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

thanks to Overlord from our forum I have got my hands on a really unique piece of computing history here this is the Intel extreme series D 5400 XS a six hundred and fifty dollar motherboard that didn't work without two $1500 CPUs and anywhere from two hundred and fifty to five hundred dollars worth of special memories not 100% sure what the pricing was like information going back that far as a little scarce because all that pricing that I just fed you guys is based on information that I could find from 2008 yes my friends this right here was the heart of a system that once you account for graphics cards power supplies case drives cooling could easily cost you five to seven thousand dollars for a finished Tower right up there with the most expensive enthusiast systems today now at the time one of the main criticisms of the game for a platformer was its high price to performance ratio especially because at the time well it was hard to find applications that scaled beyond two cores but how has it aged there's only one way for us to find out by sitting through this segue to our sponsor glass wire with glass wire you can see what's going in and out of your PC when you're connected to the internet so use glass wire to see if there are any suspicious apps that are behaving badly on your PC offer code linus gets you 25% off at the link below [Music] this thing is an absolutely incredible condition like even all the original documentation and accessories and stuff are in here here's a copy of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter - if you're into that it's even got the door hanger fraggers only noobs be where you'll be pwned motherfrakkers put that on my door now the first thing that jumps out about the board itself is of course its massive size so ea TX motherboards like this we're extremely uncommon outside of the server space at that time but it's not like it wasn't this big for good reason it was absolutely packed with cutting-edge features for that era so it uses the LGA 771 socket or rather I should say two of them which supports Zeon's but also the unlocked and overclockable extreme edition QX ninety 775 now the xeon platform was chosen for one main reason the consumer chips had a different pin out that didn't support multiple sockets and the goal here was to create an eight core platform several years before AMD would release their first consumer eight core cpu and six years before intel would release its own so then what we're dealing with here is two event Elle's 3.2 gigahertz York field Extreme Edition CPUs connected over a 1600 megahertz frontside bus to a 5000 series chipset which we can find right in the middle here that right there provides our CPUs with all the connectivity that they need to memory expansion slots and all of your rear i/o and all that good stuff now one of the funny things about this system is how normal it looks like here's your SATA ports where your hard drives go here's your PCI Express slots where your graphics card goes there's nothing about it to really immediately indicate that it is a eleven years old unless you start to look a little bit closer let's talk about the memory these are really special so they use commodity ddr2 DRAM chips but they're actually not inter compatible with ddr2 these are called fully buffered dims or FB dims so one of the big challenges of pushing memory speeds and capacities up is the complexity of designing the traces between the memory and the controller so in this case that's on the Northbridge but in a modern system that memory controller would be on the CPU itself now one of the ways to reduce trace complexity and reduce load on a memory controller is to move to a serial bus rather than a parallel one so in simple terms they decided that instead of having the controller communicate directly with the memory chips on the module they put a chip called an advanced memory buffer onto every module that would act as a go-between buffering all the read and write requests now this extra chip here is not to be confused with the extra DRAM chip on ECC memory that's used in modern workstations and servers for error correction now the amb came with a penalty to both write speed and to latency because of the additional communication step but at the time Intel thought that this trade-off would end up being worth it for the future improvements in capacity that never actually materialized by the next generation Intel ended up following AMD lead moving the memory controller on to the CPU and they ended up setting the stage for the ultimately successful plan to increase memory slot counts which was adding more memory channels to the CPU itself ok so one of my challenges getting this thing up and running was actually finding some coolers that had mounting hardware for such an old socket fortunately I happened to cross a couple of these old Yemen twos these things are kind of jokes to mount ah I didn't really have a choice they were the only non water-cooling things that we're still compatible in our warehouse and I didn't feel like reading water cooling up to it this time there is just something about a dual socket system that just gets my inner geek going you know before we booted up there's a couple more things I want to appreciate one is the onboard power and reset switches that was pretty cutting-edge for the time even if the i/o hasn't aged so well USB to firewire and eSATA I guess one for three ain't bad for standards that we're going to still exist ten years later and this is really unique so you've got your four PCI Express 16x slots here but at the time no chipset could actually directly run four PCI