 Six years ago when the Intel Extreme Edition 4960X ruled the roost, there were rumors of a secret CPU, one that was even faster, but that no one at Intel would ever acknowledge in any way. And until about two weeks ago, the most evidence that I had ever seen for its existence was a couple of photos in weird obscure forums that could have easily been photoshopped. Until the eBay listing went up. Someone listed, they had about a couple dozen of these things, the Intel Black Ops 4.6 GHz 6-core CPU, and those specs don't sound that impressive, until you factor in that this thing was allegedly created way back in 2013 and they had them on eBay for just $260. Not necessarily a great value by today's standards, but oh man, there was no way that you were gonna keep me from testing this thing out. It's real. Instantly see your current and past network activity, detect malware, and block badly behaving apps on your PC or Android device with GlassWire. Use offer code Linus to get 25% off GlassWire at the link in the video description. 🎵 While the pricing of the Black Ops might not make a ton of sense, assuming that you're paying full pop for all the rest of your system components, if you were to pair it up with one of these X79 motherboards that's made using recycled chipsets, we did a full video on this one recently, and then maybe some cast-off DDR3 that somebody didn't want, there is a pretty compelling argument to be made for 6-cores at 4.6 GHz on a budget of about $360. So that's what I'm gonna try first, but honestly speaking, I have no idea if this thing is going to boot up, because there are a couple of things about it that are pretty special. 4.6 GHz, 6-cores, was a huge deal back then. This is what is apparently known internally at Intel as an Everest chip. That means that it is the highest possible speed bin of a given chip design on a given microarchitecture. So, compared to the 4960X, which was a broadly available consumer chip based on Intel's Ivy Bridge architecture, this was like the kind of thing that maybe only a tiny percentage of dyes were capable of, so they couldn't even make enough of them to sell in a retail box on the shelf of the local microcenter. One of the other unusual things about these chips is that, allegedly, they don't have any support for hyper-threading, which is weird, right? Because that's been a major Intel selling point going back about 15 years now. Why would that be? So the rumor, again, we have no confirmation of this, is that these were used for high-frequency stock trading, where single-threaded performance is the absolute king, and nothing else really matters. For example, the Everest skew from the Westmere family of products was the Xeon X5698. That was a 6-core die that actually only had two of its cores active, but it still retained access to its entire 12 megabytes of level 3 cache. Now, as far as we know, no stock exchange ever actually ended up using these for trading, and these days they've moved on to FPGAs and, in some cases, ASICs. But what we don't know is why. One theory is that it was nearly impossible to tame the inferno that is this chip, because while Intel could build a 4.6 GHz 6-core six years ago, what they couldn't do is build it efficiently. The listed, well, listed, the reported TDP of this thing is 250 watts, with some users who have gotten their hands on them claiming that they need to downclock them significantly just to get Windows to boot. So I do think it's a bit of a long shot for our weird, random motherboard to boot this thing at all, but, hey, the only way to know for sure is to give it a try, ain't it? I don't remember which pins to short for power, so, oh, those ones. Wow. Okay. Okay, there we go. 32 gigs of RAM. Oh, and it crashed. Interesting. All right, let's try that again. Was that it? We don't get another post? That was a short-lived adventure. Fortunately, I brought a backup plan. This, I have a lot higher hopes for this one. Genuine Intel CPU at 4.6 GHz, press F1 to run setup, we might just have to reseat some memory. All right, so reseating our memory and our CPU didn't help. We're still only detecting 24 gigs, but we decided, what the hey, let's do a quick boot attempt anyway. Completely bone stock settings. We didn't even enable an XMP profile for our memory to run at full speed. Why is Razer gaming software able to run while Windows is still initializing devices? This thing managed to boot. Wow, task manager has no idea what it is. It just shows up as genuine Intel CPU. I've seen this before with some engineering samples. We've got 25 megs, level 3 cache, 4.6 GHz, 6 cores, 6 threads, so no hyper-threading. At idle, the heat sinks fine, but it remains to be seen what happens if we actually hit it with load. That's curious, why are we only getting 80% utilization? Oh, we need some drivers. Whoops, Black Ops continuation, part two. We're at just 3.6 GHz and our CPU usage is pinned at 80%. I thought it was like maybe some kind of weird driver issue, but everything is showing up properly now, so I don't get it. That is a bizarre stock voltage. Like, I have changed nothing about this thing. We might need more cooling too. Like, this thing is warm. It's idling at 60 degrees right now. 70. LTTstore.com. So in an attempt to fix both of our problems with this system, I've swapped out the board. Hopefully, that'll address getting all four of our memory sticks to show up, and I've run and obtained a liquid cooling kit. This is one of EK's fluid gaming kits. It's not like the most exceptional water cooling on the face of the earth, but it'll be better than an air cooler. So I would say who could possibly need this much thermal compound? But the answer is me. Now we've got our water cooling set up, and