Gadgetory

what if I told you Apple is selling iPads for only $1 lab would be ask a man only remedial internet users should be clicking on that banner but what if I told you instead that you can get an 8 core Intel processor 16 gigs of ram and the motherboard combo for your next gaming rig for under a hundred and fifty US dollars that would be me spittin mad truth CEO so stay tuned and I will show you how Corsairs RMI series power supplies feature premium components for great performance with very low noise check out the link in the video description to learn more so the first step here is CPU shopping do a quick search for arc that's a RK Zeon 5000 and scroll down the results until you get to the CPUs with frontside bus speeds rather than qpi speeds listed that's the generation where after they are old enough that due to their lower performance and higher power consumption compared to more modern products they've lost a lot of their value in the data center so fresh crops have used parts are hitting eBay pretty much constantly but they're good enough that as you'll see in modern desktop workloads they can perform surprisingly well from here it's pretty easy to compare specs for some context the popular cue 6600 desktop chips that I've used in scrapyard wars are 2.4 gigahertz quad cores without hyper threading but bear in mind that I'm usually banking on overclocking those to 3 gigahertz or so so since you probably won't get any overclocking out of a server motherboard try to find something that can do about that out of the box for comparable results top-of-the-line chips due to their rarity and ongoing value as a way of squeezing a little more life out of an old server are usually still too expensive to be practical but once you step down a couple tears you can find some amazing deals here's a listing with a bunch of three gigahertz quad cores for only 20 bucks a pop note that when you buy your CPUs you will need two of the same model for your dual socket motherboard so I ended up with a pair of L 50 420 chips at 2.4 gigahertz next up is the motherboard here things get a little tricky because there's the usual stuff like making sure you have the appropriate connectors on your power supply but given how many of the second-hand boards out there are salvaged units from pre-built servers and stuff there are some other things to watch out for as well ours is a dell unit and here are some of the things we ran into number one while our board has a handful of mounting holes that would line up with a standard e8 case some modding would definitely be required to mount it more securely and this is about as good as you're likely to find with some boards out there unlikely to fit in any off-the-shelf case number two there were some other layout challenges including a capacitor right behind the PCIe 16x slot that required me to sawed off the lock on my video card and a four pin CPU power connector that almost prevented the graphics card from being inserted number three its expansion options are very limited the top PCIe 16x physical slot is only a PCIe gen one eight X lot electrically and much worse than that it only has one PCIe slot total on the board so if we wanted more than the near four USB to ports for sound cards Wi-Fi USB 3 etc then we're pretty much out of luck since we'll be using a graphics card in the available slot and finally you'll need to look out for other eccentricities - very few boards will include IO shields hooking up the front panel switches and LEDs may take some Sherlock Holmes level sleuthing or even trial and error and don't be surprised to encounter some other pretty random stuff I mean ours was missing 4 pin power connectors for the CPU fans since in the original server it was designed for the CPUs to be cooled passively with the motherboard out of the way it's RAM time and once again you need to be somewhat careful here this generation of Intel server motherboards could be equipped with slots for normal ECC ddr2 or FB dim ddr2 and while they are both available on the cheap it'll hurt the bang for the buck of your system if you order the wrong one and end up being stuck with extra and it doesn't help matters that many eBay listings don't contain all the necessary information here's a pro tip though you can identify FB dims by the full heat spreader that was used to cool the advanced memory buffer chip these for contrast our regular ECC ddr2 and that's what we ended up using for our system but there's another curveball here - server RAM compatibility even if you've got the right type can be a bit of a bear so either select a rampart number that was on the qvl or qualified vendor list for that motherboard or get the most generic thing you can and cross your fingers something like this kingston set is a fairly good bet because it doesn't specifically call out that is made for servers from a brand like HP or Dell for CPU coolers we went with some brand new stock coolers from ebay then because I had forgotten that this generation of Zeon's requires the chassis itself to have threads for the heatsink to bolt into I ended up using some inserts from McMaster car and a piece of particle board for a backplate but if you're really trying to get your system built on the cheap a ghetto solution with zip ties might not be pretty but should work just fine ha which leads us finally to the big question all of this is obviously a lot more work than just going to NCIX and ordering a new system so is it worth it well in part 2 of this video next week on vessel we'll find out just kidding guys so to answer that I ran a handful of games ranging from new ish to just released a week ago in the case of Star Wars Battlefront to see how she holds up so I paired the system with a modern enthusiast grade graphics card a gtx 980 and monitored GPU usage while gaming to see if our graphics card was severely bottlenecked by our cpu and while in some games I did have to turn the in game details down significantly to get it running smoothly Crysis 3 run at medium and shadow of Mordor performed best at very high both with motion blur off the results while still lower frame rate wise than my usual test bench can achieve even though it's running at higher settings we're still what I would describe as good enough and the better optimized games even ran what I would describe as very very well I mean battlefront ran it 75 or so FPS at 1080p at the highest details only 15 FPS less than a 59 60 X and Tomb Raider ran pretty much the same on both platforms at ultimate settings I mean to put this in perspective our whole base platform cost less than 16-gig kit of premium ddr4 gaming memory cool right yes but if buying old server stuff was a magic bullet that killed all your problems then everyone would do it on top of the challenge of sourcing the parts and assembling them there's no warranty obviously there's really no upgrade path to speak of while backwards compatibility is a godsend like it's great that your shiny new SSD works at all you can forget about the latest fastest data rates unless you want to put expansion cards in and it's not like Intel has been sitting on ass for nine years you can't expect your budget gaming box to run with newer systems in every workload I mean here's a Cinebench score from this system but back to gaming again this shopping strategy is even more interesting than it appears to be on the surface because our system handles just barely the last of the single and dual thread optimized triple-a titles then just as this system was about to get completely outdated developer support arrived for multi-core CPUs allowing it to stay relevant by spreading the workload out across its eight true processing cores and the future actually looks even brighter thanks to DirectX 12 and Vulcan promising dramatic improvements to multi-core scaling in games yet again so the answer then - is it worth it finally is that while I lied a little bit in the beginning it's technically two quad-core processors not an eight core processor yes if you're willing to put a little work into it and I'm sure you'd find some help on the Linus tech tips forum have that linked up there if you wanted to do this this concept was a lot of fun for me to explore and it is a worthwhile strategy for a budget gaming box speaking of worthwhile strategies today's episode sponsor is need for c.com makers of the maximum access that you've probably seen in a lot of our behind the scenes videos on the LAN show and pretty much anywhere that I Luke or any other member of our team puts our butts down they've got a wide variety of sizes and styles available whether you're my size or Luke size and whether you on something kind of black and professional looking for a boardroom or you're more into just you know out there vibrant colors and if you go to need for seat usa.com linked in the video description and use offer code linus fifty before december 1st 2015 you can save 50 bucks on any chair on their site badass right right wrong good ass because comfy chair I'll let myself out thanks for watching guys that this video sucked you know what to do but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon hey holidays if you drop an Amazon use our affiliate code instructions up there buying a cool shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our channel super fun video where I in the team just with long cardboard tubes on those hover board things and knock each other off that's pretty freakin awesome