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PROJECT 242 - The Mystery of the i7-920 Vs E5640 ($302 + $312 Used PCs)

2016-03-28
I got the whole Ginga when two hungry subscribers asked me for pcs I just said to them where the barbecue pits in a minibike combated tag yeah City this is Bryan coming to you guys today with a little bit of a different sort of video where I'm building two pcs at the same time for subscribers that requested these builds at cost and now the good thing about this piece is I get to test the i7 920 versus the e50 640 head-to-head and see if that node shrink really does make a difference there's also some other things I'll be testing out like ECC memory that's on buffered and whether you can overclock it or not so without wasting any more time let's go over what parts we have here today and how much they cost and then we'll go over to the cleanse and then the build and the benchmarks you you this time on the gigabyte you d3r the x58 version pretty much the North Bridge and the South Bridge the thermal paste there had hardened up but it was a lot easier to get off than the MSI one so now we're going to put these two boards back together with some mx4 so anyway here's the heatsink here this stuff is like virtually like glue so I'm gonna have to put a sanding block to it and really give it a hammering okay so there it is nice and shiny and ready to go back on okay so I'm just going to quickly test and see if this BIOS needs to be flashed or not and if it does and it's a bit of a pain in the ass on this platform because they want you to flash from Windows because I think the bias file is too big so we'll just hit that power switch there and just see if our little e 5640 is being recognized okay this actually might be the CPU this time around it looks like it's not turning on all right so we've put the i7 920 back in and it looks like that was the problem so maybe the motherboard doesn't support the Xeon CPU and I will find out very soon so this time around we're going with something different we're going to use some ECC memory now this is actually unbuffered which is quite rare for ECC memory so it still does have an extra chip on here in the middle which allows it to read and write errors if they do show up however it does add an extra cycle to the memory though the good thing about this is we're able to get more memory for the same money all right so let's boot this PC up and see if this stuff works and see if it's being recognized on boot okay that isn't a good sign so looks like this motherboard doesn't like ECC memory either so I'm just going to quickly test this motherboard with the memory from the washe video that was forged from 10 Nokia 3310 okay so we've booted this thing up and we can see here and the information we've got d0 stepping which is actually a really good thing on the i7 920 because it means we'll be able to hopefully overclock this thing to 4 gigahertz and we got version 2.6 1 here so I've just downloaded the latest bios version and plug it in and see if we can update the BIOS too because we've tried to update the BIOS here with the latest BIOS and it's just not being recognized at all so if I change that over to here on the focus we can see that it just will not find the BIOS to update this is the official boss remember sized website since it does say version 8 b5 but on their website I can't even find that BIOS now managed to rename the boss to exactly the boss that it was before previously so it's giving us the option to flash so hopefully this works this time around which will be great yeah so looks like it's working knock on wood and once it's done with this BIOS flash we're going to try the ECC memory again we're also going to try an e5 56:40 I tell you this is slow and painful you just don't want it to stop will crash anyway during this turn I'm gonna find out about little monkey well wow wow what's the work around there we actually just renamed it to the exact same BIOS that was on it before the one that was being recognized and now we can see here were on the March 19th 2011 so it's a much more recent BIOS all right so we just tried the ECC memory and as you can see here it's working and I'm kind of a little bit perplexed because I'm I'm positive that the memory controller is built onto the chips with nalem they are the first generation so what this means is that the i7s the consumer grade actually supports ECC memory which is cool so I guess it's a dormant feature that was I guess awakened or woken by a BIOS update very interesting anyway so I'm not as sure for the exact reason but cheap memory is working whoo all right so we're in the bias now we've updated to version FF through the cue flash I didn't realize that you could not date it to the last version because that can only be updated via Windows I think because of the fact that the bias flash chip doesn't recognize the size of the actual bias so FF was the most recent one that I could update to and that's good enough because that now recognizes the Xeon which has the ECC memory compatibility on built on the chip in the memory controller which means that we can now use the ECC memory all 12 gigabytes of it so we are home and hosed and we're good to go Oh all right so it's finally time to boot both these computers up and we're gonna see if they work both at the same time so let's get it done okay so who is going to turn on this marvelous a sub monitor from 2008 CCFL backlit - by the way they're both working - me see here both these computers have successfully booted up one on the HDMI one on the VGA port because the DVI port on this monitor doesn't work you so there we have it - amazing pcs as you can see in the benchmarks they both ran really well the one thing I will point out is that there was not much of a difference between the i7 920 and the e 50 640 if anything there was absolutely no difference at all when it came to real-world performance most notably siding here the Cinebench score here where we got 625 points on the 920 and then we got only 621 on the e 50 640 now now this overclock was pretty much apples to apples with both motherboards sporting a base clock of 200 megahertz another thing I will point out and that you guys probably noticed as well was the quite weak scores on the GTX 660 and I noticed that back in the past when I had my gtx 750ti overclocked that thing scored more points than this thing is today so maybe there is a bit of truth with the Kepler being nerfed however I will check that in the future though for what it's worth I do think the old-school AMD cards start to offer a lot better value for money than the old-school Nvidia cards especially when it comes down to price performance and another great thing to take out of this was that the ECC memory is overclockable it's great value for money and not only that when you couple it with that x58 motherboard line and there's a company nine 20s and also the e 56 40s you can overclock them to four gigahertz and you have yourself one of the most amazing gaming CPUs especially for the money and the last thing to take out of this video would be that the old-school intel heatsink fans are actually pretty good unlike nowadays anyway that's about it for me today guys if you enjoyed this video then be sure to hit that like button if you have any questions or comments about today's builds and be sure to drop a comment in the comment section below now these PCs are really good value for money though they could have been great value for money if I'd use something like a HD 7870 or an r9 270 in my opinion anyway I'd love to hear your thoughts on these pcs so be sure to hit that comment in the comment section below and I'll get back to you as soon as I can peace out for now bye
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