Gadgetory

recently we had a look at how you could piece together a pretty darn powerful eight core gaming rig on the cheap with some older server hardware namely a pair of quad core Intel Xeon and some server grade ECC ddr2 ram and a little bit of creative modding but some of the fans made it pretty compelling that there was an argument for hey instead of drilling a block of wood to use as a motherboard mount and lopping off a part of a shiny gtx 980 why not just use an 8 core AMD desktop cpu instead indeed why not stay tuned to find out how our server style Frankenstein ray held up against an AMD FX 8350 freshbooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized save time and get paid faster click now to try for free so while the twin Xeon processors the ECC RAM and the server motherboard only set us back around one hundred and fifty dollars total ambe's most popular eight core cpu the FX 8350 is currently going for 170 by itself on Newegg and not all that much cheaper on the used market with cheaper am3+ motherboards going for around 50 bucks on the same site and 16 gigabytes of ddr3 memory going for about 60 all of this retaining much of its value on the used market you're looking at nearly double the cost for the desktop AMD platform but of course you do get quite a bit extra functionality for this added cost even lower end currently available motherboards support now standard features like USB 3.0 multiple PCI Express slots and 6 gigabit per second SATA connections by contrast our server board only has a measly pair of USB 2.0 ports I mean even the freaking Raspberry Pi has more than that one PCIe slot making any further expansion impossible once you stick in a graphics card and only support SATA revision 2 speeds we also needed to separate EPS power connectors with the server board we used so you may need to find a power supply that has a pair of these as well and obviously you get the luxury of being able to use your choice of modern CPU cooler in a real actual ATX case unless you like that sort of cyberpunk shady ghetto style piece of tech that was just thrown together kind of look which honestly I must admit I kind of have a soft spot for so I would understand but all of that aside performance is what matters most and we put both of our 8 core setups through a full battery of comparison tests if you're curious about the exact parts we use for these test benches you can see them on the screen right now first up we looked at transfer speeds on our Samsung 850 pro SSD using the black magic disk speed tests on our AMD bench we got a healthy 513 megabyte per second read speed and a 465 M bytes per second write about what we'd expect from a modern sata3 drive however our server board was a completely different story as on it we mustered only 134 and 128 megabytes per second on read and write respectively even though the board is supposed to support SATA to speeds of up to 300 megabytes per second through its connectors although there may be a way to make this work more quickly we couldn't find anything in the BIOS that would allow us to increase the speed there seems to be one post online where one dude said that he modified it to work but doesn't actually say how so we might be able to chalk this up to another one of those server parts can be screwy and hard to configure moments that said if you do want to try out the server motherboard as a gaming rig concept you might want to take the time to locate a board that you know will support SATA 3 speeds as the system was noticeably a little slower in common tasks like browsing through Windows Explorer moving on to synthetic benchmarks we saw the AMD desktop setup perform 40 to 60 percent faster and a seuss real bench suite which includes image editing video rendering and multitasking elements the FX 8350 based system also beat on our dual Xeon setup by about 18% in the Cinebench CPU test and also won the OpenGL test which renders a scene of a car chase by nearly 40 fps but would this translate to huge gains in real world gaming situations the two systems didn't show too much of a difference in our Far Cry 3 far cry 4 sorry in Crysis 3 benchmarks with our AMD desktop bench only gaining between one and three frames per second at 4k however when we switch to cities skylines a much more CPU bound title the difference was massive our FX 8350 system nearly doubled the performance of our dual Xeon set up so with these results does it still make sense to go for the cheaper server setup if you can get your hands on them it might if all you're doing with your PC is gaming and you want to keep your platform costs as low as possible and allocate more of your budget to something like say a nice graphics card of course that depends on what games are going to be playing so don't forget that to a CPU bound type we'll see a significant performance hit on the old server hardware although our FX 8350 platform cost about twice the price we got roughly double the performance and city skylines offsetting the additional cash you'd have to fork out add in a significantly faster performance and other CPU intensive tasks and even general computing as well as many more connectivity options and a more traditional platform with desktop class 8 core processor and it looks well worth the additional cost especially if you won't have to spend a ton of time configuring a server board which isn't exactly designed to be user-friendly all the time but let's be real for a moment if the tinkerer in you really wants to try out this kind of a cost-cutting challenge that's awesome go for it or if an 8350 just isn't in your budget it's certainly possible to have a satisfying gaming experience on some old Zeon's for a really really good price just remember that it might take a little bit more patience updesk has a wide variety of powered standing desks available on up desk comm what almost all of them have in common is the high quality dual motor electronically controlled height adjust system that lets you either manually raise or lower your desktop surface or pre-programmed three different heights for sit-stand or maybe for riding on a bike or walk on treadmill the one I've been using since updesk set us up is the large-sized squared up it's been a great solution for me due to needing a corner desk and I actively use the different profile modes as I have back problems and being able to rotate between sitting and standing is great so whether you're trying to just get into the habit of shifting positions periodically or if you want to get some real health benefits out of your new desk by putting a treadmill or stationary bike under it check out up desk over at up desk comm slash Linus linked in the video description down below thanks for watching guys if this video stuck do you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit the like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon buying a cool t-shirt like this one or with the direct monthly contribution through the four now that you're done doing all of that you're probably wondering what to watch next so click the little button up in the top right hand corner up here to check out this video where Linus investigates whether or not steam machines are actually worth it