things don't
actually run that hot which is kind of crazy when you consider they've got 28
flipping cores in them yeah well there's your answer david how many uh cores this
game is using the answer appears to be a big fat
i don't know a couple of them look at the frame rates they're all over
the place like okay yeah we're at 100 and whatever
but then oh man look at it just tank or 40. okay
so um not a great gaming experience for a
thousand dollars ah there's your problem while we're
getting cores boosting up to 3.1 even as
high as 3.5 gigahertz that's plenty for
modern gaming the cores on average are
running anywhere from 1 to 1.1 gigahertz
which tells us that this particular game
anyway is jumping from one core to the next which might explain why it's
running really well for a bit and then choking on its own vomit in the next
moment what we can maybe do is pin a handful of cores to this process and see
if that helps ah that's a big fat no
as soon as i have to look at anything in the distance it's not the GPU though because it's not
about what the GPU has to render it's about what the CPU has to
because it just it must be a draw call thing then which in vulcan is theoretically like
really well optimized for that but as soon as it needs more draw calls as soon
as we go off into the distance over here and it has to be like oh yeah there's a
bunch of stuff over there it's like oh interesting we're up to like 150 200
now what the heck is going on here
why is our FPS gradually climbing it's
really choppy though this frame counter here is not representative of the
smoothness of this gaming experience like you can see it probably david right
so yeah we're running well in excess of 200 FPS
and it smooths out sometimes this must be just kind of the same issue here what
a bad gaming CPU and not only is it bad
for gaming but if you needed to do say 3d work or high resolution video editing
in premiere the CPU wouldn't be ideal for that either that's because many 3d
engines greatly favored GPU rendering thanks to GPU's vastly superior
performance in parallel applications also programs like premiere tend to
disproportionately favor single core performance versus having as many
threads as you can cram into a socket that's not to say that a mini core CPU
like a 5950x is a bad idea for premiere
it's just that the 5950x also has strong single core performance
and this one just doesn't where you might see some benefit
would be in anything that involves complex parallel computing so maybe you
want a personal server that can do everything like host a few minecraft
servers and some websites and act as a
media server and do all of it simultaneously well now we're talking
even then you can also get a lot of other cpus for around the same price or
less that can perform those functions take for example the xeon e5 2670 v2
with a board and cooling you can get a pair of those for around 250 us dollars
that's 20 cores and 40 threads and definitely all that you need for some
home automation and nas and media transcoding duty though it does come at
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don't wait and check it out today and right check out that uh 400 extreme
edition video it's pretty sweet so
all in all neat chip but not nearly as big a find
as our 400 extreme editions which by the way is a great video so make sure to go
check that one out now that you're done watching this one