Gadgetory

- So, upon doing my recent tests on X58, which is an old architecture now dating back 10 years, I've been doing these tests over the last few years where I compare them against the newest CPUs, and the older architecture can definitely perform, even 'til today's standards, especially when you overclock the memory, and the CPU's and the motherboard's base clock. However, I noticed something a little bit disturbing doing these recent tests, and that is, in general, my numbers were a bit lower than I'm used to getting, especially at 4.5 gigahertz on the particular CPU that I'm overclocking with, and that was the X5660, which, when you get it to a certain clock speed, will perform the same as an X5675 or an i7-980, for example. However, this is where the problem arises. When I started crosschecking some of my results, back with the results that I took in the past, the numbers were lower, in particular on Windows 10. And when a viewer commented about forced obsolescence in my comments section, and that comment got a lot of upvotes, I decided to take a closer look. And what I found was a little bit disturbing. Let's take a look. - [Computer] Did you forget your password? Why are you so happy? - Because I've got LastPass. Never forget another password again, with today's video sponsor, LastPass. It's free to use, and it works on all popular browsers, like Chrome and Firefox, and it even works across Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS, and Android. So, if you find yourself like me, and constantly across many different websites and forums, some of which you don't care about, and most likely only visit once in a blue moon, then LastPass can autogenerate a unique password for that site, save it, and then even if you use it in a different device, as long as you have LastPass, it will remember all those websites and combinations for you. Also, if you're a business, and you share frequented sites, then you can easily share a password with other LastPass users within the same company, so you know exactly who you have shared it with, not to mention, they don't know what that password exactly used was either, so if you don't feel like sharing anymore, then you can simply cut them off and not have to worry. This service is completely free to try out. The link's in the description below. Welcome back to Tech YES City, and let's pop up some of these results first. Back when I was doing this testing in Dota 2 on lowest settings with the 1080 Ti, I was getting close to 230 FPS in Dota 2. This time around, I was actually getting a lot lower FPS figures, coming under that of 200 FPS. And this time around, I actually had even slightly-higher overclocks, and the Cinebench numbers were showing that my overclocks were stable. Another game that we moved onto was CS: GO. This also showed a drop in FPS. And then moving over to GTA V, this is also showed a drop, with the same settings, with the same graphics card. I automatically knew something was up here, and this is on a fresh install of Windows as well, and I've even gone to the lengths of disabling both Spectre and Meltdown registries in Windows 10. However, moving over to Far Cry Primal interestingly enough showed similar results to my old results. So, we were left at a dilemma of, possibly, some of these games have been patched to have a performance hit on older CPUs like Xeons. So, I decided to do even more investigating, and this is when I kind of found something that was really disturbing, and that was OpenGL on Dota 2. When I ran this on Windows 10, it was getting around 200, and sometimes under 200 FPS. And then we decided to do a fresh install of Linux, and also on top of that, we decided to reflash the BIOS, and backdate it, just in case any funny buggers were occurring. And sure enough, when we loaded up Dota 2, we were getting around 240 FPS constant, with the exact same conditions, in the middle lane with Storm Spirit. What this kind of means for me, is that something definitely is going on with Windows 10 and older CPUs, and I don't think it's to the extent of a massive performance dip, for instance, if one was to do forced obsolescence, they wouldn't just do it in Cinebench, because that would be too obvious. But all the popular titles here seem to be copping a performance hit. And then we looked at something like Far Cry Primal, which practically no one plays anymore, is not copping a performance hit. I'm sitting here scratching my head, and wonder why this is happening, because for me personally, I'm a big enthusiast of X58. I'm a big enthusiast of the old-school stuff, especially when it comes to tweaking it and overclocking it, and especially showing people that if they get a really good deal on some of these older hardware, they don't have to go out and buy the latest and greatest stuff, and they can get really good value for money, so I was really upset when I came into these numbers. And now, going forward from here, I don't really know what to do about this, because a lot of my channel is built up on testing