 Back in December of 2015, we threw together a budget 8-core gaming PC for under 150 bucks 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 8-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? What 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 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 Super Micro H8Q G6F, designed for the proprietary SWTX 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 onboard 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 ports, so two gigabit for data, and another one for IPMI, 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 $150 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 4GIG sticks of ECC-registered memory, giving us quad-channel memory for each of our four CPUs. That's like 16 channels of memory! Hahahaha! 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 solved, we plugged it all in and powered it up, and 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 8-core Opteron 6128s 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 Threadripper and Intel's latest Core i9. I mean, this thing's gonna win with its eyes closed and one hand behind its 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 and DirectX 12 got 10% of the performance of the Core i7-7700k. 10%! And it's even worse in CS GO! I mean, at least it was only half as bad in 3DMark and Unigine Superposition. But, I mean, if Super Micro 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 Threadripper or Core i9, but it handily outdoes the Ryzen 7 1800X for roughly the same overall system cost. Unsurprisingly, Cinebench and 7-Zip show similar results, but... a lack of AVX2 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 NFF12s just sitting on top of the heatsinks 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... Whoa, Nellie, 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. 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, it actually doesn't look that bad, even though it is at the bottom of our charts. Like, so all in, we paid about $1,888 for this ghetto workstation as specced, 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 $5 graphics card in, then our system here actually delivers better value than Ryzen Threadripper. And, if we had weighted our testing more towards Blender, we'd have seen an even better price-to-performance ratio. This actually makes for 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. Speaking of headaches, do you find yourself with a headache at the end of the day, as a freelancer or small business owner? Well, FreshBooks has got you taken care of. It's the small business accounting software that is custom-built for how you want to work. It's a way to be more productive, more organized, and, perhaps most importantly, get paid faster. You can create and send professional-looking invoices in less than 30 seconds, you can set up online payments with just a couple clicks, and you can see when your client has seen your invoice putting an end to the guessing games. For an unrestricted 30-day free trial, go to freshbooks.com slash tech tips, and enter Linus Tech Tips in the How You Heard About Us section. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed, maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description. Or maybe something sensible. Maybe we'll put like a Threadripper down there or something. Also down there, we have our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, as well as our community forum, which you should totally join.