Gadgetory

- X79 was a platform that was released in late 2011. And it boasted some big upgrades over X58, in the means of not just getting rid of the Northbridge, but also having things like Native SATA 3 on board, as well as PCIe Gen 3 support. However, in 2013 there was a Xeon variant that was released on this architecture, that was eight core, 16 threads, and it was overclockable. The irony of this was there was never a consumer i7 desktop variant released to the public. And here's the funny thing, in 2018 I used this CPU in my main computer for editing videos, despite me also having access to the 9900K, and also the 2700X from AMD. So today's video is gonna be a prelude to the upcoming comparisons which is gonna be a three part series, I'm gonna talk about why would someone even want to consider X79 in 2018. Let's take a look. (upbeat music) Welcome back to Tech Yes City and first things first, this X79 platform, it is not a value for money play. In fact, unlike X58 I don't really see X79 motherboards with CPUs and RAM coming up for really good deals, and that people aren't really chucking them out. In fact most of the best deals on X79 I see are people deliberately selling the motherboard, CPU and RAM in sort of like a bare bones combo, for instance on Gumtree, for 400 Aussie dollars which is a little over 250 US dollars, you can get 32 gigabytes of DDR3 memory, a six core Sandy Bridge-E variant, and also an X79 Sabertooth motherboard. And although this is a pretty good deal in itself, it's still not the best value for money when we look at some of those deals that we get in the past, with X58 where people just throw out those PCs and not realize that those X58 motherboards are really good. So with X79 I don't think you're going to be getting a good deal on a good motherboard. For instance when we go on eBay and we look through the motherboard list, there are Huanans for sale and anything with a decent name on it whether it's Gigabite, MSI, Asus or ASRock, would usually command a premium. In terms of overclocking and getting enthusiast performance out of the Huanan boards, I've tested one of these motherboards in the past, and they're pretty lackluster, I'll put the link up here if you haven't seen it already. But basically they only support dual-channel memory, they don't officially use an X79 chipset. I do have another motherboard on hand which I'll be doing some testing on, which is called the Running, that's supposedly meant to be an upgrade on that, but even then putting an eight core 16 threaded Xeon on these imitation boards wouldn't be recommended in my opinion, instead for me personally I am using the Rampage Extreme Four. This is a pretty much top of the line X79 motherboard, and I picked this up on a deal where I got it for around 300 Aussie dollars. I also managed after that to pick up one brand new in the box, for 350 Aussie dollars. Now you're probably gonna stop me there, and you're gonna say well that's crazy, why would you spend that much on the motherboard, when we look at an X470 motherboard where you can pick that up for around 150 to 200 US dollars, and then you look at also the Z390s where you can get a decent board for around $200 as well. That's coming in under the price of these good X79 motherboards and also the CPU's themselves, the 9900K is currently going for 530 US and the Ryzen 7270X is currently going for around 309 dollars on Amazon. So the CPU prices and the motherboard prices aren't looking too good for this X79 setup I've got here, because when we look at the 1680 v2 price the cheapest I can find it for is around 400 US dollars, and yes, that is how much this 1680 v2 still commands in 2018 and this is where another element comes into play, these CPUs and also these X79 motherboards are worth money because that's what they sell for on the marketplace, they have pent up demand, and pretty much with the 1680 v2, it is the best in slot CPU, in my opinion, for X79. You're not gonna get a better CPU for high end single desktop power usage than this thing right here. Now another benefit of this, which I've tested in the past and we're gonna be retesting, is of course the DDR3 memory, and it's low CAS latency. This has quad channel memory support, so the bandwidth of, say for instance, DDR3 1600MHz memory will still be equal to that of DDR4 3200MHz in dual channel mode. So that's one great benefit of X79. Another awesome feature of this chipset itself, is essentially using an ECBU, it does have PCA Gen 3 support, and now you get 40 lanes itself direct to the CPU. For instance, you can have two graphics cards in full 16 x support, as well still have 8 lanes left over for other things. Whether it be PCA NVME, which, yes, it does work on this platform, and you can feed that data directly to the CPU, getting no slow downs. For instance, on my main rig, I'm using a two terabyte, 970 EVO drive. And the performance is absolutely incredible, and yes, this is a boot drive. Keep in mind, you do need a modified BIOS, which is uploaded on the web, and they're out there. But this was baked into X79 when they initially designed it. So when we look at X79, this was really leading the forefront of technology, sure, you