thanks to overlord from our forum i have got my hands on a really unique piece of
computing history here this is the Intel xtreme series d
5400 xs a
650 dollar motherboard that didn't work
without two 1500 cpus and anywhere from 250 to 500
worth of special memory not 100 sure what the pricing was like information
going back that far is a little scarce because all that pricing that i just fed
you guys is based on information that i could find from two
thousand eight yes my friends this right here was the
heart of a system that once you account for graphics cards power supplies case
drives cooling could easily cost you
five to seven thousand dollars for a
finished tower right up there with the most expensive enthusiast systems today
now at the time one of the main criticisms of the school drill platform
was its high price to performance ratio
especially because at the time well it was hard to find applications that
scaled beyond two cores but how has it
aged there's only one way for us to find out
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this thing is in absolutely incredible condition like even all the original
documentation and accessories and stuff are in here here's a copy of ghost recon
advanced warfighter 2 if you're into that it's even got the door hanger
fraggers only noobs beware you'll be pwned
motherfraggers put that on my door
now the first thing that jumps out about the board itself is of course its
massive size so eatx motherboards like
this were extremely uncommon outside of the server space at that time but
it's not like it wasn't this big for good reason it was absolutely packed
with cutting-edge features for that era so it uses the lga 771
socket or rather i should say two of them which supports xeons but also the
unlocked and overclockable extreme
edition qx 9775
now the xeon platform was chosen for one main reason the consumer chips had a
different pin out that didn't support multiple sockets and the goal here was
to create an eight core platform several
years before AMD would release their first consumer eight core CPU and six
years before Intel would release its own
so then what we're dealing with here is two of
Intel's 3.2 gigahertz york field extreme
edition cpus connected over a 1600 megahertz front side bus to a 5000
series chipset which we can find right in the middle here
that right there provides our cpus with
all the connectivity that they need to memory uh expansion slots and all of
your rear i o and all that good stuff now one of the funny things about this
system is how normal it looks like here's your SATA
ports where your hard drives go here's your pci express slots where your
graphics card goes there's nothing about it to really
immediately indicate that it is 11 years old unless you start to look a little
bit closer let's talk about the memory these are really special so they use
commodity ddr2 dram chips but they're
actually not intercompatible with ddr2
these are called fully buffered dimms or
fb dimms so one of the big challenges of pushing memory speeds and capacities up
is the complexity of designing the traces between the memory and the
controller so in this case that's on the north bridge but in a modern system that
memory controller would be on the CPU itself now one of the ways to reduce
trace complexity and reduce load on a
memory controller is to move to a serial bus
rather than a parallel one so in simple terms they decided that
instead of having the controller communicate directly with the memory
chips on the module they put a chip called an advanced memory buffer onto
every module that would act as a go-between buffering all the read and
write requests now this extra chip here
is not to be confused with the extra dram chip on ecc memory that's used in
modern workstations and servers for error correction now the AMD came with a
penalty to both write speed and to
latency because of the additional communication step but at the time Intel
thought that this trade-off would end up being worth it for the future
improvements in capacity that
never actually materialized by the next generation Intel ended up following
AMD's lead moving the memory controller onto the CPU and they ended up setting
the stage for the ultimately successful plan to increase memory slot counts
which was adding more memory channels to
the CPU itself
okay so one of my challenges getting this thing up and running was actually
finding some coolers that had mounting hardware for such an old socket uh
fortunately i happened to cross a couple of these old uh gemin2's
these things are kind of jokes to mount but uh i didn't really have a choice
they were the only non-water cooling things that were still compatible in our
warehouse and i didn't feel like bringing water cooling up to it
this time there is just something about a dual
socket system that just gets my inner geek going you know
before we boot it up there's a couple more things i want to appreciate one is
the onboard power and reset switches that was pretty cutting edge for the
time even if the i o hasn't aged so well
usb 2 and esata
i guess one for three ain't bad for standards that were going to still exist
10 years later and this is really unique so you've got your four pci express 16x
slots here but at the time no chipset could actually directly run
four pci express 16x slots so how did
they do it so check this out Intel's southbridge
needed some kind of a solution to increase the number of pci express slots
and what they used was actually two
NVIDIA pci express switches which would each take 16 lanes
and split them out into two slots with 16 lanes each so what this meant was
from NVIDIA's driver's perspective
all of the gpus in the system were actually connected to an NVIDIA chipset
meaning that Intel didn't have to resolve the licensing dispute in order
to support sli on this particular motherboard even if none of their others
could do it well some of these holes line up good enough
power connectivity is almost identical to a modern board we're just going to
run a regular old SATA SSD off it okay backwards
compatibility and then uh theoretically i can just throw my titan x test bench
card on here and it should just fire up
okay and one and two and
good luck everybody and we're up hey hard drives detect uh
SSD rather excuse me old habits
so that was painless just fired up a drive i already had set up and bippity
boppity no no drivers required or anything that's it modern Windows 10.
