 So I was looking through the 3DMark leaderboards the other day because Steve over at Gamers Nexus was talking some smack about our benchmarking skills. I didn't see it though, I don't watch his videos. As usual, Kingpin from EVGA is way up at the top holding the record in 3DMark, Timespy, Extreme and all that stuff. But when I looked a little closer I saw, what's this? He's only using a 7980XC 18 core processor with 4 GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards. And I thought, this is my opportunity. My one shot, my mom's spaghetti. I can't beat him with liquid nitrogen cooling and like sawed off graphics cards with custom power delivery boards soldered to the back of them. But what I do have is better hardware than that. So my plan is to use 56 CPU cores in our Asus C621E Sage WS and 4 of Nvidia's Quadro GV100s which cost a whopping $9000 each. And today's video is brought to you by Thermaltake. Thermaltake's level 20 cases feature radiator mounting for water cooling, gaming focused aesthetics and beautiful tempered glass panels. Check them out at the link in the video description. Are you not entertained? I'm gonna throw in a quick spoiler alert here. My dastardly plan to troll you guys with this setup didn't work out. But it's still worth going through the process because it is a pretty unreal rig. So problem number one, SLI support for gaming on Quadros. The GV100 with its high speed HBM2 memory and massive 5376 CUDA cores should be a little faster than a Titan V, which is faster than a GTX 1080 Ti or Titan XP right out of the box. So even though I can't liquid nitrogen cool these things, I should be able to make up a lot of the difference in just outright faster hardware. Except for one problem. These cards don't support three-way or four-way SLI. So this right here is called an NVLink connector, and it is only designed for these cards anyway to put two of them together at a time. So while you can actually run SLI over NVLink, it's not really intended for that. It's more for resource and memory sharing in 3D modeling or compute applications. Fortunately though, I do have a way around that. So this is a Quadro Sync 2 board. And you'll probably recognize it if you've watched one of our many K, like 16K gaming videos, where we've used it to game on an array of as many as 16 monitors at once. Now, this thing's purpose is primarily video display walls, like giant digital signage deployments, for example, to keep the monitors from getting out of sync, which would cause weird tearing issues. But we already know that it works for gaming, as long as the resolution we're running at isn't too much for the frame buffer of each individual card. So that got me thinking. What if instead of plugging multiple monitors into each one of the cards, because remember, the more pixels each card drives, the harder it is for you to run the game. What if instead of that, we just ran a single 1080p display out of each one in a 2x2 grid for a total of 4K? Well, these are each 32 gig cards, so should be just fine. Bringing us to problem number two. Even if you had a monitor like this one, it's 1080p, it's got super thin bezels, it's inexpensive, you still have a problem. Nobody wants to game where four bezels intersect, because that's right where your crosshair is. This was by far my favorite part of my idea for this video and what prompted me to go ahead with it. Now, I had intended, like I said, to troll you guys with some unbelievable benchmarks, with like a test bench under a sheet or something to make you guys think that I had RTX cards early or something. But you'd never buy that if I had four of these monitors on an arm like we did back when we did our first 8K gaming setup. So, what if we used LG's 43UD79? It's 43 inches, 4K, and thanks to its four separate inputs, it could be split into quadrants. So, let's get it set up, shall we? One thing I should do while we're setting this up is give a massive shout out to Benny over at Memex, who did a personal favor hooking me up very last minute with one of these guys, actually two of them. DisplayPort to HDMI 2.0 active adapters. The active part's important because, well, for one thing, these quadros don't have HDMI, so you have to run DisplayPort. And we've only got two DisplayPort inputs on this monitor, only one of which is actually usable because it's a Type-C. And you can't adapt this to that. There are cables, but they are directional cables. They don't go both ways. The QuadroSync 2 card here only works if every one of these cards is hooked up to the same type of display. The card has to think it's DisplayPort, so that's why the active signal adapter is important, so every card thinks it's hooked up to DisplayPort. Just the amount of hassle that I went through to get this thing working. But it was totally worth it, sort of. Here's an example of one of those directional cables. They only go from a Type-C output, like on your laptop or something, to a DisplayPort monitor. They don't go the other way. Oh, it totally makes sense. It's just not something that I thought about when this video was in the early conceptualization stages. Can we all just stop and appreciate for a moment that this is $36,000 worth of graphics cards here? I guess props to NVIDIA for lending them to us, even though we're totally not doing what we said we were going to do with them. NVIDIA gets real cagey about gaming on Quadros. They just... They don't like people talking about it. Okay, so HDMI 4, HDMI 3. That's what I want. Boom. Yeah. Boom. Done. Finish. And you can see how