How bad is this $5000 PC from 10 years ago?

Thanks to Overlord on our forum, I have a truly unique piece of computing history in my hands. This is the Intel so far away is a bit slim because all the prices I just gave you are based on information I was able to find in 2008. Yes, my friends,

this

right here was the heart of a system that, once you take into account the graphics cards, power supplies, cooling units, cooling could easily cost you between five and seven thousand dollars for a finished tower on par with today's most expensive enthusiast systems, now at the time, one of the main school reviews.

The drilling rig was its high price-performance ratio, especially since at the time it was difficult to find applications that scaled beyond two cores, but how has it aged? There's only one way to find out by sitting on

this

segway with our sponsor glasswire with Glasswire you can see what goes in and out of your PC when you're connected to the Internet, so use Glasswire to see if there are any suspicious apps misbehaving on your PC . The Linux offer code gives you 25 off at the link below this. The thing is in absolutely incredible condition, as if even all the original documentation, accessories and stuff were here.

Here's a copy of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2. If you like it, it even has the door hanger. Newbies only, be careful, you will be fooled. Put that on my doorstep now, the first thing that jumps out about the board itself is of course its enormous size, so Eatx motherboards like this were extremely rare outside of the server space at the time, but it's not like it wasn't as big forever. which is why it was absolutely packed with cutting edge features for that time so it uses the lga 771 socket or rather I should say two of them which support xeons but also the unlocked and overclockable extreme edition qx 9775 platform was now chosen xeon for one main reason consumer chips had a different pin that did not support multiple sockets and the goal here was to create an eight core platform several

years

before AMD released its first consumer eight core CPU and six

years

before Intel released its own, so What we're dealing with here are two 3.2 gigahertz Intel York Field Extreme Edition CPUs connected via a 1600 megahertz front-end bus to a

5000

series chipset which we can find right in the middle here and which provides our CPU with all the connectivity. that need memory, uh, expansion slots and all the rear I/O and all that good stuff.

Now one of the fun things about this system is how normal it seems. Here are the sata ports where the hard drives go. Here are the pci express slots where The graphics card has nothing that immediately indicates that it is 11 years old, unless you start looking a little closer. Let's talk about memory. These are really special, so they use basic DDR2 Dram chips, but they're not really intercompatible. ddr2, these are called fully buffered attenuators or fb attenuators, so one of the big challenges of increasing memory speeds and capacities is the complexity of designing the traces between the memory and the controller, so in this case that is on the north bridge, but in a modern system. that memory controller would be on the CPU itself now, one of the ways to reduce the complexity of tracking and loading on a memory controller is to move to a serial bus instead of a parallel one, so in simple terms they decided that instead of the controller communicating. directly with the memory chips in the module, they placed a chip called an advanced memory buffer in each module that would act as a middleman buffering all read and write requests.

Now, this extra chip here is not to be confused with the extra dram chip. in ecc memory which is used in modern workstations and servers for error correction, now AMD came with a penalty in both write speed and latency due to the extra communication step, but at that time Intel thought that This trade-off would end up being worth it. For future capacity improvements that never materialized in the next generation, Intel ended up following AMD's lead by moving the memory controller to the CPU and they ended up setting the stage for the ultimately successful plan to increase the number of memory slots, which consisted of adding more memory channels. to the CPU itself, okay, so one of my challenges in getting this up and running was finding some coolers that had mounting hardware for such an old socket.

Luckily, I came across a couple of these old Gemin2s. These things are kind of a joke. assemble, but I didn't really have a choice, they were the only non-watercooled items still supported in our warehouse and I didn't feel like bringing watercooling this time, there's just something about a double plug. system that just kickstarts my inner geek, you know, before I boot it up, there are a couple more things I want to appreciate, one is the integrated power and reset switches which were pretty innovative for that time, even if the i or not It has aged so well.

