WE GOT INTEL'S PROTOTYPE GRAPHICS CARD!!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,152 words · ~10 min read
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Intel keeps very careful track of its internal engineering samples going to great lengths to ensure that if
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They leave the lab it is in pieces so small that they could never be reassembled again
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So the first question we need to answer is
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How did we get our hands on?
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this thing
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eBay obviously what can't you buy on eBay a
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Sponsorship online is tech tips for that you have to talk to Colton like Corsair did Corsair's dark core se RGB wireless mouse
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So the seller turned out to have been a contractor at Intel a few years ago who in the middle of a sixth floor
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renovation went dumpster diving through the boxes full of
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Junk that was destined for the e-waste pile
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apparently
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It was a
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treasure trove of press samples laptops and
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this
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GPU looking thing that was noteworthy for being blue instead of green or red
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You see by that point
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project Larrabee this
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Sort of had been cancelled for years and how many years depends on which cancellation you're going by
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So talking to Tom Forsythe who was one of the key team members he figures
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They got cancelled anywhere from four to five times and remembers getting these weird memos
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Yeah
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You guys are gonna see some headlines
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It's just a thing
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None of you are laid off. Just keep on working
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BT dubs you've been rebranded Zeon fight. Thanks. Bye. So
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What is this thing?
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that's actually a somewhat complicated question, but
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Because it's got a DVI port not to mention DisplayPort and HDMI soldered onto it
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It is technically an engineering sample board for Intel's first and to date only
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dedicated graphics card now
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Most people who follow the mainstream tech press believe that project Larrabee was an abject failure
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But as is so often the case the truth is actually
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Stranger than fiction not only was it a success
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But it powered th2, which was the world's most powerful
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supercomputer for over two years and ten years later
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You can actually still buy its descendants either in socketed form as we reviewed just last year or on
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Amazon for a cool
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1500 greenbacks
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So as it turns out the goal of the project
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Never was actually to create a gaming GPU
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That was just a workload that was already fairly well understood at the time because you gotta remember back in the mid
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2000s the idea of using a GPU as a
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General purpose computing unit was just emerging
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so this this idea of using it for gaming was actually just a small part of a business case to build a
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processor that had many highly efficient
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x86 cores that could be easily just like
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slotted into these powerful supercomputers
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but
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That doesn't mean that it couldn't have been used for gaming in fact by the time they wound down the units that were working on
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graphics they had about
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300 of the top-selling games on Steam
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running on the thing with a card just
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like this one as the only GPU in the system and the way this whole thing worked is incredible now a
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Normal graphics card or GPU rather uses a lot of fixed function hardware
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So if you told it okay, look, I don't need shaders
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Just draw a ton of tiny lines with really nice anti-aliasing
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So that's pretty much CAD in a nutshell
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It would use only a fraction of its hardware
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But with Larrabee
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Everything is software. So the whole chip is lit up doing that
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So that actually helped to offset the x86 overhead a fair bit
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This was the fastest CAD card at the time and it had other benefits with regular GPUs
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You might run into a situation where?
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Enabling a particular feature in a game might hit the AMD users a lot harder than the NVIDIA users or vice versa
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So during development
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AMD and NVIDIA they both have to actually guess as best
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They can what the next couple of years of games will demand and then try to look into their crystal ball and build their hardware
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Around that
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Larrabee, no such limitation. This thing is a full-blown
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Computer with up to 61 quad threaded cores running a normal operating system like FreeBSD
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like you could
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you could actually telnet into the thing
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and run a top command and see a list
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of all the processes that were running on it.
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And if you were running a game,
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you'd see, I don't know, 128 or 200 processes
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called DirectX graphics.
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And you could do that while the thing was working.
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So if you wanted, you could cordon off some of the cores
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and use them for something else,
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or you could just YOLO it
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and throw another workload into the mix
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and then just let the processor manage itself.
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The only non-programmable hardware on this puppy
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is the texture unit, which takes very simple commands.
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I mean, wrap your brain around this.
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The thing that I'm looking at right here
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is Intel's first ever DirectX 11 GPU.
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Even though it was built,
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it was built before DirectX 11.
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So this was possible because all of those graphics card
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features that are normally running in hardware
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are just running in software.
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So you could actually update it to DirectX 11
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or DirectX 12 with a driver update.
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Now, there are some caveats here.
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I mean, there's a reason that the thing
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never made it into a computer near you.
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It wasn't as efficient as a dedicated graphics card,
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for a lot of things.
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So it only got about a quarter of the performance in games
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as a comparably power consuming card
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from AMD or NVIDIA at the time.
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But it was really good at certain graphics workloads
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for a number of reasons.
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And I mean, if you think about it
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and you look at how far off they were,
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considering that they were effectively emulating,
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dedicated hardware, it's damn impressive.
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So what happened?
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Well, management happened.