seamless it is as you move between them. So you'll get a little bit of tearing. We got a little bit vertically there. Actually, that's probably about the worst I've seen. But then you can see here, moving between these two, we get nothing. Oh, and now, see its behavior. Oh, yeah. So it's not perfect, but I figured it would be good enough to trick you guys. All right, let's bring up some 3D Mark here. And there it is, Time Spy Extreme. I think this would have been believable. Yeah, you can see the characters walking right through the intersection of all four of them, and you can't see any tearing. Pretty neat. And yeah. So that's pretty underwhelming. But perhaps if we weren't so CPU bottlenecked. So while our CPU score is actually really good, like 10,000, that's just because we got a great score in the CPU tests, not because that CPU is actually not causing a bottleneck for our overpowered graphics setup. So maybe what we can do is transfer the whole thing onto a bench with a 7980XE. So why don't we do that? Maybe we can alleviate the CPU bottleneck a little bit, because we've got lots of cores here, but they're not particularly fast. You know, you do enough bench swaps, you get pretty fast at it. And as expected, this is really not a lot better. Also, I'm having another weird issue where the color is a little bit off on the bottom left quadrant for some reason. I've actually run this before on both of these setups. I have no idea what it's doing this time. As you guys can imagine, by this point in this whole process, I was feeling pretty discouraged, because we are a far cry from the results that I was expecting. I mean, it's not like the entire thing is terrible. Like here, we can fire up a game here and see that actually like in-game performance looks pretty darn good. We're just going to ignore this weirdness because this is the first time I've seen that. But this is not the benchmark breaker that I was really hoping that it would be. Oh, I know what it is. It's the whole 0 to 255 versus 16 to whatever black depth thing. How do you adjust that? You know what? I bet I have to break down the mosaic. You can see not in mosaic, I'm not having the issue. So I think it's just a matter of like, it just went wonko for a second there. Yeah, see, it works perfectly this time. So let's run a game or two on this thing. Not bad. So what I can hope for here is that we will get some pretty awesome frame rates in GTA V. Why is this game so bad at running in full screen? Hey, Anthony, can I borrow you for a minute? No, I don't want to like, can I just change more things than one at a time? Okay, how do you crank it? You have to manually crank it. Should we crank all the settings first before we start again? You can't. You can reset it if you say no. So the good news is throughout the process of getting all of our GTA V settings cranked, this tearing line down the middle is gone. So that's pretty cool. Now we can see if our 4K performance is impressive. Because we have got this thing dialed in to hurt anything other than a godly graphics card setup. Why is that off? Oh, it did. It registered everything else, just not the MSAA. So that's neat. Multiple reboots later. We've got all that on. Yes, I want to keep the new settings. Yes, yes, yes. And then we should be able to do extended shadow distances now. Now let's find out if in a situation where we're not quite so CPU bottlenecked, this thing can knock our socks off. Anthony, are you ready? Am I ready? Yeah. Are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready? I'm ready. I'm ready. It's loading still. So what would you expect? I would say this would do like 90. You think so? Yeah. That's stuttering. It's suffering. So I still maintain this was a pretty cool idea. Perhaps works in GTA V DX 11? Yeah. Yes. Let's just throw it on here. OK. So how impressed are you for $36,000? Not very. All right. Let's see what it's actually running at here. Yeah. No, no, it's just only running at like 30 FPS. OK. What is a Peltzer V8? Something or other. Oh, 15 FPS. Oh, OK. Well, I mean, that was clearly the frame rate drops. This is very realistic car physics we've got going on here. Are you saying you don't ride your car along walls? I'm saying that they probably wanted this car in their pool, and I'm doing them a favor. So basically, between the amount of GPU horsepower we have and the difficulty of synchronizing them and managing resources between them, there are many, many bottlenecks that prevent this theoretically cool setup from actually performing well in the real world. Speaking of performing well in the real world, Corsair's Strafe MK2 or MK2 mechanical RGB keyboard is an update from the previous fan favorite and now has all the features you've been asking for. It comes in either Cherry MX Red or Cherry MX Silent switches with Reds offering smooth and linear actuation with silence dampening the sound by 30 percent. It's got 100 percent anti-ghosting with 104 key rollover. So no matter how fast all of your keystrokes are on the keyboard, it will register all of them. It's got eight megs of built-in storage so you can take all your RGB configurations and macro customization with you. It's got easy access multimedia audio controls allowing you to make on the fly adjustments. And the top of the keyboard is a built-in USB passthrough, which allows you to plug in a mouse, smartphone, flash drive, et cetera. So check it out at the link in the video description. Thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. 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