because I'm a little bit concerned that even, you know, a decent water cooling setup won't be enough for this bloody thing, I'm just going to go ahead and throw some ice in our reservoir here. Man, this is going to be really inconvenient if I have to swap a bunch of motherboards and crap. Hey, 32 gigs of RAM, so we solved that problem. And that's weird. Our voltage is 1.39 at default now. All right, let's do a quick BIOS update just to see how that makes us feel. Yeah, that ice has already melted. Well, I mean, mostly I was just filling it with the water that was in my water bottle, and because it's insulated, it happened to still have ice cubes in it. LTTstore.com. Latest BIOS, overvoltager is back. And we're back at 1.6 volts. Super weird. How are we at 44 degrees? We're not even doing anything. Now we're at 84% utilization. We're still at 3.86 gigahertz though. Let's try a different board. Board number three, all our memory is showing up, so that seems to have been an issue with that first board. Holy crap, it's stuck at 84% again. What does this even mean? So I don't remember if I mentioned this already or not, but I got my hands on two of them just because, well, they were such a curiosity, and I wasn't sure how well this whole thing would go down, so I wanted to have a backup. And maybe, just maybe, there's something wrong with that first one. Hold on a second. We should, oh wait, what the... What I did notice is we didn't get a CPU overvoltage error. Yeah, this is the latest. Oh, there it is. CPU overvoltage error. Same stock voltage. You know, I was really hoping that with adequate cooling, we would manage to get this thing booted, like at stock speed. Let's see if we get past 84% utilization here. 82. I think I just need to accept that, no, boards designed for at max a 160 watt TDP CPU are not just gonna plug and play work with a 250 watt one. Still only 3.87 gigahertz. I don't understand that. Let's try turning the voltage down. 88 is better than 84. Clock speed shouldn't be jumping around like this. It should be fixed. So basically, it just does whatever it wants, and it's just a matter of turning the voltage down until the system behaves itself. I kind of attempted to turn it down even more, like turn it down to more like a stock voltage, which for this one is just a hair over one volt, or actually under for some chips. Why don't we do that? And it behaves exactly the same way. At least it doesn't run so hot anymore though. So I guess there's that. So that's it. 3.86 gigahertz all core turbo. And the only really quirky thing about it is that it comes with a stock voltage of 1.6 volts, assuming some kind of incredible cooling system that you'd have to put on it. So it seems to me that you need specific BIOS support for unlocking this chip in order to actually get it to overclock to its stock speed. And whether it's due to the utilization issue we're running into or just lack of frequency because it's not running at 4.2, performance kind of blows. Like in spite of having two more cores than a 4770K, it is getting pretty handily here. So given that, you know, let's fire up eBay. It's okay. Buy it now. 140 bucks. I definitely wouldn't go through the hassle of goofing around with one of these. But I have to know if maybe this is just an asus idiosyncrasy. And if I try a different motherboard vendor, you know, maybe it'll work perfectly. So I dug one last x79 board out of the mothballs. It's a gigabyte x79s something, something I can't remember. This has become less about making a video and more about satisfying my own personal curiosity at this point. Oh, wow. Is this not even going to post? I've got one last Hail Mary. And I think this is very unlikely to work. But I recently got my hands on one of these. Theoretically, as quad socket capable CPUs, they should also be dual socket capable. But given that this is not exactly the world's most amazeballs motherboard, I think it's very unlikely these things are going to boot in it. I'm just I have to try. I'm planning a full video about this board, by the way, because it is really cool. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. Wait, are you going to try and run both at the same time? Look, I'm out of options. This is the last maybe compatible board that I have. This is the problem of troubleshooting. There's always something else to try. But in all seriousness, this is the last thing I have to try. Whoa, no way. Holy crap. That was actually it. Sorry. Can I startle you there? Right. I'm not plugged. Wait, what the how did I get into the bios? Why does it detect it as three point four? Interesting. Power management. Factory long duration power limit. There it is. Performance custom. Let's leave everything default and just see if it boots. I didn't even plug in a boot drive. I really, really did not think that was going to do anything. So this board has no way for me to adjust voltage. So this thing is freaking furnace hot right now. But as a total long shot, I decided to disable two of the cores per socket and just see what happens. So I've got eight cores, four per socket, and it did manage to boot. Oh, yeah. Okay. So our water cooled one is at like 25 ish. The other ones are like 50 ish at idle. So our speed is slightly higher because we're troubling four cores instead of six. But our utilization is still 86 percent. Ten of ten. Very weird. Not recommended. If you use Wi-Fi a lot on your smartphone, why are you paying for a fixed data monthly plan? Stop paying for what you don't use with Ting. You can find out just how much you'll save with Ting using their calculator at linus.ting.com. They've got nationwide LTE coverage using both T-Mobile and Sprint. 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