$650 64-Core Quad Socket Gaming Workstation!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,526 words · ~7 min read
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back in december of 2015 we threw together a budget eight core gaming pc
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for under 150 bucks for the CPU RAM and
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motherboard that is still a great deal almost two years later and we were able
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to do this thanks to a couple of things one high-end workstation and server
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equipment is often ahead of the technology curve in certain ways like
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multi-core processors and two the way that businesses upgrade their it
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gear on a regular cycle can lead to big
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jumps in the supply of this older tech on sites like ebay where the pricing
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often ends up much lower than mainstream hardware because it's less familiar to
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the average consumer and nobody's searching for it
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so we thought to ourselves well
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now eight core cpus are like mainstream
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so how do we take this concept to another level
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let's build the most badass machine
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possible using decommissioned server
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gear what could go wrong
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nothing could go wrong by visiting our merch store which has shirts hats and
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more it even has stickers there's a link below
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so this video has actually been ongoing since uh
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mid-may i mean what the crap how difficult could it be
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to source some junky old stuff on ebay and slap it
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together it's story time so way back then Anthony and i was like
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way early on in his employment here even we sat down and we first looked for the
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biggest baddest motherboard we could possibly find on ebay the most sockets
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the most memory slots the most actual
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physical size and we settled on this
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the super micro h8q g6 f designed for
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the proprietary swtx form factor it checked all the boxes
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four g34 CPU sockets
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32 dimm slots for up to a terabyte of ecc registered ddr3 memory multiple pci
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express slots and even an onboard lsi sas controller this thing is in another
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league look at all those connectors and yes those are fans on the chipsets
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plural chipsets speaking of which the i o includes three
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Ethernet ports so two gigabit for data and another one for ipmi which is a
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remote management interface you can learn more about here
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next up then choosing a CPU or rather four of them as we pointed out
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in our hundred and fifty dollar gaming rig video top of the line skus for even
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very old servers are still being sold at a premium but
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drop down a few tears and
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there we go the opteron 6276
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with 16 cores each can be had for 30
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bucks so we snatched up four of those then we
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grabbed a case lot of 16 4 gig sticks of
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ecc registered memory giving us quad
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channel memory for each of our four
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cpus that's like 16 channels of memory
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so then at this point we were ready to rip up the performance charts right
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not really so not only is this motherboard a crazy
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form factor that wouldn't even begin to fit in any case or test bench we have
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here at the office we also needed to track down a power supply with three eps
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12 volt connectors in order to supply power to all of these bloody cpus i mean
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even the highest end consumer units only come with two such cables at most
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so what we ended up doing was frankensteining together the cables from
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two modular units onto one success
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so then with that issue solved we plugged it all in and powered it up
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and blank screen the board wasn't
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posting now the cpus are on the supported list
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so what gives well we ended up shelving it and waiting
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a couple of months for a slightly stripped down version of the same board
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it lacks the sas controller in a few PCIe slots so that's a bummer but it'll
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do at least it came with some 8 core optron 6128s already installed so we were able
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to use those to fire it up verify it was working then swap our 16 cores in and
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what okay i'm going to skip the long version
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here and it turns out that despite the BIOS reporting that it was the latest
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revision it was not
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so a desperation BIOS flash later and we were finally in business
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on an unrelated note anyone want to buy an unexpectedly functional quad socket
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optiron board anyone bueller
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bueller bueller oh right no uh you want to see how it
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performs first huh well with a whopping
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64 cores we put it straight head to head
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with ryzen threadripper and Intel's latest core i9 i mean this thing's gonna
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win with its eyes closed and one hand behind it's back in the multi-threaded
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tests right we'll get to those but first let's address the elephant in the video
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title gaming it sucks
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mike let me make this abundantly clear
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this is a 1080 ti running at
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1080p so if you've ever wondered what a
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bottleneck looks like this is it
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rise of the tomb raider and directx 12 got 10 percent of the performance of the
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core i7 7700k 10
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and it's even worse in cs go i mean at least it was only half as bad in 3dmark
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and unigine's superposition but i mean if super micro is to be
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believed this is or at least was a machine that was designed to do work
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not games so will it blend
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actually yeah in blender it's 3d rendering prowess
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doesn't put it quite on the level of threadripper or core i9 but it handily
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outdoes the ryzen 7 1800x for roughly
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the same overall system cost unsurprisingly cinebench and 7-zip show
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similar results but a lack of avx-2 support and relatively
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low cash per core hinders its high core count significantly compared to its more
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modern competition even in these multi-threaded workloads
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and there is more to buying a CPU than just performance too so we tested our
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thermals with some Noctua nff12s just
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sitting on top of the heatsinks that were included with our board and
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actually this wasn't bad each CPU hit only 55
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degrees at the worst in ida 64. as for that power draw
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nelly wow that's a number that only gets
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trumped by our overclocked 18 core core
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i9 7980xe extreme edition
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though in fairness this is 64 cores
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across four cpus so bottom line then um
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fun experiment but did we get our money's worth well given that we bought
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two boards by accident no no we didn't but let's play a game where
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we pretend we didn't do that for gaming this setup is super dumb
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but for productivity it actually doesn't look that bad
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even though it is at the bottom of our charts like so all in we paid about
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eighteen hundred and eighty eight dollars for this ghetto workstation as
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spec using a motherboard box as an open bench
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style case now as soon as you buy modern hardware like a 1080 ti the
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bottlenecking of that high-end gear hurts your overall system value but
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if all you wanted was CPU performance and you just put like a five dollar
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graphics card in then our system here actually delivers better value than
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ryzen threadripper and if we had weighted our testing more towards
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blender we'd have seen an even better price to performance ratio this actually
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makes for a a really cool budget blender
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box but if you want to do
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almost literally anything else with your machine
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especially gaming it shouldn't be your first choice
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especially given the headache factor
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speaking of headaches do you find yourself with a headache at the end of
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the day as a freelancer or small business owner well freshbooks has got
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you taken care of it's the small business accounting software that is
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custom built for how you want to work it's a way to be more productive more
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organized and perhaps most importantly get paid faster you can create and send
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payments with just a couple clicks and you can see when your client has seen
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your invoice putting an end to the guessing games for an unrestricted
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30-day free trial go to freshbooks.com tech tips and enter Linus tech tips in
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the how you heard about us section
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so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get
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subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at
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the link in the video description or maybe something sensible maybe we'll put
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like a threadripper down there or something also down there we have our
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merch store which has cool shirts like this one as well as our community forum
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which you should totally join