Okay, so it's here. This might not look
like much, but if you've ever gotten a review sample from Intel, then you'll
know that there could be anything inside. Usually a CPU, but anyway, this,
my friends, is one of our two Intel Xeon
2699 V3 processors. Now, this was not easy to
get because this is not your average run-of-the-mill consumer, you know, tops
out at a,000 peasant dollars processor. No, this is a $4,500
chip. It has 18 cores. It supports
hyperthreading for a total of 36 threads. It has 45 megabytes of cache.
It has more cash than my first computer
had RAM. My first computer that I owned for myself had RAM. It has more cash
than that. And my server board isn't
here for it yet, but I figure what the hey, this is LGA 20113, right? Just like
an X99 motherboard. The X99 motherboard listed as
compatible. So, I figured why don't we take her for a spin even though we can't
fire up both of them. and I'm gonna put it in ASUS X99 Deluxe and find out what
this little puppy is capable of. So, come along for the ride.
The Ring Video Doorbell lets you see who's at the door. And really, now
you're going to open the door. Okay, well, whatever. I could have prevented
him from doing that by locking my door and then going and seeing the video on
my phone to see if I should let that guy in. All right, so the first step is to
take that uh Wussy Core i75960X
8 core processor out of my test bench.
Now, the first thing that stands out to me immediately about these suckers is
the fact that even though they go in the same socket, you can actually see that
the Xeon chip Look, my hands are shaking. I'm super stoked on this. You
can see that the Xeon chip is significantly wider and it will actually
overhang the socket a little bit compared to what the Core i7 chip did.
Now, this is for a very good reason because each of those physical cores uh
in the die down there is the same size as the eight that go in here, but
there's 18 of them. 18 cores. So,
they're going to be spread out quite a bit more under the integrated heat
spreader, the metal piece on top. Now, one of the cool things about these Xeons
is that, you know, you might go 18 cores. Holy cow. Oh, we better put some
new thermal compound on there. 18 cores, holy cow. How, you know, are they going
to cool that sucker? Well, because they
have so many lower powered cores running at a lower voltage and because the power
density is so much lower, they're actually significantly easier to cool
and they will it will in theory run cooler than our fewer high-powered
cores. So, uh I am really stoked to see
how our single 120 mm water cooler fares
with this bad boy. Okay, now zeons aren't really meant to be used with
gaming memory. So, we actually had Kingston for the the dual processor
server that we're building with this thing, right? We had Kingston provide
128 gigs. So, that's eight 8x6 gig
sticks of ECC DDR42133.
So, we're going to go ahead and we're going to pull our gaming memory out, but I'm not 100% sure if this board even
supports ECC. So,
okay. Moment of truth time.
Let's see if she boots.
Oh, does this powered on? Oh, boss.
Oh, here we go. That took a really long time. There it
is. New CPU installed. 64 gigs of RAM.
E5 2699 V3 at 2.3 GHz. So, uh, yeah, I
guess all that's left now is boot into Windows. Check that out. CPU core
voltage 784 volts.
Next to nothing.
You're going to miss the moment. It's installing driver software. Oh, that's
just USB devices. Okay, I guess the CPU works already fine then.
I don't know. Maybe those. Holy crap.
Have you ever seen 18 threads and or
excuse me 18 cores and 18 hyperthreaded
virtual cores in one place at one time?
That is fantastic. There's our 45 megs
of level three cache. There's our 18x
256 kilobyte. Wow, this thing has multiple megabytes. So 4 and 1/2 megs of
level two cache. Never mind the the level three cache.
Memory is running in quad channel. Now, something I'm curious about is I
obviously this chip is not designed for gaming strictly speaking, but I wonder
will it support the regular unbuffered memory?
Let's uh let's take a run at it, shall we? So, since we're playing around
anyway, uh we're going to boot her up with our quad channel kit of Corsair
Vengeance memory. And I'm just going to see if like XMP memory works because I
can't imagine why it would, but I also
can't necessarily think of a reason why not. I mean, would Intel turn a feature
off on the $4,500 processor?
It boots.
And if we go to advanced mode, XMPP is an option. Oh, I don't think
that's going to work, though. I don't know. Let's Let's see. Uh, yeah. You
know what? Okay, I'm going to let it try.
I don't think this is going to work, though. The way XMP works on the consumer grade
chips is it'll actually run the CPU strap at 125 megahertz. Um, and then
it's actually going to run the base clock slightly out of spec. And I really
don't think the Xeon is going to like that. If this boots, I'll be floored. I
don't think it is. It's in a loop right now.
It's not happy. Time to clear Simos and restart.
You know what? Let's do 26666 since that is a little bit of a of a safer
number. Oh, not happy.
Let's go for default settings. And that's it.
Okay, so now that I'm booted up, I know the max turbo frequency for this chip is
3.5 GHz in a single threaded workload, which means in theory you actually could
game on the thing and there would be no disadvantage compared to running on a
consumer chip. But what I don't know is
that in spite of its 2.3 GHz base clock,
what it will run at under a sustained
all core load. So there's two things I
want to know. I want to know what voltage it actually runs at when we're loading it. And I want to know what
frequency it actually runs at. So you can see turbo boost and speedep jumping
around changing frequencies here. So let's start our ID to 64 stability test.
And then just for fun,
100% usage of 18 cores and 36 threads.