USB 2 and Esata, I guess one times three isn't bad by the standards that would still exist 10 years later and this is really unique so you have your four pci express 16x slots here but at the time no chipset could do it directly. run four PCI Express 16x slots, so how did they do it? Look at this. Intel Southbridge needed some kind of solution to increase the number of pci express slots and what they actually used was two nvidia pci express switches, each of which would take 16 lanes and split them into two slots with 16 lanes each, so This meant that, from the Nvidia driver's perspective, all the GPUs in the system were actually connected to an Nvidia chipset, meaning that Intel did not have to resolve the licensing dispute in order to support SLI.

On this particular motherboard, even if none of the others could get it right, some of these holes line up well enough. Power connectivity is almost identical to a modern board. We're just going to run a regular old sata SSD. Okay, it's backwards compatible and then. uh in theory i can throw my titan so it was painless. I turned on a unit that I had already configured and bippity boppity no, no drivers required or anything, modern Windows 10. Now this is cool, one fun thing about this generation of hardware is that because the CPU bones connected to the north bridge bone are connected to the memory bone, we don't have to deal with the performance penalty. , where modern dual socket systems can experience worse performance when this CPU needs some of the memory that is directly connected to it, causing an additional communication hop, so you can see everything here.

Our cores appear as a single pneuma node which should basically allow any workload to scale fine on all eight of our course, I mean, except for the fact that we have a north bridge, so as always there is a jump additional, I mean, saying that in general. The system responsiveness here is super usable, like with an SSD here. I would have no reason to think, unless I open the task manager, that I'm looking at a super old computer here like everything works, so it's definitely not modern there though. There are some really good things about this setup, like this is as old school as possible while still maintaining most of the modern conveniences like pci express, even gen 1 means we can add high speed connectivity to this system that you want. 10 gig network.

I just installed boom, one add-on card and you're good to go, you want USB 3 boom, another add-on card, it's ready to go, like previous generation pci which by the way also has a couple of pci slots there was a limit of 133 megabytes per second and that was a shared bus, so multiple cards plugged into multiple slots had to share that limit. PCI Express, even the first-generation version shown here, could handle up to four gigabytes per second in a slot like this. Well, it occurs to me that we're going to be limited by our SATA One drive, but I'm copying a file over the network here and we run out of disk space at one point.

Anyway, we should still be able to know. if we're getting a real 10 gig connection to our server here, it should exceed 112 megabytes per second and boom, that's 183 megabytes per second, which is well under 10 gigs, but certainly more than one, how Does our CPU usage look like doing that? so let's come up with some more realistic workloads, so I mean what about YouTube 4k, remember guys this is 2000. Holy shit this was 2008, yeah remember when YouTube looked like this. YouTube 4k was just a twinkle in the engineer's eye when this system was released, so let's see if it can handle it, ladies and gentlemen, smooth 4k YouTube playback, how much does that cost us in terms of CPU usage?

Although that's actually not even that bad, we're sitting at around 20 CPUs now, I'm not. saying let's get too excited about this because 20 CPUs in this system is about, oh, it just went up to 300 watts, but about 250 watts from the wall, which, considering a modern smartphone can also play YouTube 4k on watts of a single digit, it's good, it shows. We've definitely come a long way in the last 10 years when it comes to multitasking, even if we try to browse the web in the foreground while our 4k video plays in the background, we'll see spikes in CPU activity in the 60s range to 70 or even 80 depending on how heavy the pages are that we're trying to load so you can see each page loaded here as it comes in.

Oh wow, loading a large Google Sheet actually allowed us to use up to 75 CPUs, but our video still plays smoothly, we can explore as if all the features were working exactly as you'd expect them to now to see how well it's done. aged in terms of productivity, let's activate Photoshop Creative Cloud Ed in which you want to try and do something. this, let me know, let me know if it's good, here's a coil line that's working, there's a reasonable amount of time to open this real quick, yeah, maybe close the background task manager, oh wow, we are at 100 CPU, what?

