 We've got no shortage of videos on our channel about building expensive gaming machines. But what about those of you who would rather spend your money on LTTstore.com? Well for you guys, we've got value machines and you can get a lot of gaming bang for your buck these days. This right here is a test bench made up of the components from our $900 value gaming build guide a little while ago. It's an 8-core 3800X processor from AMD, a 2060 Super from Nvidia, and this B450 board from MSI. But what if I told you that I could get twice as many cores for my money, and all I would have to do is scour AliExpress and eBay for refurbished Xeon CPUs and ECC memory, and this, the GNTech Jingxia X79 dual socket bizarre Chinese motherboard that definitely they're gonna be around to honor that three-year warranty on. This video is brought to you by GlassWire. With GlassWire you can instantly see your current and past network activity on your Windows or Android device. Use offer code LINUS at the link below to get 25% off. Now just because we've got twice as many cores doesn't mean we're gonna necessarily have twice as much performance. So we're gonna run some benchmarks on our Ryzen system here to give us a point of reference for how much value we're actually getting because what's interesting about the components that I chose is that once you factor in the CPU, motherboard, and memory, they are very nearly the same price. So let's talk through the Xeons we chose. These are Intel's E5-2667v2s, and they are a little bit on the older side. So these are Ivy Bridge and they're LGA 2011. And what that means is that you're not gonna have the same kinds of aggressive boost clocks that you would find on modern processors, even server ones. So their base is about 3.3 GHz and their boost is about 4 GHz. But because Intel has been so stagnant when it comes to performance per clock improvements over the last four or five years, we are expecting this to perform reasonably similarly to a modern CPU running at the same clock speed. So when you factor in that we can have two of these for the price of a single Ryzen 3800, it starts to look, maybe, pretty compelling. Our RAM is not that interesting. These are just some DDR3 1600 ECC server memory modules. These are readily available on eBay. But our motherboard is very interesting. So you can find this on Newegg for about $300. Or if you're a lot smarter than that, you can find it on AliExpress for about $130. And like that other bizarro Chinese motherboard that we checked out a little while ago, it appears as though Jingxia is actually manufacturing these out of refurbished parts. So it seems like the chipsets that they're using in them, because it can't be X79. X79 was a single CPU only chipset. So it appears the chipsets are C-series ones that were pulled off of either dead or discarded server boards, and then plunked onto this new design that they've done. And it's a pretty interesting one. So we've got dual PCI Express 16x slots here, M.2, which was not actually that common on older boards in the X79 era, a couple more PCI Express 1x slots, our two 2011 slots, and then up to eight memory slots, giving us hopefully the full quad-channel memory experience per CPU, even though these are color-coded as though they would be dual channel for whatever reason. Wow, I got to say the I.O. on this thing is not impressive. PS2, okay, I mean, it never hurts to have that, but only two USB 3 ports, dual gigabit ethernet, and that super basic three-port 5.1 audio. Okay. Now, something to note is that I've seen a fair number of people speculating online that, oh, because this motherboard runs an X79 chipset, maybe you could put like Extreme Editions or Core i7s in it. But no, the X79 chipset is just outright false advertising, and if you want to run two CPUs in this thing, you will absolutely need to get Xeons. They're the only ones that have the extra QPI link enabled that allows the two CPUs to communicate with each other. And that is exactly one of the performance issues that I'm expecting to run into here, because in a perfect world, in a workload that supports it, we're going to be able to leverage 16 cores against a mere eight cores for our AMD system. But the problem with that is that many workloads, even heavily multi-threaded ones, are not what's called NUMA-aware. So that is to say that they are not able to leverage memory that is directly connected to this CPU for a workload that's running on this one, in very, very simplistic terms. So what that means is that you will basically, in your worst-case scenario, only be able to use one of your CPUs. So that would be eight cores against eight cores, and these are much, much weaker cores. All right, my render finished in 12 minutes, 28 seconds, and I got sick. So I'm going to sound like this for the rest of the video. Let's go ahead and run a couple of games, then we can compare against our eBay machine. I mean, that's the good news, is I can talk like this. Brrrr! In Shadow of the Tomb Raider here, I've gone with what I think are reasonable graphics settings for a machine of this budget. So we're running at 1440p, all high, motion blur off, and we're not indulging in MSAA. And you can see that we're right in the range of what I would expect for a solid gaming experience, 80, 90, 100 FPS. Worldbuilder-type RTS games tend to be quite CPU-bound, so I've fired up a, I'd say, a mid-level scenario in Anno 1800. Looking at about 75 FPS. Again, this is medium settings, this time with a little bit of anti-aliasing, because this game tends to have a lot of jankies in it. Oh, okay. Well, whatever, that's fine, I got my numbers. I'm using a pair of NH-U12S's for cooling, but it's worth noting that any LGA 2066 or 2011 compatible cooler will work on these CPUs. So if you're trying to keep your pricing close between the platforms, you might want to get something a little bit more value-conscious, but these are really quick to set up on a test bench and stuff, so I really like using them. You know, I've always felt like Rockin' 2 CPUs is kind of like having a gigantic hood scoop on your car. Like, it could be an indicator