Under $150 Budget Gaming 8 Core CPU, Motherboard & 16GB RAM
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2016-05-06
·
1,879 words · ~9 min read
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what if I told you apple is selling iPads for only a dollar well that would
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be a scam and only remedial internet users should be clicking on that Banner
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but what if I told you instead that you can get an 8 core Intel processor 16
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gigs of RAM and a motherboard combo for your next gaming rig for under
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$150 that would be me spitting mad truth
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yo so stay tuned and I will show you how
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Corsair's RMI series power supplies feature premium components for great
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performance with very low noise check out the link in the video description to
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learn more so the first step here is CPU
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shopping do a quick search for Arc that's Ark Zeon 5000 and scroll down the
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results until you get to the CPUs with front side bus speeds rather than qpi
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speeds listed that that's the generation we're after they're old enough that due
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to their lower performance and higher power consumption compared to more
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modern products they've lost a lot of their value in the data center so fresh
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crops of used parts are hitting eBay pretty much constantly but they're good
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enough that as you'll see in modern desktop workloads they can perform
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surprisingly well from here it's pretty
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easy to compare specs for some context
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the popular q6600 desktop chips that
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I've used in scrapyard Wars are 2.4 GHz
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quad cores without hyperthreading but bear in mind that I'm usually banking on
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overclocking those to 3 GHz or so so since you probably won't get any
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overclocking out of a Server Motherboard try to find something that can do about
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that out of the box for comparable results topof thee line chips due to
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their Rarity and ongoing value as a way of squeezing a little more life out of
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an old server are usually still too expensive to be practical but once you
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step down a couple tiers you can find some amazing deals here's a listing with
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a bunch of 3 GHz quad course for only 20 bucks a pop note that when you buy your
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CPUs you will need two of the same model for your dual socket motherboard so I
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ended up with a pair of l5420 chips at 2.4 GHz next up is the motherboard here
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things get a little tricky because there's the usual stuff like making sure
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you have the appropriate connectors on your power supply but given how many of
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the secondhand Boards out there are Salvage units from pre-built servers and
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stuff there are some other things to watch out for as well ours is a Dell
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unit and here are some of the things we ran into number one while our board has
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a handful of mounting holes that would line up with a standard eatx case some
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modding would definitely be required to mount it more securely and this is about
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as good as you're likely to find with some boards out there unlikely to fit in
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any off-the-shelf case number two there were some other layout challenges
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including a capacitor right behind the PCI e6x slot that required me to saw off
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the lock on my video card and a four pin CPU power connector that almost
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prevented the graphics card from being inserted number three its expansion
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options are very limited the top PCIe
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16x physical slot is only a PCIe gen 1
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8X slot electrically and much worse than
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that it only has one PCIe slot total on
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the board so if we wanted more than the mere 4 usb2 ports for sound cards Wi-Fi
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usb3 Etc then we're pretty much out of luck since we'll be using a graphics
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card in the available slot and finally you'll need to look out for other
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eccentricities too very few boards will include IO Shields hooking up the front
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panel switches and LEDs may take some Sherlock Homes level sleuthing or even
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trial and error and don't be surprised to encounter some other pretty random
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stuff I mean ours was missing four pin power connectors for the CPU fans since
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in the original server it was designed for the CPUs to be cooled
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passively with the motherboard out of the way it's RAM time and once again you
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need to be somewhat careful here this generation of Intel server motherboards
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could be equipped with slots for normal ECC ddr2 or FB dim ddr2 and while they
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are both available on the cheap it'll hurt the bang for the buck of your
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system if you order the wrong one and end up being stuck with extra and it
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doesn't help matters that many eBay listings don't contain all the necessary
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information here's a pro tip though you can identify FB dims by the full heat
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spreader that was used to cool the advanced memory buffer chip these for
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contrast are regular ECC ddr2 and that's
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what we ended up using for our system but there's another curveball here too
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server RAM compatibility even if you've got the right type can be a bit of a
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bear so either select a RAM part number
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that is on the qvl or qualified vendor list for that motherboard or get the
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most generic thing you can and cross your fingers something like this
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Kingston set is a fairly good bet because it doesn't specifically call out
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that is made four servers from a brand like HP or Dell for CPU coolers we went
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with some brand new stock coolers from eBay then because I had forgotten that
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this generation of zons requires the chassis itself to have threads for the
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Heat snc to bolt into I ended up using some inserts from McMaster car and a
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piece of particle board for a back plate but if you're really trying to get your
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system built on the cheap a ghetto solution with zip ties might not be
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pretty but should work just fine which leads us finally to the big
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question all of this is obviously a lot
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more work than just going to NCI and ordering a new system so is it worth it
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well in part two of this video next week on vessel we'll find out out just
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kidding guys so to answer that I ran a handful of games ranging from neish to
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just released a week ago in the case of Star Wars Battlefront to see how she
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holds up so I paired the system with a modern Enthusiast grade graphics card a
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gtx980 and monitored GPU usage while
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gaming to see if our graphics card was
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severely bottlenecked by our CPU and while in some games I did have to turn
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the in-game details down significantly to get it running smoothly uh Crisis 3
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ran at medium and Shadow of Mordor performed best at very high both with
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motion blur off the results while still
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lower frame rate wise than my usual test bench can achieve even though it's
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running at higher settings we're still what I would describe as good enough and
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the better optimized games even ran what I would describe as very very well I
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mean Battlefront ran at 75 or so FPS at
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1080p at the highest details only 15 FPS
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less than a 5960x and Tomb Raider ran
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pretty much the same on both platforms at ultimate settings I mean to put this
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in perspective our whole base platform
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costs less than a 16 gig kit of Premium ddr4 gaming memory cool right yes but if
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buying old server stuff was a magic bullet that killed all your problems
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then everyone would do it on top of the
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challenge of sourcing the parts and assembling them
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there's no warranty obviously there's really no upgrade path to speak of while
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backwards compatibility is a godsend like it's great that your shiny new SSD
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works at all you can forget about the latest fastest data rates unless you
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want to put expansion cards in and it's
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not like Intel has been sitting on ass for nine years you can't expect your
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budget gaming box to run with newer systems in every workload I mean here's
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a cine bench score from this system but back to game again this
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shopping strategy is even more interesting than it appears to be on the
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surface because our system handles just
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barely the last of the single and dual
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thread optimized AAA titles then just as
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this system was about to get completely outdated developer support arrived for
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multicore CPUs allowing it to stay relevant by spreading the workload out
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across its eight true processing course
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and the future actually looks even brighter thanks to directx12 and Vulcan
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promising dramatic improvements to multicore scaling in games yet again so
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the answer then to is it worth it finally is that while I lied a little
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bit in the beginning it's technically two quad core processor not an eight
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core processor yes if you're willing to
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put a little work into it and I'm sure you'd find some help on the line's Tech
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tips Forum have that linked up there if you wanted to do this this concept was a
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lot of fun for me to explore and it is a worthwhile strategy for a budget gaming
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box speaking of worthwhile strategies
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today's episode sponsor is needfor seat.com makers of the maxnomic chairs
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that you've probably seen in a lot of our behind the-scenes videos on the W
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whether you're my size or lukee size and whether you want something kind of black
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before December 1st 2015 you can save 50 bucks on any chair on their site badass
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right right wrong good ass because comfy
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chair I'll let myself out thanks for
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watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome
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get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by
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shopping at Amazon use our affiliate code instructions up there buying a cool
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shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution now that you're
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done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top
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right corner to check out our Channel Super Fun video where I and the team
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joust with long cardboard tubes on those hoverboard things and knock each other
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off them it's pretty freaking awesome