Are you trying to do it? I'm just duplicating that layer and it's a flat layer. Wow, you can hear the fans getting louder. Oh wow, there you go. I just needed to catch up. I wonder if a big part of our problem. it could be that we only have eight gigs of memory, ah, so we'll only let Photoshop have up to five gigs, which isn't the worst thing actually, it's not great, I mean, your workstation doesn't work like that, right? but I mean this is 10 years old, yeah this seems pretty unusable to me, I mean the resolutions have gone up since then so it's just loading, loading stuff for days, okay thanks Ed, can we even close Photoshop now ? hoping that the Photoshop test went well so there would be some suspense when I fire up Adobe Premiere, but all signs point to this being just blood, blood laughter, it's worse than a bloodbath, it's a lot worse, give it a second. it's just that it's coming out, it's coming out, coming out fresh, you know, you got that new content, okay, that's it, all the media loaded, let's see what kind of performance we can get here, wow, to be fair, this is some footage of 8k, um, and we're trying to play it. at half resolution a quarter resolution oh no, that's ugly, let's try an eighth, okay, maybe a sixteenth, so it's not completely unusable, but only at 1 16 quality, you can see now, at least my scrubbing performance is quite a bit better than it was, I can move around. on the timeline and I actually get a preview in a reasonable amount of time here, so this is grayed out, but that game was definitely released.

This is strange behavior. Oh yeah, we're trying to play now, in theory, the higher the resolution, the better your chances. have a bottleneck due to your graphics card instead of your CPU so I'm going to try running an 1800 at 4k resolution now the menu is at 60fps that's not a bad sign shut up David here we go and no, that spectacular menu performance didn't do it. translate to the game, so this cardIt should be good for 45 to 50 frames per second at these settings somewhere in that range. This is clearly not that now what's cool is that you can actually see g-sync in action when you zoom in and you manage to get a decent frame rate, so we get to around 30, but you don't manage to take into account a similar panning and also the game just crashes. g-sync can't help you with that, wow, this is a spectacular game crash like I can't even log into task manager, that will do it.

This is what kills me about Windows. They can't code and not finish the task, but if you log out, oh yeah, you want to finish the task. no problem it's fine so to be fair to our system I chose anno knowing it's a CPU intensive game so why don't we try something a little fairer? This will eventually go back to high quality 4k Rocket League with motion. it blurs and this is actually pretty playable, I mean it still sucks at this game or whatever, but the good news is that we're running it between 50 and 65 frames per second, it actually plays pretty well, especially again , like I said with g-sync, a feature you couldn't have imagined existed when you were creating this motherboard and CPU combo, guys, my secret plan all along was to equip this thing with 2500 horsepower for modern gaming, like this es, i wanted to run two rtx 2080 tis on sli, now the thing is that it will take some time to get sli working because there are actually problems with windows 10 driver support for those nvidia pci express bridges that we need, oh shit, I'm out to realize I forgot to plug the chipset fan back in, that's hot so anyway that's going to take some work and also some of the stuff we have.

Attempts so far have been quite slow, we ran into obvious CPU bottlenecks, maybe overclocking is the solution, well that will take some time and another thing: eight gigs of RAM is obviously a problem for productivity , but it can even be a problem for games. For us, right now, Intel has only validated this motherboard for eight gigs of RAM, four times two gigs, so I'll have to get some fully buffered four gig attenuators and see what happens. Also, I think there is some software optimization we can do. do it with game launchers, it's gotten to the point where you need two, three, four, maybe even more than running on your system and on a modern system something like the uplay launcher is a negligible amount of overhead system, it's not enough to affect performance unless you're running benchmarks or something, but on a system like this, playing in the background, check this out, just starting it shot us up to 80 and having it running in the background flat consumes about eight to ten percent of our CPU performance, so to put that in context, that's about two-thirds of one of my eight cores, okay, it still wasn't going to run well on this, but having things in the background certainly won't help, so I want to hear from you, what are your suggestions in the comments of the video about what you want to see in the second part?

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