now this is cool one fun thing about this generation of hardware is that
because the CPU bones connected to the northbridge bone is connected to the
memory bone we don't have to deal with the performance penalty where modern dual
socket systems can experience worse performance when this CPU needs
something from the memory that's directly attached to this one causing an
extra communication hop so you can
actually see here all of our cores show up as a single pneuma node which should
allow basically any workload to scale well across all eight of our course i
mean except for the fact that we have a north bridge so there's just like always
an extra hop i mean with that said overall system
responsiveness here is super usable like
with an SSD drive in here i would have no reason to think unless i opened up
task manager that i'm looking at a super old computer here like
everything just kind of works so while it's definitely not modern
there are some really good things about this setup like this is about as far
back as you can go while still maintaining
most of the modern creature comforts like pci express even gen 1 means that
we can add high speed connectivity to this system you want 10 gig networking
which i just installed boom an add-in card and you're ready to
go you want usb 3 boom another add-in
card you're ready to go like pci the older generation which by the way does
also have a couple pci slots in there capped out at 133 megabytes a second and
that was a shared bus so multiple cards plugged into multiple slots
all had to share that limit pci express
even the first generation version featured here could handle up to four
gigabytes per second on a slot like this one okay so it occurs to me that we're
going to be limited by our SATA one drive but i'm copying a file over the
network here and we are out of disk space one moment
please at any rate we should still be able to tell if we're getting an actual
10 gig connection to our server here it should exceed 112 megabytes a second and
boom there it is 183 megabytes a second which is well shy of
10 gig but certainly more than one what's our CPU usage look like doing
that so let's come up with some more
realistic workloads then i mean what about 4k youtube remember guys this is 2
000. holy sh this was in 2008
yup remember when youtube looked like this
4k youtube was just a twinkle in the engineer's eye
when this system was released so let's see if it can handle it
there it is ladies and gentlemen 4k youtube playback
butter smooth what does that cost us in terms of CPU
usage though actually that's not even that bad we're sitting at around 20 CPU
now i'm not saying to get too excited about this because 20 CPU on this system
is about oh it just spiked to 300 watts
but about 250 watts from the wall which
considering that a modern smartphone can also playback 4k youtube in
the single digit watts is uh
well it shows you that we've definitely come a long way in the last 10 years as
for multitasking while even just trying to browse the web in the foreground
while our 4k video plays in the background we're going to see spikes in
CPU activity up in the range of 60 to 70
or even 80 depending on how heavy the pages we're
trying to load are so you can actually see each page load here as it's coming
in oh wow loading a big google sheet actually got us up to 75 CPU usage but
our video is still playing back smoothly we can scrub around like all the
features work exactly like you would expect them to
now to see how well it's aged in terms of productivity
let's fire up uh photoshop creative cloud ed you want to try and do
something on this let me know let me know if it's any good all righty here's
some coil line it's working there
is that a reasonable amount of time to open this up real quick yeah maybe close
task manager in the background oh wow we're at 100 CPU what are you trying to
do i'm just duplicating that layer and it's
a flat layer wow you can actually hear the fans ramp
up oh wow oh there you go i just needed to catch
up now i kind of wonder if a big part of
our problem could be that we've only got eight gigs of memory
oh so we're only letting photoshop have up to five
point something gigs that's not the worst thing ever actually
it's not great i mean your workstation doesn't perform like this does it no but
i mean this is 10 years old yeah this looks pretty unusable to me
i mean resolutions have gone up since then so
it's just loading loading things for days all
right thanks ed are we even going to be able to close photoshop
