 Now the whole industry has been really excited about how AMD's third-gen Ryzen processors have finally caught up to Intel in key consumer applications like gaming. But in the background, AMD has been quietly not just catching up to Intel, but surpassing them by an incredible margin with their second generation of epic server processors. And in my hands, I have the Epic Rome 7742, a 64-core, 128-thread, 8-channel memory, absolute f***ing monster of a CPU. Welcome to today's episode of Holy S***, where we are going to take this thing for a little test drive. Guys, the full review will come. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that. But today is going to be more about the stuff that AMD didn't want to cede us a processor because they knew we were going to do, like running Cinebench and games and all that kind of fun stuff. Speaking of fun, this segue to our sponsor, GlassWire. With GlassWire, you can see what's going in and out of your PC over its network connection so you can diagnose if there's any suspicious apps behaving badly. So check it out and get 25% off using offer code LINUS at the link in the video description. So while we get set up here, I want to fill you guys in on some of what's special about AMD's Epic Rome platform. So as I mentioned before, this is a 7742 with 64 cores and 128 threads. But contrary to what you might think, if your only CPU experience is with Intel processors, even though it has 64 cores in it, its 225 watt TDP is not actually that much higher than Intel's top of the line server chips, which only have a mere... It's hard to wrap my brain around saying that. A mere 28 cores on board and the unfairness of this comparison doesn't end at the core counts and the thermals. At the top end, AMD boasts nearly seven times the cache, four times the maximum memory capacity, two extra memory channels, PCI Express Gen 4, which is double the speed of Gen 3, not to mention that they've got nearly three times as many lanes on board and they come in at $4,000 less. And that's just at the top end, up and down the stack. Intel's Xeon scalable processors are under attack from AMD Epic Rome. And it gets better than that. So a little over 15 years ago, AMD made a huge step forward in computer architecture by taking the memory controller off of the North Bridge, that second chipset that motherboards used to have on them, and integrating it into the CPU. Now, they've done themselves one further by taking nearly everything that still existed, whether you want to call it a chipset or an IO hub or whatever else, but that still existed on a separate chip on the motherboard and integrated it right into the CPU. Yes, even all those PCI Express lanes, that is the secret sauce that makes Epic so modular and scalable and flexible. It means that whether we're talking about a motherboard like this one that Supermicro very kindly sent over to us, along with the CPU for us to do this preliminary testing, or whether you're talking about a fully integrated server that takes all those PCI Express lanes and wires them up directly to NVMe drives all across the front of the thing instead of using, you know, splitters and switches and all that kind of nonsense. AMD doesn't have to go head-to-head with Intel in terms of raw CPU performance. That's not to say that they can't. Actually, the CPU performance we're expecting will be very good. But it means that the solution is just capable of stuff that Intel flat out cannot do right now. So why don't we fire it up? It's like mind-blowing that we have 64 processing cores and a Northbridge effectively sitting under a single Noctua cooler. Getting all hot and bothered. Let me take off my sweater. Nice sweater, right? lttstore.com. Also this shirt. So for lulls more than anything else, we're going to kick things off with Cinebench R15, a benchmark that everyone knows is sort of light for modern multi-core processors. Never mind modern. Epic! Look at all those threads! It's ridiculous! It's so dumb! And this is cool. Only two NUMA domains. And if you're nerdy enough, you'll know why that's really cool. It is incredibly hard to do that with this many cores. AMD has figured out a way even in their dual or multi-socket configurations to dramatically reduce the number of NUMA domains that are required for these massive core counts. Something that Intel actually lorded over them just last generation. So no more anticipation. Let's do it. And it's gone. Ha ha ha ha ha ha! 8450 in Cinebench R15 on a single CPU. It's not even running long enough to load up the... to get hot! The fan didn't even spin up. So obviously we're going to need something a little heavier. Let's step up to Cinebench R20, which is based on a much more modern version of Maxon Cinema 4D. This thing wrecks R20 the way that high-end desktop Intel chips wreck R15. Like... BOOM! This just