can say that they've upgraded since, to the DMI 3.0 from DMI 2.0. And that's where the USB 3, for instance, the controller is still on the chipset itself with X79. So, if you're running USB 3 through the chipset, there'll be a slowdown in the DMI link between the CPU and the chipset itself. And this is true, except, as we said before, we do have 40 lanes available with PCA Gen 3, as opposed to the Ryzen 7 2700X, which only had 20 lanes, and also the 9900K, which only has 24 lanes, I believe. And also, on top of that with X79, you've got USB front out connectivity, as well as Native SATA 3, and a lot of USB 3 support at the rear. And then there's the argument of, well there's now USB 3.0, there's Type-C, there's also ThunderBolt 3, and even the DMI 3.0 link from the actual CPU to the chipset itself, which on X79, admittedly it's only got DMI 2.0. But, all that aside, for what I do personally, I do not need the DMI 3.0 link speeds. When I've got those NVME drives going directly to the CPU, feeding the data, and when we look at USB 2, if we're gonna use our mouse, for example, this is when old school rumors, I don't know if you have guys heard about it but you use a USB 2 for your mouse instead of a USB 3. And that's because it had to go through the chipset in the case of X79, and then get fed to the CPU, as opposed to the UBS 2 slots, which are going directly to the CPU. So in this case, yes, we would use our mouse to reduce input latency through the USB 3, and then we would simply just use our NVME drive on a PCIe slot. And so when we do that, we won't have to incur any slow downs from DMI 3.0 versus 2.0, for example. And then we look at USB 3 versus 3.1 or even Type-C for example, and these speeds don't affect my everyday workflow. for example I've got flash based memory cards, which hook up to a controller and then they copy data off, and the USB 3 speeds are more than plenty enough to max out those memory cards, as well as when they connect external SSDs to the computer itself, USB 3 is still plenty fine. So with all these new upgrades on Z390 and on Ryzen side X470, they don't apply to me, and they don't affect my workflow whatsoever. However, when looking at X79, the last thing I'm gonna talk about in today's video is the enthusiast nature of this platform. We're getting CPUs like the 1680 v2, for example, which have base clocks at 3 gigahertz and we can take that all the way to 4.6 gigahertz with a decent cooling solution and good motherboard. That's over a 50% gain in clock speeds. You look at the 9900K or even the 2700X, for instance, the 9900K you get 4.7 gigahertz out of the box on all cores with a good motherboard and good cooling solution, without even doing anything. You try overclocking that to 6.5 gigahertz on water or air, it's not gonna happen, you're gonna need LN2 to do that. You try going from 4.7 gigahertz for example, on a 9900K all the way up to 6.5 gigahertz on air or water, and it's just not happening. In fact, the most you'll really get out these is probably an extra three or four hundred megahertz, where you can take it to 5 or 5.1 gigahertz. So, the overclocking gains in 2018 on these newer CPUs really aren't there. Furthermore, when we look in the BIOS, in the settings needed to get a proper overclock on X79 for example, there was much more than just the simple three settings of jumping in and changing the CPU multiply, CPU core voltage and setting in your X and B profiles. You're required more finesse in my opinion even going from X58 to X79 was a more simplification of overclocking, in my opinion. So when we look at the upcoming comparison that I'm gonna be doing in a three part series, of eight cores versus eight cores versus eight cores. It's gonna show that 2013, a whole lot of things haven't changed. Of course, in the 2700X and 9900K you do get those new instruction sets, I believe it's AVX2, FMA3 which isn't available on the Ivy Bridge-E. But even then, those same instruction sets were introduced in X99. So in closing with X79, it's gonna be that one exception to used price performance, where the price is pretty much going out the window. So when it comes to the upcoming videos and comments, I really don't wanna hear about the price performance in this case, more so much the 2013 versus 2018 wow factor, in that I wanna look and really see on single and desktop users, how far performance has come. And I can tell you from using this personally, I don't think it has come that far, but we're gonna be testing out things, not only just benchmarks like gaming and productivity, but we're gonna be testing out input lag as well, which I do have a feeling that we could've gone slightly backwards from 2013 to 2018. All will be revealed in the coming days, and I hope you enjoyed today's video. If you did, the be sure to hit that like button and let us know in the comments section below, have you ever tried X79, or does this video bring back some nostalgic memories? I guess it's one of those combinations of nostalgia mixed with relevancy, because I feel like X79 is still relevant to someone who wants the latest and greatest. Anyway, we'll be finding out very soon. Peace out for now, bye. (upbeat music)