now i was kind of hoping that the photoshop test would go okay so that
there would be some suspense when i fire up adobe premiere
but um all signs point to this just being a
blood blood blath a blood laugh is that worse than a bloodbath it's much worse
give it a second it's just it's popping in it's popping in popping fresh you
know got that fresh content
all right that's it all media loaded let's see what kind of performance we
can get here woof
now in fairness this is 8k footage
um and we're trying to play it at half res
quarter res oh nope
that's ugly let's try one eighth okay maybe one
sixteenth okay so it's not completely unusable but only at 1 16 quality you
can see now at least my scrubbing performance is quite a bit better than
it was i can move around on the timeline and actually get a preview in a
reasonable amount of time here so this is grayed out but that game
definitely launched this is some strange behavior
oh yeah we're trying to game now theoretically the higher resolution you
go the more likely you are to be bottlenecked by your graphics card
rather than your CPU so i'm going to try and run ano 1800
at 4k resolution now the menu is at 60fps that's
not a bad sign shut up david there we go
and no that spectacular menu performance did
not translate to in-game so this card
should be good for 45 to 50 frames per
second at these settings somewhere in that range this is clearly
not that now what's kind of cool is you can
really see g-sync in action when you zoom in and you manage to get like a
decent frame rate so we're up to around 30 but it doesn't manage to
account for like panning and also the game just crashed
g-sync cannot help you with that wow this is one spectacular game crash
like i can't even get task manager up
sign out that'll do it see this is the thing that
kills me about Windows they can't code an actual no end the
task but if you sign out oh yeah you want to end the task no problem okay so
in fairness to our system here i did choose anno knowing that it's a
particularly CPU heavy game so
why don't we try something a little bit more fair this here eventually is going to be
rocket league again 4k
high quality with motion blur off
and actually this is quite playable
i mean i still suck at this game or whatever but the good news is that we're
running it anywhere from about 50 to 65 frames per second
it actually plays pretty darn nice especially again like i said with g-sync
a feature that they couldn't possibly have imagined existing back when they were creating
this motherboard and CPU combo thing is guys my secret plan all along
was actually to outfit this thing with
2500 worth of modern gaming horsepower that's
right i wanted to run two rtx 2080 tis
on it in sli now
the thing is though it's going to take some time to get sli working because
there are actually issues with Windows 10's driver support for those NVIDIA pci
express bridges that we need oh crap i just realized i forgot to plug the
chipset fan back in that's hot
all right so anyway that's going to take some work also
some of the things we've tried so far have been pretty slow we're running into
obvious CPU bottlenecks maybe overclocking is the solution
well that's going to take some time as well another thing
eight gigs of RAM is obviously a problem for productivity but it may even be a
problem for gaming for us at this point Intel only ever validated this
motherboard for eight gigs of RAM four by two gigs so i'm just gonna have to
source some four gig fully buffered dimms
and just see what happens also i think there's some software
optimization that we can do so game launchers it's gotten to the point where
you need two three four maybe even more of those running on your system and on a
modern system something like the uplay launcher is a negligible amount of
system overhead not enough to affect performance unless you're running like
comparative benchmarks or something but on a system like this
having you play in the background look at this just launching it spiked us up
to 80 and having it running in the background sucks up as much as eight to ten percent
of our CPU performance so to put that in context that is about two-thirds of one
of my eight cores like okay anno still
wasn't gonna run well in this thing but having stuff going in the background
certainly isn't going to help
so then i want to hear from you guys what are
your suggestions in the video comments for what you want to see for part two
and i also want to hear from you guys what you think of this segway to our
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