older hardware, and a lot of the viewers out there, I know you guys love some of this older stuff. And it's sad to see that this is being afflicted upon X58, and I hope this kind of trend doesn't come onto X79, which I'm actually just about to start testing, because we are finished up, essentially, with the X58 tests on the RTX 2080 Ti and also the RTX 2070, and now we're gonna be moving over to the eight-core, 16-thread Xeon on the X79. And the ironic thing, too, is that in my main rig, I actually use this X79 Xeon for doing all my 4K video editing, and everything else, gaming as well. So, if it's getting a forced-obsolescence performance hit, then that is really concerning. Also, throwing on top of this Dota 2 test, we decided to test it also on ultra settings at 1080p and were noticing yet again there was a performance difference, both between the Linux install of Dota 2 on OpenGL, and also the Windows 10 OpenGL on ultra settings. And the differences came out in this test, and I feel that this is indeed a direct apples-to-apples comparison, because you're using the same API, just on two different OSs. Anyway, guys, going forwards from here, let me know in the comments section below what you think about this. I mean, I'm, as I said before, I'm upset. But also, today's video, I really actually intended it to be on X58, and is it sort of on its way out. And I guess we can talk about that, but this kind of throws in a curveball into the mix, because I'm expecting the results would've been higher, had it not been for these nerfs that have been afflicted upon this CPU and its architecture. Anyway, let's continue with story time with X58. When I was over in Italy doing an event for AMD, it was actually kind of a long time, because I had to fly over to Europe. I then saw a subscriber who let me stay at his house in Austria, and then I went over to Japan after that. During that time, Hardware Unboxed released a i7-980X video, and after that our whole Discord blew up, saying X58, it's just crap, it's done, you shouldn't be buying it. I spoke to Steve behind the scenes about this, and his opinion is, it's 10 years old, it's ready for the dumpster, I pointed out that, hey, I don't think you gave X58 the best chance when you tested it. He did test it with and i7-980X, and at 4.4 gigahertz, this CPU will perform exactly like a Xeon, providing it's stable. And I do put the emphasis on stable, because when I looked at the video closely, and the first thing that came to me immediately, was the Elpida memory. This is literally some of the worst DDR3 memory you can use on any motherboard that supports DDR3 memory. Essentially this company went bankrupt in 2012, and this came at a weird time when memory makers were essentially flourishing in the industry. I guess that speaks lengths to that memory directly, and the reason why this memory is bad, is because it doesn't have any XMP profiles above the JEDEC standard. And essentially, on X58, if you're overclocking your memory, you'd either really want XMP profiles, or you have to spend a lot of time tuning not just the CL timings, but also all the sub-timings as well, and essentially it does take a long time to get a proper memory overclock on this platform. And you look at the results, there's DDR3-1600, on both the stock and overclocked settings, which indicates that Steve did not overclock his X58 motherboard via a base clock overclock. And when you do this, you essentially overclock the QPI frequency, too, which is actually pretty crucial to getting better performance, especially when you overclock the CPU. The second issue I noticed was he was using a Gigabyte UD5 X58 motherboard. Gigabyte in this era did have, I guess, a problematic BIOS, and so when you couple a problematic BIOS with problematic memory, I don't think you're gonna get the most stable of overclocks and you can see this in the Battlefield 1 results. Essentially with Steve's i7-980X stock settings, he's getting 130 average FPS, and this is at 3.46 gigahertz on all cores, which is where the i7-980X runs at. When you overclock it to 4.4 gigahertz, you should be getting roughly over 20% in overclock performance, and this does show in even Steve's own Cinebench scores. And then when we move over to Battlefield 1 results again, we can see that they're only increasing 9%. Now I did run the same tests here at the studio, and indeed, when I had stock settings versus to overclocked settings, I was getting a performance boost of over 22%. Of course, it just depends on where you test in the map, on what FPS you were gonna get exactly. But on top of that, the Cinebench scores also weren't that good for a 4.4 gigahertz, both on the single-threaded and the multi-threaded score. For instance, I was getting around 1,000 points, Steve was getting around 970. The single-core performance was higher on my end as well, both even stock and overclocks, too. So, essentially, in Steve's Cinebench scores, he was getting overclocks that were scaling with performance but when it came to Battlefield he wasn't, which, as