that there's lots of performance under the hood, or it could be mostly for show. And I guess we're about to find out which one we're dealing with today. Installing this on the bench is actually an excellent reminder of some of the things other than improved performance that newer hardware yields. So you can see we actually need two 8-pin CPU power connectors, and the motherboard is physically quite a lot larger than our 3800X platform. So, yeah, they might cost the same, but this one's going to cost more to run, and it's going to take up more space. I don't know, maybe it's so much faster, it doesn't matter, though. Let's find out. Display port in, and... Good luck, everybody. Oh, wow. Didn't even get a chance to go in the BIOS. We're kicking right to Windows, boys and girls. Well, I can't believe how painless this was. We booted right up, 3.3 GHz base, 16 cores, 32 threads, 64 gigs of RAM. Everything's just working. So let's go ahead and... What did we start with? Blender? Let's start with Blender. Now, what I want to see here is how many of our cores we end up using, because I've seen Blender struggle across multiple NUMA nodes, but this is not that day, or whatever he says. We are getting 100% utilization. An unfortunate thing, though, is we are running merely at base clock. Remember, these older CPUs didn't really have all-core boost. The base clock was the clock speed it ran at when you were pushing every single core. I think this thing is going to slay that AMD platform. Ooh, wow, that is not the margin of victory that I expected. 1146. I mean, it's faster, but given that we've got double the core count, and we were running at 100% across all of our cores, running quad-channel memory, even though it's DDR3, I was expecting more than a 42-second margin of victory here. Ooh, that does not bode well. We're getting 100% utilization in Cinebench as well, but it's clear to me that these cores are not as fast as our AMD ones. I was not expecting this. Our gaming results are actually looking really similar so far. What the heck? Like, this is fine. I am kind of impressed, actually. I haven't seen the final score. Like, I don't know what our 95% tiles are or anything like that, but so far, this looks shockingly viable. All right, let's have a look here. Okay, so shockingly, our average FPS is only like 6% behind. That is not what I was expecting after how much slower these cores are. But if you check the CPU game FPS, the 95th percentile, it's way lower. It's more like 12, 13% lower. I don't know, I'm doing this math in my head, but it's over 10% lower. So that's more like what I expected. Just goes to show you guys, though, that modern games are really coming a long way in terms of utilizing more cores. You can see we're utilizing at least seven of our cores pretty substantially. Although, check this out. Remember I talked about programs not being aware of multiple NUMA nodes? These cores were clearly untouched, while only these ones were utilized. Oh lordy. Now, this is more like what I'd expect as a worst-case scenario. 42 to 43 FPS looking at exactly the same scene. So what this tells us is that Shadow of the Tomb Raider was doing an excellent job, as we saw, of spreading out the load across cores, helping to compensate for the poor per-core performance of this machine. This game, not so much. So when you consider that we have twice as many cores here versus our Ryzen 7 and our multi-threaded applications, still ran at about the same speed, it stands to reason that if we're extremely CPU bound, we're going to run at something close to just over half of the speed. Ouch. Let's just have a look at our task manager here. You can see here it's actually utilizing more cores to a lesser degree, but it's still running like hot garbage. So our conclusions today then are pretty interesting. One is that if you have a particular workload that benefits from lots and lots of cores, refurbished server or old workstation hardware on a used marketplace like eBay can be a fantastic bet. You're going to give up some power consumption, but we did get noticeably better performance in both Blender and Cinebench. And if you manage to find some DDR3 dims in a dumpster or something like that, which does happen from time to time, that can tip the balance significantly in favor of a solution like this. But what we also know is that if you want something that's going to perform predictably, like consistently across applications, be they single threaded or multi-threaded, something that is architecturally newer, even though it does come with the premium of being brand new, is definitely the way to go. Not to mention that, of course, when you buy new hardware, you get a warranty to go along with it. So if you have the exact right use case, honestly, this looks not bad. For everyone else, there's something more modern like a 3800X. Or there's our sponsor, FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the small business accounting software that's custom built for how you want to work. And it's a simple way to be more productive, more organized, and to get paid faster. Cash flow is so important for a small business. So whether it's people not responding to your invoices in time, FreshBooks lets you check to see if they've actually seen the invoice. Or whether it's just if it's so complicated and tedious that you don't feel like sitting down and dealing with it, that can be a huge problem. So try out FreshBooks. You can create and send professional looking invoices in just 30 seconds. You can set up online payments with just a couple of clicks to get paid up to four days faster. And you don't have to take my word for it. You can try it for free at FreshBooks.com slash Tech Tips for 30 days. We're going to have that linked in the video description. Just make sure you put Linus Tech Tips in the How did you hear about us section. Thanks for watching guys. We've actually got some more great server content upcoming. Check this out. I'm going to be building myself a new storage server. We've got that 512 gigs of RAM, 32 epic cores, and over a hundred terabytes of NVMe storage. Get subscribed.