Express 16x slots so how did they do it so check this out Intel's Southbridge needed some kind of a solution to increase the number of PCI Express slots and what they used was actually two Nvidia PCI Express switches which would each take 16 lanes and split them out into two slots with 16 lanes each so what this meant was from Nvidia's drivers perspective all of the GPUs in the system were actually connected to an Nvidia chipset meaning that Intel didn't have to resolve the licensing dispute in order to support SLI on this particular motherboard even if none of their others could do it no some of these holes line up good enough power connectivity is almost identical to a modern board we're just gonna run a regular old SATA SSD off its compatibility and then uh theoretically I can just throw my tight necks testbench card on here and it should just fire up and a 1/2 [Music] good luck everybody now we're up hey hard drives detected Arab Nessus t rather excuse me old habits die hard so that was painless just fire it up a drive I already had set up and bippity Boppity no no drivers required or anything that's it modern Windows 10 now this is cool one fun thing about this generation of hardware is that because the CPU bones connected to the Northbridge bone is 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 something from the memory that's directly attached to this one causing an extra communication hop so you can actually see here all of our cores show up as a single Numa node which should allow basically any workload to scale well across all eight of our course I mean except for the fact that we have a North Bridge so there's just like always an extra-hot I mean with that said overall system responsiveness here is super usable like with an SSD drive in here I would have no reason to think unless I opened up Task Manager that I'm looking at a super old computer here like everything just kind of works so while it's definitely not modern there are some really good things about this setup like this is about as far back as you can go while still maintaining most of the modern creature comforts like PCI Express even Gen one means that we can add high-speed connectivity to this system you want 10 gig networking which I just installed boom and adding card and you're ready to go you want USB 3 boom another adding card you're ready to go like PCI the older generation which by the way it does also have a couple PCI slots in there tapped out at 133 megabytes a second and that was a shared bus so multiple cards plugged into multiple slots all had to share that limit PCI Express even the first generation version featured here could handle up to four gigabytes per second on a slot like this one okay so it occurs to me that we're gonna be limited by our SATA one drive but I'm copying a file over the network here and we are out of disk space one moment please at any rate we should still be able to tell if we're getting an actual 10 gig connection to our server here it should exceed 112 megabytes the second ad boat there it is a hundred and eighty three megabytes a second which is well shy of 10 gig but certainly more than one it's our CPU usage look like doing that mmm so let's come up with some more realistic workloads then I mean what about 4k YouTube remember guys this is 2000 holy this was in 2008 yep remember when YouTube looked like this 4k YouTube was just a twinkle and the engineers eye when this system was released so let's see if it can handle it there it is ladies and gentlemen 4k YouTube playback butter smooth what does that cost us in terms of CPU usage though actually that's not even that bad we're sitting at around 20% CPU now I'm not saying to get too excited about this because 20% CPU on this system is a boat oh it just speak to 300 watts but about 250 Watts from the wall which considering that a modern smartphone can also playback 4k YouTube in the single-digit watts is well shows you that we've definitely come a long way in the last 10 years as for multitasking well even just trying to browse the web in the foreground while our 4k video plays in the background we're gonna see spikes in CPU activity up in the range of 60 to set or even 80% depending on how heavy the pages were trying to load are so you can actually see each page load here as it's coming in oh wow loading a big Google sheet actually got us up to 75% CPU usage but our video is still playing back smoothly we can scrub around like all the features work exactly like you would expect them to now to see how well it's aged in terms of productivity let's fire up Photoshop Creative Cloud Edie you want to try and do something on this let me know let me know if it's any good all righty here's some coil line let's work in there is that a reasonable amount of time to open this yeah maybe close task manager in the background oh wow we're at a hundred percent CPU what are you trying to do there Wow you can actually hear the fans ramp up oh wow now I kind of wonder if a big part of our problem could be that we've only got eight gigs of memory oh so we're only letting Photoshop have up to five yeah point something gigs that's not the worst thing ever actually it's not great I mean your workstation doesn't perform like this does it no but this is ten years old yeah this looks pretty unusable to me I mean resolutions have gone up since then so it's just loading loading things for days all right thanks ed are we even gonna be able to close Photoshop now I was kind of hoping that the Photoshop test would go okay so that there would be some suspense when I fire up Adobe Premiere but all signs point to this just being a blood let blood bath a blood blast it's much worse give it a