I said before, indicates that Steve did not have a stable overclock when he was conducting these tests. And also, another thing on top of this with with that video, was when the Ryzen CPUs were being compared to the X58 CPU, they were definitely using some very good DDR4 memory, which that alone can cost more than a whole configuration of X58, DDR3 memory, a CPU, and a CPU cooler. So, I guess in closing out, people in the comments were just making fun of me, but not one person pointed out the discrepancy in the results. Two people did point out the motherboard overclocks, and also the DDR3, so that was good to see. But what it all comes to, I didn't really wanna address this, because I love Steve, and I love what he does, especially with new parts, new graphics cards, Ryzen CPUs, Intel CPUs, he does phenomenal benchmarking, and I feel like his results are very accurate when it comes to new parts. I just feel like X58, and architecture like this, it does require a lot of finesse, and comments like these, when I get comments like these coming into my channel, they're really insulting towards me, in that it makes me feel like, okay, I don't know what I'm doing at all, yet I've spent a lot of time with X58, X79. And the reason I still recommend people go with X58 or X79, or stuff like that, is because a lot of the times people will upgrade their systems, and not care so much for their old stuff, and they'll just essentially give it away for next to nothing. Recently on Discord someone found a really good deal on an X58 kit for about $40. And so, from time to time, you can get really good deals on this old stuff. I've always encouraged my viewers to take advantage of that. Of course, when it comes to buying a motherboard of eBay, I wouldn't recommend at all to anyone, and I never have, go pay $150 or $200 for an X58 board. That's just not representing price/performance at all. But another reason that I had taken a real liking to things like X58 and X79, is that overclocking them was a lot of fun. It required a lot more than today's conventional overclock, where you've got literally three settings, whack in your XMP profiles, up your CPU multiplier, up your CPU core voltage, and call it a day. On these older architectures, you really had to trial and error, test a lot of different settings out, and figure out a great balance of settings that would get you a higher overclock, and in the process, I guess you learn to appreciate older gear like this, and what it can do, especially when you see the overclock percentage levels. Sometimes with and X5650, for example, you can take that thing from 2.66 gigahertz all the way up to 4.4, 4.5 gigahertz, with the right motherboard. That's like over a 40% overclock, and this just incredible value for money. But another thing, too, when it came to me and Steve talking on Skype about this, he just seems to think that the architecture is really old, and essentially no one should really buy it, and that's his opinion. And me, my opinion is, if the right deal comes up, you should definitely take the gamble. It might be a lot of fun. And that's where we differ as tech reviewers. He's not wrong, I mean, when he says that it doesn't support a USB3 out at the front, it doesn't have PCI-e 3, it doesn't have the new instruction sets, he's right in that a lot of the times, it doesn't have those new features. But when it comes to me, I think, well, a lot of people out there, especially a lot of our audience, they just love playing games, they like extracting the most value for money out of their gear. And so, if you are that person, and you wanna couple it with a mid-range graphics card, then X58 has always been a good option, and even to this date, it still is. Anyway, guys, I hope you enjoyed today's video. If you did, then be sure to hit that like button, and also, let us know in the comments section below, do you think X58 is finished? This is sort of like the last video I wanted to make on it before I move on now to X79, and the eight-core 16-threaded Xeon. I hope you have enjoyed the recent videos surrounding X58, and this is sort of like the finale. Of course, I will follow it up, if I, I guess, I get more information on what's going on. If Microsoft want to address some of these concerns with the Xeon CPUs running slower on their OS, then I'd love to hear what they have to say about that, but other than that, I don't know how else to take it, but possibly forced obsolescence, as some of the viewers have mentioned in the comments. Anyway guys, I'll catch you in another tech video very soon. Also, on top of that, don't forget to check out today's video sponsor, LastPass, helping us keep the content real, and flowing towards you guys. Completely free to try out. Link is in the description below. And I'll catch you in the next one. Peace out for now, bye. (energetic electronic music) (record scratching) (metal clicking) (liquid hissing) (man humming) (liquid hissing) (metal clicking) (liquid hissing) (dull thudding) Eye for an eye, boy. (laid-back R&B music)