 Recently we had a look at how you could piece together a pretty darn powerful 8-core gaming rig on the cheap with some older server hardware. Namely a pair of quad-core Intel Xeons and some server-grade ECC DDR2 RAM and a little bit of creative modding. But some of the fans made it pretty compelling that there was an argument for, hey, instead of drilling a block of wood to use as a motherboard mount and lopping off a part of a shiny GTX 980, why not just use an 8-core AMD desktop CPU instead? Indeed, why not? Stay tuned to find out how our server-style Frankenstein rig held up against an AMD FX8350. FreshBooks is the super simple invoicing solution that lets you get organized, save time, and get paid faster. Click now to try it for free. So while the Twinsion processors, the ECC RAM, and the server motherboard only set us back around $150 total, AMD's most popular 8-core CPU, the FX8350, is currently going for $170 by itself on Newegg, and not all that much cheaper on the used market. With cheaper AM3 Plus motherboards going for around $50 on the same site, and 16GB of DDR3 memory going for about $60, all of this retaining much of its value on the used market, you're looking at nearly double the cost for the desktop AMD platform. But of course, you do get quite a bit extra functionality for this added cost. Even lower-end, currently available motherboards support now standard features like USB 3.0, multiple PCI Express slots, and 6 gigabit per second SATA connections. By contrast, our server board only has a measly pair of USB 2.0 ports, I mean, even the freaking Raspberry Pi has more than that, one PCIe slot making any further expansion impossible once you stick in a graphics card, and only supports SATA revision two speeds. We also needed to separate EPS power connectors with the server board we used, so you may need to find a power supply that has a pair of these as well. And obviously, you get the luxury of being able to use your choice of modern CPU cooler in a real, actual ATX case, unless you like that sort of cyberpunk, shady ghetto style piece of tech that was just thrown together kind of look, which honestly, I must admit, I kind of have a soft spot for, so I would understand. But all of that aside, performance is what matters most, and we put both of our eight core setups through a full battery of comparison tests. If you're curious about the exact parts we use for these test benches, you can see them on the screen right now. First up, we looked at transfer speeds on our Samsung 850 Pro SSD using the Blackmagic Disk Speed tests. On our AMD bench, we got a healthy 513 megabyte per second read speed and a 465 megabytes per second write, about what we'd expect from a modern SATA 3 drive. However, our server board was a completely different story, as on it, we mustered only 134 and 128 megabytes per second on read and write, respectively, even though the board is supposed to support SATA 2 speeds of up to 300 megabytes per second through its connectors. Although there may be a way to make this work more quickly, we couldn't find anything in the BIOS that would allow us to increase the speed. There seems to be one post online where one dude said that he modified it to work, but doesn't actually say how, so we might be able to chalk this up to another one of those server parts can be screwy and hard to configure moments. That said, if you do want to try out the server motherboard as a gaming rig concept, you might want to take the time to locate a board that you know will support SATA 3 speeds, as the system was noticeably a little slower in common tasks like browsing through Windows Explorer. Moving on to synthetic benchmarks, we saw the AMD desktop setup perform 40 to 60% faster in ASUS RealBench Suite, which includes image editing, video rendering, and multitasking elements. The FX8350-based system also beat on our dual Xeon setup by about 18% in the Cinebench CPU test, and also won the OpenGL test, which renders a scene of a car chase by nearly 40 FPS. But would this translate to huge gains in real-world gaming situations? The two systems didn't show too much of a difference in our Far Cry 4 and Crysis 3 benchmarks, with our AMD desktop bench only gaining between 1 and 3 frames per second at 4K. However, when we switched to Cities Skylines, a much more CPU-bound title, the difference was massive. Our FX8350 system nearly doubled the performance of our dual Xeon setup. So with these results, does it still make sense to go for the cheaper server setup if you can get your hands on them? It might if all you're doing with your PC is gaming, and you want to keep your platform costs as low as possible, and allocate more of your budget to something like, say, a nice graphics card, of course. That depends on what games you're going to be playing, so don't forget that, too. As CPU-bound titles, we'll see a significant performance hit on the old server hardware. Although our FX8350 platform cost about twice the price, we got roughly double the performance in Cities Skylines. Offsetting the additional cache you'd have to fork out, add in a significantly faster performance in other CPU-intensive tasks, and even general computing, as well as many more connectivity options, and a more traditional platform with desktop class 8-core processor, and it looks well worth the additional cost, especially if you won't have to spend a ton of time configuring a server board, which isn't exactly designed to be user-friendly all the time. But let's be real for a moment. If the tinkerer in you really wants to try out this kind of a cost-cutting challenge, that's awesome. Go for it. Or if an 8350 just isn't in your budget, it's certainly possible to have a satisfying gaming experience on some old Xeons for a really, really good price. Just remember that it might take a little bit more patience. UpDesk has a wide variety of powered standing desks available on updesk.com. What almost all of them have in common is the high-quality dual-motor electronically controlled height adjust system that lets you either manually raise or lower your desktop surface, or pre-program three different heights for sit, stand, or maybe for riding on a bike or a walk-on treadmill. The one I've been using since updesk set us up is the large-sized squared up. It's been a great solution for me due to needing a corner desk, and I actively use the different profile modes as I have back problems, and being able to rotate between sitting and standing is great. So whether you're trying to just get into the habit of shifting positions periodically, or if you want to get some real health benefits out of your new desk by putting a treadmill or stationary bike under it, check out updesk over at updesk.com slash linus, linked in the video description down below. Thanks for watching guys. 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