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Intel at its core, haha, is a hardware company.
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So they wanted all the features completed
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so they could either ship this thing or can it.
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Because in the hardware world,
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making up a four times difference in performance
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is impossible and you might as well just pull the plug.
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But the team wanted to work on performance optimization
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instead because in the software world,
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it's not unheard of to go from like two pixels
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showing up on a screen and dog slow
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to a hundred times faster in a week
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if you have a breakthrough.
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And it got to the point where they had to have
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separate teams for performance and for features
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to get management off their backs.
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So the performance team actually got Quake
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running like really fast,
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but then they found out that Quake was this weird edge case
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and the architecture would have to be completely redone.
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I mean, to give you guys some idea of the dysfunction,
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at one point there were three to four software teams
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with different ideas and working on
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different rendering architectures.
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But depending who you ask,
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the continued development would have been worth it.
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I mean, imagine this.
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Instead of turning anti-aliasing on for an entire scene,
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imagine if a game developer
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could say, well, you know what?
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This sky is not important to be anti-aliased.
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Why don't we just focus all of our AA
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on these characters here or this foliage there?
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Or how about this?
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Like, oh crap, that texture wasn't loaded.
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You know what?
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Let's just procedurally generate a placeholder.
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Boom.
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Arguably the stupidest decision that was made
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was to make the Larrabee graphics team
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and the Gen graphics team,
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which is what Intel calls
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its integrated graphics internally,
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compete together for the same budget
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and then like make internal presentations
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arguing about why their approach was good in the future
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and the other groups was bad and not the future
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because they were both perfectly suitable
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for what they were doing.
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Larrabee was never going to be a five watt part
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that you could bake right into a CPU.
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A 200 watt PCI express part
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was nowhere on the roadmap for Gen.
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So what I've got here, come on, come on, come on,
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is not Knight's Ferry.
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That was the first Larrabee revision
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that had some deal breaking bugs.
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Apparently the saying in the hardware industry is
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always plan to make a prototype
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since you'll end up making one anyway.
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So this is Knight's Corner
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and probably has anywhere from six to 16
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16 gigs of RAM and up to 62 cores,
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depending on how many of them had some manufacturing flaws.
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Should we fire it up?
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I mean, come on.
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I wasn't not gonna do that at this point.
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I spent like $400 on this thing off of eBay.
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I've got no drivers for it.
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So it's actually, this is the first time I've turned it on.
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So it is very possible that it won't manage
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to display anything even in 2D,
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but I definitely, definitely, definitely, definitely,
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definitely have to try.
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By the way, if anyone out there
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has the secret sauce drivers
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or has access to the secret sauce drivers
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that would make this run games,
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please hit me up.
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I mean, assuming that it even works,
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which we don't know yet.
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I actually haven't tried this.
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I wanted to save the suspense for the video.
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This is like far more post codes
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than I'm accustomed to seeing,
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but it hasn't stopped.
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And it hasn't rebooted.
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We've got some kind of LED on here.
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It looks like it stalled on D6,
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but I don't know what that is.
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Now, when I talked to Tom,
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he did specifically mention it's got DVI soldered to it.
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Now, I don't know if that's because DVI
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was the most relevant output at the time.
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So that's like what they used internally,
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or if the DisplayPort and HDMI were just dummies
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and DVI was the only thing that actually worked.
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So, take two, I'm gonna run and grab a DVI monitor
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and gonna try this again.
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Like, I kind of wonder about,
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you know, what it's PCI-e.
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I mean, would that be even Gen 2 at that point?
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Like 2007, 2009.
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I wonder about compatibility
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with the new board and stuff like that.
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You know what?
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I don't think it's gonna boot.
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Well, that's pretty disappointing.
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I thought I might be onto something
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with the whole DVI thing.
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I'm just gonna try, I'm gonna try one other slot
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just to, I think there's only one other one
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out in the wild and some like Russian collector
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of like weird hardware has it.
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Yeah, not you, a different one.
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Okay, sometimes it hangs on 79 for a bit
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and then this thing boots.
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So that might've been a good sign.
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No, that's D6 again.
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I think it's not going anywhere.
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Well, that was disappointing,
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but I'm gonna let it keep trying
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while I tell you guys about Mastrop.
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I'm like sad, it's like hard to have any energy.
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Okay, I'm gonna try that again.
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and come with a noise canceling microphone.
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So go check them out.
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So thanks for watching guys.
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If this video sucked, you know what to do,
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but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button.
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You can especially hit that like button
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if you wanna make me feel better
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about how disappointed I feel right now,
14:12
or you can check out the link to where to buy the stuff
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Also linked in the description is our merch store,
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and our community forum, which you should totally join.
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Oh, I really, I was really hoping
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I was just gonna get the screen to light up.
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That was all I was really, that was all I really wanted.
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Good night, sweet prince.
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You were too good for this world.