for the CPU RAM and motherboard. That is still a great deal almost two years later, and we were able to do this

Thanks to a couple of things. One:

high-end workstation and server equipment is often ahead of the technology curve in certain ways like multi-core processors and

Two: the way that businesses upgrade their IT gear on a regular cycle

Can lead to big jumps in the supply of

This older tech

on sites like eBay, where the pricing often ends up much lower than mainstream

hardware because it's less familiar to the average consumer and nobody's searching for it. So we thought to ourselves well

Now eight core CPUs are like mainstream, so how do we take this concept to another level?

Let's build the most badass machine possible

using decommissioned server gear

What could go wrong? (Boom)

[Music Plays Here]

Nothing could go wrong by visiting our merch store, which has shirts hats and more

It even has stickers

There's a link below.

So this video has actually been ongoing since uh,

mid May, I mean what the crap? How difficult could it be to source some

junky old stuff on eBay and slap it together

It's story time

So way back then Anthony and I, that was like way early on in his employment here even,

we sat down, and we first looked for the biggest baddest motherboard

We could possibly find on eBay. The most sockets, the most memory slots, the most

actual

physical size, and we settled on this: the Supermicro H8QG6F

designed for the proprietary

SW TX form factor. It checked all the boxes. Four G34 CPU sockets

32 DIMM slots for up to a terabyte of ECC registered ddr3 memory

Multiple PCI Express slots and even an on board LSI SAS controller. This thing is in another league!

Look at all those connectors, and yes, those are fans on the chipsets

plural chipsets

Speaking of which the i/o includes three Ethernet port so two gigabit for data and another one for IP mi

Which is a remote management interface you can learn more about here.

Next up then

Choosing a CPU; Or rather four of them. As we pointed out in our hundred and fifty dollar gaming rig video

top of the line SKUs for even very old servers are still being sold at a premium but

drop down a few tiers and aha

There we go the Opteron 6276 with

16 cores each can be had for 30 bucks

So we snatched up four of those then we grabbed a case lot of

16 four gigabyte sticks of ECC registered memory giving us

quad-channel memory for each of our

4 CPUs

That's like 16 channels of memory

Hahahahaha. So then at this point we were ready to rip up the performance charts, right?

Not really, so not only is this motherboard a crazy form factor

That wouldn't even begin to fit in any case or test bench we have here at the office

We also needed to track down a power supply with three

EPS 12 volt connectors in order to supply power to all of these bloody CPUs

I mean even the highest end consumer units only come with two such cables at most so what we ended up doing was

frankensteining together the cables from two modular units onto one

success

So then with that issue you solved we plugged it all in and powered it up

Blank screen

The board wasn't posting. Now the CPUs are on the supported list so... what gives?

well, we ended up shelving it and waiting a couple of months for a slightly stripped down version of the same board it lacks the

SAS controller and a few PCIe slots, so that's a bummer

But it'll do at least it came with some eight core Opteron 6128 already installed

So we were able to use those to fire it up verify it was working then swap our 16 cores in and what?

Okay, I'm gonna skip the long version here

And it turns out that despite the BIOS reporting that it was the latest revision it

Was not so a desperation BIOS flash later, and we were finally in business

On an unrelated note anyone want to buy an unexpectedly functional quad socket Opteron board

anyone Bueller Bueller

Bueller

Oh right, no you want to see how it performs first. Huh well with a whopping

64 cores we put it straight head-to-head with Ryzen Thread Ripper and

Intel's latest core i9. I mean this thing's gonna win with its eyes closed and one hand behind

It's back in the multi-threaded tests right. We'll get to those but first. Let's address the elephant in the video title

Gaming

It sucks. Like

Let me make this abundantly clear

This is a 1080 TI running at 1080p

So if you've ever wondered what a bottleneck looks like

This is it rise of the Tomb Raider in DirectX 12 got 10% of the performance of the core i7 7700 get

10% and it's even worse in csgo, I mean at least it was only half as bad in 3d marking Unigine superposition

But I mean if Supermicro is to be believed

This is or at least was a machine that was designed to do work not games

So will it blend

Actually, yeah in blender its 3d rendering prowess doesn't put it quite on the level of Thread Ripper work

For i9 but it handily outdoes the Rison 7 1800 x4 roughly the same overall system cost

unsurprisingly Cinebench and 7-zip show similar results, but the lack of a VX to support and

Relatively low cache per core hinders its high core count significantly compared to its more modern competition

even in these multi-threaded workloads and

There's more to buying a CPU than just performance too so we tested our thermals with some

Noctua nff 12s just sitting on top of the heat sinks that were included with our board and actually

this wasn't bad each CPU hit only 55 degrees at the worst in AIDA64 as

for that power draw

Hone le wow that's a number that only gets trumped by our

overclocked

18 core core i9 7980XE extreme edition though in fairness this is

64 cores across four CPUs

So bottom line then umm

Fun experiment, but did we get our money's worth well given that we bought two boards by accident

No, no we didn't but let's play a game where we pretend. We didn't do that for gaming this setup is

super dumb, but for productivity

Surely doesn't look that bad

Even though it is at the bottom of our charts like so all in we paid about

eighteen hundred and eighty eight dollars for this ghetto workstation as SPECT

Using a motherboard box as an open bench style case now as soon as you buy modern hardware like a 1080 Ti

the bottlenecking of that high end gear hurts your overall system value

But if all you wanted was CPU performance

And you just put like a five dollar graphics card in then our system here actually

Delivers better value than Ryzen Thread Ripper, and if we had waited our testing more towards blender

We'd have seen an even better price to performance ratio this actually makes for a, a really cool budget blender box

but if

You want to do almost literally?

Anything else with your machine especially gaming it

Shouldn't be your first choice

Especially given the headache factor

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For an unrestricted 30-day free trial go to freshbooks.com slash tech tips and enter Linus tech tips into how you heard about us section

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