second it's just it's popping in it's popping in poppin fresh you know got that fresh content [Music] all right that's it all media loaded let's see what kind of performance we can get here woof now in fairness this is a que footage and we're trying to play it at half res quarter res oh no that's ugly let's try one eight okay maybe one sixteenth okay so it's not completely unusable but only at one sixteenth 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 actually get a preview in a reasonable amount of time here so this is grayed out but that game definitely launched this is a strange behavior oh yeah we're trying a game now theoretically the higher resolution you go the more likely you are to be bottlenecked by your graphics card rather than your CPU so I'm gonna try and run a no 1800 at 4k resolution now the menus at 60fps that's not a bad sign shut up David there we go and know that spectacular menu performance did not translate to in-game so this card 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 kind of cool is you can really see decent connection when you zoom in and you manage to get like a decent framerate so we're up to around 30 but it doesn't manage to account for like panning and also the game just crashed decent cannot help you with that wow this is one spectacular game crash like I can't even get task manager up sign out I'll do it see this is the thing that kills me about Windows they can't code an actual no and the task but if you sign out oh yeah you want to end the task no problem okay so in fairness to our system here I did choose an Oh No that it's a particularly CPU heavy game so why don't we try something a little bit more fair this here eventually is going to be rocket League again bork a high quality with motion blur off and actually this is quite playable I mean I still suck at this game or whatever but the good news is that we're running it anywhere from about 50 to 65 frames per second it actually plays pretty smart nice especially again like I said with g-sync a feature that they couldn't possibly have imagined existing back when they were creating this motherboard and CPU combo the thing is guys my secret plan all along was actually to outfit this thing with $2,500 worth of modern gaming horsepower that's right I wanted to run to RTX 28 et eyes on it in SLI now thing is though it's gonna take some time to get SLI working because there are actually issues with windows tens driver support for those Nvidia PCI Express bridges that we need oh crap I just realized I forgot to plug the chips that fan back in that's hot alright so anyway that's gonna take some work also some of the things we've tried so far have been pretty slow we're running into obvious cpu bottlenecks maybe overclocking is the solution well that's gonna take some time as well another thing 8 gigs of ram is obviously a problem for productivity but it may even be a problem for gaming for us at this point intel only ever validated this motherboard for 8 gigs of ram 4x2 gigs so I'm just gonna have to source some 4 gig fully buffered dims and just see what happens also I think there's some software optimization that we can do so game launchers it's gotten to the point where you need two three four maybe even more of those running on your system and on a modern system something like the you play launcher is a negligee amount of system overhead not enough to affect performance unless you're running Lake comparative benchmarks or something but on a system like this having you play in the background look at this just launching it spiked us up to 80 percent and having it running in the background sucks up as much as eight to ten percent of our cpu performance so to put that in context that is about two-thirds of one of my eight cores like an O still wasn't gonna run well on this thing but having stuff going in the background certainly isn't gonna help so then I want to hear from you guys what are your suggestions in the video comments for what you want to see for part two and I also want to hear from you guys what you think of this segue to my responses the NuForce be alive twos are lightweight they're bluetooth and they've got magnets on each year but to clasp them together they feature ten hours of continuous listening they fully charge in one and a half hours their IP x5 water-resistant rated so you can sweat with them in and they've got an inline microphone their Google assistant and Siri compatible and they've got a remote to skip tracks and adjust the volume you can get yours today on Amazon for just 29 bucks at the link in the video description so thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you know where that button is but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below also down there's our merch storage has cool shirts like the one I'm wearing cool water bottles like the new ltte stealth water bottle and also we have a link to our community forum down there which you should definitely join still cold insulated bottle

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 7,293,406

Rating: 4.9126492 out of 5

Keywords: intel, skulltrail, cpu, $5000, eatx, motherboard, 10, years, lga771, dual, xeon, extreme, qx9775

Id: wNo7qoLRtkQ

Length: 20min 37sec (1237 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 05 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Death2PorchPirates]

linus has leaked them previously in a video, it's almost intentional at this point

[u/Defiant001]

This is the same type of marketing as when the Titan RTX was silently in the background before release.

[u/Rocksdanister]

Couldn't see the taskmanager properly , I think that youtube 4k test likely used gpu for decoding.