the EVGA classified super record 2 is an
utterly Unique Piece of gaming history when it was released this motherboard
and the two CPUs inside it would have set you back nearly
$4,000 add some memory case and power
supply probably a handful of gpus for that sweet sweet quad SLI action and we
are dangerously close to a gaming system that would cost
$10,000 adjusted for inflation a gaming
system all I can say is for that kind of money this thing better be pretty darn
future proof it better be would you look
at the time it's future o' so to see if
the sr2 still F we put together a library of awesome games that still
support SLI and we got our hands on not
one but four of the fastest quad SLI
gpus that EVGA ever built to see how
this monster holds up 9 to 13 years
later like the video if you think that's a good question to
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the very first thing you'll notice about the classified sr2 is its massive size
this ain't your mama's eatx and it ain't even your papy's xlx it uses a form
factor of evga's own design
hptx that weighs in at a colossal 15 in
by 13 and half their justification
well where else are we going to put the two Zeon workstation CPUs the 12 sticks
of DDR3 memory and the whopping s PCIe
gen 2x6 expansion slots to even get that
much Hardware support in spite of EVGA marketing this platform to enthusiasts
and Gamers they used an Intel 5520
server chipset so as we mentioned before
we've gone with the best chips of aailable for it a pair of xon
x5690 Allin we're talking 24 total
threads with 24 megabytes of cache operating at turbo speeds of up to
3.73 GHz and the word on the street is
that if you're willing to risk your substantial investment
$1,600 each they overclock like wild on
this board challenge accepted to make
the platform more friendly to Consumers the classified sr2 supports non ECC RAM
so the same kind you would put in a gaming system rather than a server or a
workstation we did find that the support for it was a little bit spotty
especially when we tried to Cobble together kits out of older sticks we had
lying around but thankfully Corsair still makes DDR3 and they sent over
enough sticks for us to Cobble together a couple of triple Channel DDR 3600 kits
will we get better performance than dual channel in games almost definitely not
is it cool heck yeah it is is it soft no
for that you're going to need the new polo from LTT Store.com time to get this
mama jama installed and
uh
um thankfully we've got a solution the
one the only EVGA
dg85 I flipping love this case it's
going to require a little bit of work but this case unironically holds up
extremely well HDMI pass through for VR
a built-in rear door for a super clean look an acrylic side panel and acrylic
interior panel not to mention ample Cable Management the only issue is that
these standoffs are not in the right place though that seems to be more the
board's fault than the case's fault going to have to mask these
off three screws seems pretty good now
something that doesn't hold up as well is the storage support on this board
modern NVMe drives require a ufi type
firmware rather than an older BIOS type firmware and the sr2 it ain't got it
there are hacky workarounds involving a bootloader on a SATA device and then
handing off to an NVMe device but for Simplicity we've stuck with tried and
true SATA 2 terabytes for our library of
SLI compatible games now we need to think about power if we want to run not
one not two but four 980 TI I mean
that's 1,000 Watts right there and our CPUs are going to draw up to 130 watts
each that's over 1,200 Watts if only
there was someone who made a power supply that well okay you spoiled it
okay fine we're using the EVGA Supernova 1600 T2 and the size isn't the only
weird thing about this motherboard I mean look at all of these extra power
connectors we've got two eight pins for the CPUs and then an additional three
six pin PCI Express for auxiliary power
for well potentially all these devices that won't be a problem for us though
because we don't care about cable managing this build there we go we chose
this particular card because it's a twos slot variant so when we went to add
three more of them they would actually fit without using risers plus I mean
look tvga we had to go EVGA you believe
a top-of-the-line GPU with a 384bit bus
and six gigs of memory was only
$650 practically pay that much for a GP with six gigs of memory today I mean not
quite but jeez anyway we're going to take a
baseline with just one of these cards then we're going to add some
more she works it's alive two CPUs let's
go what better way to try out our SI
gaming system then crisis 2 considering it's only running
at between 60 and 70fps at 1440p I
wouldn't say it's running especially well but that was kind of this game's
whole deal let's see if our system can handle something more modern what about
cyber Punk hold on hold on it doesn't say play
again I wanted to play the new crisis
cyber Punk but red launcher's crashing even with the Legacy patch that's fine
let's overclock this thing man I do not
remember how to overclock on this platform In fairness to me it's been
over 10 years okay let's just try dummy OC dummy OC let's go oh it worked we are
over 4 GHz gummy OC for the win
effortless little bit more voltage easy
4.2 dang CPUs are only at like 60° too
this is why people used to overclock cuz there was a point I want more though oh
my God that was 400 watts decided to go for gold here we went straight to 4.5