So it looks like we're going to get a
multiplier of 24. Not bad. So that's a
little bit higher. Not much higher. It manages to turbo boost another, you
know, 100 MHz, but that's better than nothing. And the core voltage stays
extremely low. So these are super low
power cores. So, I'm going to go eat lunch and we'll come back and find out
what these temps settling at. All right, so this is actually better than I
expected. It's been sitting here running for 28 minutes and our highest core is
51, 52°,
something like that. That is ridiculous.
So, let's overclock it.
Now, I don't think we're going to be able to do much. Xeons straight up do
not allow you to change the multiplier.
They're not consumer chips. They're not intended for that. So, the only thing
you can do on a Zeon is increase the base clock speed. Now, we already saw
what happened when we tried to run a different strap. So, that's clearly not
happening. We're not going to 125 base clock. So, all we can really do is maybe
we can get, you know, 5 MHz
more on the 100 MHz stock base clock.
But remember guys, 5 MHz more is 5% to
our to every clock speed we run at every boost level. So, that could result in a
significant performance improvement, especially when you multiply it by 18
cores. That's that's like adding almost another core to the to the chip.
Look at that. 105 MHz. We are now seeing Well, I guess
we should we should compare apples to apples. So, let's run our stress test.
2.73 GHz.
Rounding up a little bit. Come on. It's still impressive on our 18 core
processor under full load. How very
interesting. Now, obviously, something like this is going to need a longer
stress test if you're going to deploy it in any kind of environment. Um, and 105
megahertz from my understanding is actually pretty borderline. So, we're
gonna use uh we're actually going to use ASUS's real bench in order to hit this
bad boy and find out over a longer period of time
if she's stable. So, Real Bench has two modes. One of
them is a stress test mode and one is a benchmark mode. So, let's go ahead and
give her up to 16 gigs of RAM and start.
All right, so Real Bench, I thought it
was still running for quite some time, but the system actually locked up after
about 14 minutes. So, we're going to dial this puppy back.
Let's say 103 MHz. Let's try this again
and find out if we can get her stable. Okay, so now we're booted up at 103 MHz
base clock. So let's do our eight hour
stress test again and find out if this
is stable. This will still give us a 3%
improvement in frequency which will come
back actually. Oh, this is not the same
kind of a workload. So you guys can see that even in a fairly multi-threaded
workload, we're actually sitting at
2.88 GHz per core.
Wow. So it's only in that synthetic IDA
workload that the multiplier is only going to 24. That is really impressive.
So, it looks like our 8h hour run
actually did succeed, which means that
we're stable for all intents and purposes at a 3% overclock on our Zeon.
So, now all that's left is to run a couple benchmarks and kind of see how it
goes from there. So, uh, those of you who are into Cinebench, why don't we go
ahead and do a multi-threaded Cinebench R15
bench.
Wow,
that is incredible.
I've watched this run a lot of times. I
have never watched it run like that.
Holy crap. So I think is this your Xeon
Ed 2.6 GHz 12 core 24 thread?
Uh 2.7. Okay. So this thing
is double the performance of an X5650.
It is two and a half time like 2.3 times the performance of a 3930K
in Cinebench. Something that scales reasonably well. Now, let's run the
single core benchmark because I want to see how performance is actually scaling
going from 1 to 18 cores. This one's going to take a while. I don't think
we're going to film the whole thing. You see, this is this is more like what I'm
used to seeing. So, we mentioned this before, but this
is the Ring Video Doorbell. Basically, what it does is it allows you to preview
using video. It's got a 720p camera on your iOS or Android device who is coming
to your door. So, whoever it is that happens to be coming up the steps and
knocking or in this case actually ringing the bell, which is of course his
cue, but he totally missed it. What? Oh, hi. I have a package for you,
Lionus. Get inside and get to work. I thought
this was going to be my dual socket motherboard. Go, go. Jeez. Anyway, the
point is it can be powered with your existing doorbell wiring or it can use
its 5200 mAh internal battery and it
works over Wi-Fi. It's got motion detection and is basically just a way of
knowing who exactly it is without actually going outside or unlocking your
door or whatever else the case may be. It's available for $1.99 and for $3 a
month you can actually archive the footage off of it for six months. So,
it's $30 a year if you buy a year at a time. So, head over to the link that
I've got posted below me if you want to learn more about the Ring doorbell. All
right. So, here we go. Obviously, performance is a little bit lower.
Actually, less than 18 times the performance. So, you can see that what
we lose in intercore communication and
splitting up the project efficiency, we actually gain back and then a little bit
with hyperthreading. So, performance
looks very promising. This is an extremely fast machine. Um, but I think
that's pretty much it for today. I'd love for you guys to leave a comment and
let me know if you'd like to see any other completely, you know, different
kinds of of stuff with this thing. I
already have some ideas. I'd love to see how it actually does in in gaming
workloads, for example. I'd love to see if we can if we can crack the top of
some leaderboards based on that we're using processors that
literally nobody has. So, uh, yeah, I
guess that's pretty much it. Thanks for watching, guys. Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it
sucked, and, uh, leave a comment if your feelings are more complicated than that,
preferably in our forum, which is linked in the video description. also linked in
the video description. You can buy a cool t-shirt like this one, give us a monthly contribution if you think what
we're doing is awesome and we need more CPUs like this or even just change your
Amazon bookmarked one with our affiliate code because if you bought a Zeon like
that on Amazon with our affiliate code, that would help us a lot, like a lot.
So, uh, thanks again for watching and as always, don't forget to subscribe.