beat a 48-core configuration of dual Xeon Platinum 8168s. So more perspective here. Each of those chips is within striking distance of the cost of a single 7742. And that's ignoring that it takes two of them to not even have the same performance, not to mention all the memory channels and PCI Express lanes and blah blah blah, all that other stuff. It's madness. And things get a little bit more crazy here. Now the eagle-eyed among you probably noticed that we're only running four memory sticks in this motherboard right now. The reason is that at least in our early testing, we were having trouble getting unbuffered ECC memory to run in it. We are also going to be significantly upgrading the memory capacity of our system here. Each of these is a 32 gigabyte DIM. So that'll be 256 gigs of RAM. So there it is, 256 gigs of RAM, and this hardware is too new to have the readout for how many memory channels and what speed it's running at and all that noise. So I guess we'll have to fire up like... Do you have HWinfo? Yeah, okay, cool. Let's do that. All right, so we're running at 2666, which happens to be the rated speed of our memory. We've got our RTX 2080 Ti, which is totally inappropriate. Everything here is looking pretty right. All right, let's try Cinebench R20 again. Now to be clear, I'm not expecting a huge difference in performance going from quad to eight channel memory in this particular workload. There are very few, if any, single user use cases where you're really going to get a benefit from that much memory bandwidth. It's more for like actual legitimate server use. And as expected, our score is pretty darn similar. If you got eight channels, y'all might as well use them. On the subject of single user workloads though, here's one that can really benefit from extra CPU power. Let's go ahead and do the classic BMW Blender render and see just how much of our CPU we can load up here. Wow, even Blender, which is traditionally a very multi-threaded workload, cannot take advantage of all 128 of our threads, maxing out at around 80, 85 of them or so. It's only using half of them. Is Blender, Numa aware? That's fine. We have a solution to unlock this fully armed and operational battle station. We're just going to run two instances of the render at the same time. And there it is. So we are turboing to just shy of 2.5 gigahertz. We are seeing 100% usage of all 64 of our cores, 128 threads. And I am willing to bet that this thing is kicking out some heat. I need to dry my hair. The fan's not really ramping up. Okay, these fins are getting pretty toasty. Is this fan going to ramp up at some point? I might not be on the right header. Supermicro doesn't label their headers particularly clearly. We could just try a different one. Oops. So impressively, it still managed to finish while running two Blender instances simultaneously in a minute and 14 seconds apiece. All right, so now that we've got our fan figured out properly, let's go ahead and have a look at what we can expect in terms of CPU temperatures under a very heavy load. So my friends, that is 128 instances of Prime95. I've never seen anything quite like that. And let's see what that does to our poor 7742. I wonder if it detects this as a power virus. Every thread is only running at 93, 94%. So this isn't working, and we think the CPU might be detecting Prime95 as a so-called power virus because it's even throttling below its base speed. So we're going to go ahead and kill that. All right, so this is more like it. Now we're hitting every core for all it's worth. We're actually managing to turbo a little above our base clock to 2.5 GHz. And shockingly, temperatures are not even just reasonable. They're downright under control. We're actually only at about 50 degrees on the CPU now that our fan turns up when there's heat going into the heatsink. Now that might seem unintuitive having 64 cores running at a mere 52 degrees when you've got like an 8-core Intel processor like a 9900K that'll easily run at, you know, 70 plus and it's only 8 cores. But in this case, EPYC's size and the lower frequency of its cores means that not only are the cores more spread out, making it easier to transfer heat into the heatsink, but because they're running at a lower frequency and a lower voltage, it means they're running much more efficiently. Pushing for that last little bit of frequency requires a lot more power to be pumped through the chip and therefore a lot more waste heat. That dual gooseberry render though. But enough of all that. It's time to answer the question you've all been waiting for. Can it run Crysis? Okay then, 720p it is. But we're going to crank everything to very high. Very high is grayed out, also motion blur sucks. Anytime now. If this takes any longer, I'm going to have a midlife crisis. That is pretty slow. Wait a minute. Anthony, is this