GHz are we going to get it oh oh she crashed
4.35 I believe no blue
screen we're going to take the easy w at
4.2 what kind of FPS we looking at I'm Vibe checking frame view doesn't work on
Windows 7 so we just have to Vibe the FPS S I would say it's not a lot better
but it's a little better I'm seeing far fewer dips into the mid-60s that
indicates to us that a faster CPU never hurts but it wasn't our main bottleneck
thankfully we have a plan let's see how many gpus we can stuff in here by the
way did I mention we're sucking back like 500 watts with only one 980 TI
right now to somewhat control our benchmarking I am going to look at this
flame that's going to be our scene 93 fr fres per
second and now you see why we didn't bother cable managing anything while
there are nine PCI slots at the back and in theory that's all we need cuz the
first two are unoccupied and then we've got seven all right that last card is a
double slot card and um there's nowhere for it to go that's where our new case
comes in did uh Justin make this test bench oh yeah did he do it really fast
oh yeah nice unironically this is how a lot of people ran sr2 I mean it's right
in the name this was not a daily driver platform for regular consumers it's the
super record 2 something about loading up a motherboard with gpus that just man
I miss it you know time for the big moment the quad SLI
Bridge oh yeah now for the most fun part
configure SL maximize 3D performance uh
casual uh 400 Watts at the desktop 500
watts at the desktop no big deal this
really is the Hummer of gaming machines
all this brick of gpus would cost you back when it was new was $22,600
accounting for inflation is about equivalent to $ 249s today but hey it's
got 24 gigs of vram just like a 4090
maybe it'll keep up no that's not how that works that's not how any of this
works last time we ran the unigen heaven Benchmark on this system it was with
just one card we got around 2200 points
coming just shy of 90 frames per second
four-way SLI scaling isn't perfect but I got to say I was expecting a little
better than that here's the thing remember that 24 gigs of vram well it's
split between all four different cards you don't just get to pull it together
every one of these has to hold their own copy of any asset that's required in
order to render the scene also this SLI
link not that fast so the intercard communication adds a ton of overhead as
they're coordinating who's working on exactly what what this means is that
especially Beyond Two Cards the scaling is awful and the worst part is that none
of that is the worst part it's hard to pick up on camera but oh yeah there it
is you probably saw that micro stutter which is caused by uneven timing of the
delivered finished frames can be very distracting and make a higher frame rate
feel like a lower one because of the hitches and choppiness but I'm not going
to let that dampen my enthusiasm let's run some games all right here we
go it's like not even 10 FP it's
96 oh my God hold on hold on we haven't
gotten down to our fire yet we got to look at the fire maybe this setup is
fire and all we're drawing is uh 800 WTS
you know what hold on a second no no this is faster we're
at95 120 FPS but that fire 140 150 FPS
that's that's legit actually cuz we were getting 90 something before the 50%
Improvement never mind that two cards probably would have gotten to very
similar numbers but then we wouldn't get to see the sweet sweet SLI times 4 in
our top left try to launch another SLI game let's see how compatible SLI was
with uh video game games back then all right could we have done 4K woo she's
floaty and that 60 FPS does not feel
like 60 FPS oh wow that's truly awful I
want to see 1440p man this bottom card the fan just keeps turning off going
back on it's not doing anything while we're drawing 630 Watts it's actually
less than I was expecting it's a lot less than I was expecting they're
definitely not going to full usage nope I mean I think if it's all the way all
four are being used so we are basically not touching our quad no we're using
like one and a half cards something to keep in mind is that even games that
support SLI don't necessarily support three-way or four-way SLI let alone take
like full advantage of it like support does not mean utilize Titanfall 2 yeah
it was on the list crank it times eight yeah yeah it'll do 8X
msaa I'm getting over 100 FPS 108 1080
but this is cranked 1080p by the time
you put on 8X msaa you might as well be running out a higher resolution yeah but
look we're using still like one maybe two cards yep all we're really learning
is that the 980 TI is a really good card and we can tell from our power
consumption too actually our power consp around 750 watts we are probably getting
some benefit minor but
some yeah these boys are not doing much
GPU 0 42 48
5054 so it's not that only one GPU is
doing the work it's that each GPU is doing very little of it okay tried Jedi
fall in order that's from 2019 here we go with a system from 2010 to 2015
depending how you measure it no I see
this doing weird stuff in the startup menu uh but is using a lot more of the
cards I paid for the whole card I want to use the whole card yeah 144 graphic
quality epic epic here we go uh o this
does not bode well that does not look like 60 FPS sir I mean it's using those
cards though oh yeah oh boy
740 750 okay never mind the power is
being used and we're getting 68 FPS but
that looks more like 25 oh yeah even just through the camera like it should
