Gadgetory

back in December of 2015 we threw together a budget eight core gaming PC for under a hundred and fifty bucks for the CPU RAM and motherboard that is still a great deal almost two years later and we were able to do this thanks to a couple of things one high-end workstation and server equipment is often ahead of the technology curve in certain ways like multi-core processors and to the way that businesses upgrade their IT gear on a regular cycle can lead to big jumps in the supply of this older tack on sites like eBay where the pricing often ends up much lower than mainstream hardware because it's less familiar to the average consumer and nobody's searching for it so we thought to ourselves well now eight core CPUs are like mainstream so how do we take this concept to another level let's build the most badass machine possible using decommissioned server gear what could go wrong nothing could go wrong by visiting our merch store which has shirts hats and more it even has stickers there's a link below so this video has actually been ongoing since the mid May I mean what the crap how difficult could it be to source some junky old stuff on eBay and slap it together it's story time so way back then Anthony and I was like way early on in his employment here even we sat down and we first looked for the biggest baddest motherboard we could possibly find on eBay the most sockets the most memory slots that the most actual physical size and we settled on this the super mikro h 8q g 6f designed for the proprietary SW TX form factor and checked all the boxes for g3 for CPU sockets 32 DIMM slots for up to a terabyte of ECC registered ddr3 memory multiple PCI Express slots and even an on board LSI SAS controller this thing isn't another league look at all those connectors and yes those are fans on the chipsets plural chipsets speaking of which the i/o includes three Ethernet port so two gigabit for data and another one for IP mi which is a remote management interface you can learn more about here next up then choosing a CPU or rather four of them as we pointed out in our hundred and fifty dollar gaming rig video top of the line SKUs for even very old servers are still being sold at a premium but drop down a few tears and ah there we go the Opteron 62 76 with 16 cores each can be had for 30 bucks so we snatched up four of those then we grabbed a case lot of 16 for gig sticks of ECC registered memory giving us quad-channel memory for each of our 4c that's like 16 channels of memories hahahahaha so then at this point we were ready to rip up the performance charts right not really so not only is this motherboard a crazy form factor that wouldn't even begin to fit in any case or test bench we have here at the office we also needed to track down a power supply with three EPS 12 volt connectors in order to supply power to all of these bloody CPUs I mean even the highest end consumer units only come with two such cables at most so what we ended up doing was frankensteining together the cables from two modular units onto one success so then with that as you solved we plugged it all in and powered it up thanks green the board wasn't posting now the CPUs are on the supported list so what gives well we ended up shelving it and waiting a couple of months for a slightly stripped down version of the same board it lacks the SAS controller and a few PCIe slots so that's a bummer but it'll do at least it came with some eight core Opteron 6128 already installed so we were able to use those to fire it up verify it was working then swap our 16 cores in and what okay I'm gonna skip the long version here and it turns out that despite the BIOS reporting that it was the latest revision it was not so a desperation BIOS flash later and we were finally in business on an unrelated note anyone want to buy an unexpectedly functional quad socket Opteron board anyone Bueller Bueller Bueller oh right no you want to see how it performs first huh well with a whopping 64 cores we put it straight head-to-head with rise and thread Ripper and Intel's latest core i9 we this thing's gonna win with its eyes closed and one hand bind it's back in the multi-threaded tests right we'll get to those but first let's address the elephant in the video title Gaming it sucks Mike let me make this abundantly clear this is a 1080 TI running at 1080p so if you've ever wondered what a bottleneck looks like this is it rise of the Tomb Raider in DirectX 12 got 10% of the performance of the core i7 7700 get 10% and it's even worse in csgo I mean at least it was only half as bad in 3d marking Unigine super position but I mean if Super Micro is to be believed this is or at least was a machine that was designed to do work not games so will it blend actually yeah in blender its 3d rendering prowess doesn't put it quite on the level of thread Ripper work for i9 but it handily out does the Rison 7 1800 x4 roughly the same overall system cost unsurprisingly Cinebench and 7-zip show similar results but the lack of a VX to support and relatively low cache per core hinders its high core count significantly compared to its more modern competition even in these multi-threaded workloads and there's more to buying a CPU than just performance 2 so we tested our thermals with some Noctua nff 12s just sitting on top of the heap thinks that we're included with our board and actually this wasn't bad each CPU hit only 55 degrees at the worst in i-264 as for that power draw hone le wow that's a number that only gets trumped by our overclocked 18 core core I 979 ATX e extreme edition though in fairness this is 64 cores across four CPUs so bottom line then umm fun experiment but did we get our money's worth well given that we bought two boards by accident no no we didn't but let's play a game where we pretend we didn't do that for gaming this setup is super dumb but for productivity surely doesn't look that bad even though it is at the bottom of our charts like so all in we paid about eighteen hundred and eighty eight dollars for this ghetto workstation as SPECT using a motherboard box as an open bench style case now as soon as you buy modern hardware like a 1080 Ti the bottlenecking of that high end gear hurts your overall system value but if all you wanted was CPU performance and you just put like a five dollar graphics card in then our system here actually delivers better value than Rison thread Ripper and if we had waited our testing more towards blender we'd have seen an even better price to performance ratio this actually makes for a be a really cool budget blender box but if you want to do almost literally anything else with your machine especially gaming it shouldn't be your first choice especially given the headache factor speaking of headaches do you find yourself with a headache at the end of the day as a freelancer or small business owner while FreshBooks has got you taken care of it's the small business accounting software that is custom-built for how you want to work it's a way to be more productive more organized and perhaps most importantly get paid faster you can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds you can set up online payments with just a couple clicks and you can see when your client has seen your invoice putting an end to the guessing games for an unrestricted 30-day free trial go to fresh ebooks.com slash tech tips and enter - tech tips into how you heard about us section so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description or maybe something sensible maybe we'll put like a thread ripper down there or something also down there we have our merch store which has cool shirts like this one as well as our community forum which is you totally join