the CPU renderer version? Yeah, that's why I told you not to run over 720p. Oh wow, I'm surprised this is like running at all then. Yeah, I had everything on low and it's actually semi playable on low. Okay, well why don't we try that then? Friggin' figures, I knew you had some crazy trick up your sleeve. Alright, so I turned the in-game settings down to low and this is pretty darn impressive, but the best is yet to come. So in order to get this, it's using a renderer called Swift shader. In order to get it to even launch the game, you have to change your CPU affinity to something other than all processors. So it looks like eight processors total. So we instead are going to allow it an entire Numa node. Now let's see how it runs. This is crazy. Now to be clear, no one at Google where they're developing the software expects anyone to game on CPUs as the graphics card anytime soon. It's designed more as like a compatibility layer, but it's working. Come on, I want one kill. Yes. Alright, so now that we're not being silly, here it is 4K, everything cranked to high. It's actually kind of amazing how still kind of respectable this game looks all these years later. I mean the AI is dumb as toast by modern standards and stuff, but honestly Crysis didn't run well, but that's in large part due to it just being really really old and not particularly well optimized. Let's run something a little more modern and see how that goes, shall we? I mean Apex isn't exactly the most demanding game on the market, but it's certainly popular. So let's go have a look at how things are running here. We are using a grand total of 2% of our CPU right now. And graph to overall utilization, and we peaked down about 12% in game. We're turboing up to around 3.3, 3.4 GHz, but that's more than enough to run this game at 144 frames per second average. We're actually locked to our refresh rate because I didn't bother to adjust it. Holy crap, I think my team is bothering to respawn me here. Wow, that was a waste of effort. Appreciate you guys though. Okay, so I don't have any of my stuff now though, like I'm just naked at this point, right? Wow, they're like paying stuff for me. I wonder if they know who I am. H to thank them. Thanks. All right, all right, I'm coming. I'm ready to contribute to the team now. They're trying so hard to help me. Like I feel so bad for them right now. Seven squads left. So we're actually like doing respectably, I think. I'm not as much of a liability as Dennis. Oh no, they pinged a thing. We're going somewhere. No, no, I don't want to go anywhere. I liked this place. This place seemed pretty good. Oh, oh shoot. There's like enemies all over the town. Run. I got a kill. They totally like set it up for me, but whatever. I want to win, Brandon. I am a competitive gamer. Hey, there's nothing wrong with being supportive. Okay, bras are supportive and they're very popular. Actually, that's true. Millennials are apparently killing bras. Okay. There's only three squads left, ladies and gentlemen. Oh. They're picking me up again. Go team. If they can kill that guy, they may actually pick me up again. Let's see if I'm the Chico can take this guy out. Oh, they might get him. No way. Wow. We're one of the final squads. These guys. Oh man, this is hilarious. You got to heal, man. How do I heal? I don't know how to heal. Oh no, hold four. Hold it and then drag your mouse. Yeah, let go and then now press four. Oh my goodness. They go so fast. I can't keep up. Where are we going? Okay, I'm healing. I'm healing. They can't hear me, but whatever. It's chill. Please just hit him. Oh, you got to be kidding me. I think I just got hit in the head. Okay, that's fine. I will just heal more. I'm just, I'm a distraction. I'm a distraction. I'm bleeding out. No. No. Is it one V3 right now? Oh no. No. No. I leveled up. So that's it for now. This thing renders, it crunches, it games, it slices, it dices. It's pretty freaking amazing. And we've actually got a fair bit more content planned around AMD's Epic Roam processors for the future. So make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any of it. And I think all that's left is to thank our sponsor. Are you concerned about a data breach causing your credit card info to fall into the wrong hands? Then check out today's sponsor, privacy.com, at privacy.com slash Linus. Privacy.com is a free, easy to use service that hides your credit card number. You see, it works by creating a virtual card that's locked to whatever merchant you're shopping at. So even if that merchant gets hacked, the bad guys won't be able to just use your card anywhere they please. 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And if you want something else to watch that you might enjoy, check out our video on upgrading our petabyte project, our petabyte of storage. We'll have that linked as well.