be plain to see that that is not 75
FPS oh wow that was
horrible oh did you see that was it transitioned highest we're going for it
absolutely cranked 1080p screen capab broke I mean the game's working this is
only 45 FPS and feels way better than
Jedi Fallen ordered it at 75 we lost our SLI tracker though yeah we don't know
how much is being used very little it turns 5 60 watts yep Ultra Plus wow that
is a very uh excited ponytail yeah why
is it shaking so much why is everything awful so much
oh wow what is
happening I don't think the Witcher 3
despite saying that it's compatible with SLI I don't think it likes it at all but
none of that is the fault of the classified sr2 so what if we took a more
modern Jeep pu and at least gave it a chance to run these modern games In
fairness to SLI this was the last generation of cards to use the older
style non High Bend width link and
before gpus got this fast it did work a little better it was less of a
bottleneck this feels stupid but I'm
doing it wait a second are there even Windows 7 drivers for the 490 that is a
great question I don't I doubt it okay the 490 doesn't have a driver for
Windows 7 but you know what I say to that no big loss cuz guess what the 3090
TI does and also hey happens to be the
fastest card EVGA ever made well fastest card they sold fastest card they sold
were you in 1440 before when you got the 130 number 120 what 150 at the fire what
like 140 150 it's not that much better
well we're not the fire yet I guess no but it's not that much better right
that's wild then hold on what's our Cuda core counts Colin can you look up how
many cacor a 980 TI has and then compare that times 4 to how many cacor a 390 TI
has uh Vance can you look it up please
sure he tries so hard as it turns out
the total number of cakor is not that dissimilar with this having about
10,700 and our 4 9980 TI totaling around
11,000 does it maybe make sense that the performance is about the same holy crap
the performance is about the same wow
actually power consumption is not even that far off no 580 pretty close this is
obviously a case where the CPU is what is holding us back in spite of the fact
that we're running it 1440p Ultra let's
try a more demanding game crisis 2 was demanding for its time
wow I mean it looks better it looks way
better yeah you know what it's super h
though yeah we're probably held back a little bit by DDR3 as well our CPU even
though we're at like what 4 GHz uh the IPC of how many generations yeah is
really going to climb and something to consider is that if any aspect of this
game leaks off of the six cores that are on the one CPU and needs to be handled
by the other one we have to wait around for that qpi link between the CPUs you
can really see it these birds are like
yeah they just like stop and then go I want to try a couple more games
though this is 100% completely totally
fine and playable this is freaking awesome oh I mean except I need to get
good that's the only issue when the CPU is fast enough you will get a great
gaming experience I would definitely recommend upgrading an older system like
this before spending that kind of money on a GPU yeah but you can throw in your
new GPU and then upgrade later if you really want to you could as long as
you've already got the uh power supply head room yeah this is freaking awesome
400 watts oh wow and so much more
efficient which tells us we are still very CPU bottle oh 100% our cards fans
aren't even turned on I mean even if we are capping the frame rate that is
flipping wild okay why is that frame
rate capped though I don't know you know what I bet that frame rate cap is a big
part of why the CPU is not causing issues as well cuz not just running it
right up against the limit okay Jedi fall in order I feel good we're going to
play a reasonably game on this ancient
freaking platform plus a 390t well plus A 390t Minor
Details this is better but still sucks
much yeah this is still very hitchy now give it a sec maybe it'll warm up you
know what I want to do now what not now now but now that I've seen this I want
to get those 980 TI running on something a little newer they might not be that
bad 6 gigs of vram though I feel like this is CPU again oh wait no we're at
like 100 FPS also it's not hitching as much anymore yeah it warmed up this kind
of settled in this is like perfect now
playable perfect perfect is a stretch see it's not perfect when he
goes to New areas and it has to load for
a second struggling a little it struggles it is damn playable markedly
better I'd like to see you play this game on your 13-year-old console oh yeah
no that's not going to work mind you your 13-year-old console wouldn't have cost you 1,000 to upgrade or to begin
with you know what else needs an upgrade this segue just kidding not yet I wanted
to talk about how much fun we had building this okay it was kind of a
disaster and there were compatibility issues just like in the old days but
like overclocking man we got a meaningful Improvement in performance
and crisis for like 15 25 minutes of
effort do you guys even overclock anymore we're going to link a community
poll in the video description it just doesn't feel worth it and man and I
don't know what it is maybe it's the polo shirt with the collar or the old
Hardware but this was an absolute blast even if the price made no sense and it
was inefficient as all hell just like this inefficient segue
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