 This is what $9,000 can get you, or at least it could. You see, I bought this 28 core Intel Xeon Platinum 8176 on eBay for just $999. And it's not only not a bad deal for the CPU on its own, but it's a reflection of an increasingly favorable CPU market for buyers. That is, if you're willing to get your hands a little bit dirty, digging through the archives of CPU history. And if you're willing to take some risks, like the risk I take of you skipping this message from our sponsor, Seasonic. Never skimp on getting a quality power supply for your current or your next computer build. Check out Seasonic and their wattage calculator at the link in the video description to find out which one will suit your needs. (*upbeat music*) Intel's first generation Xeon scalable CPUs launched on July 11th, 2017. And the reception to them was lukewarm, largely because AMD also launched their first generation Epic server CPUs around the same time. See, the problem for Intel was for nearly $5,000 less, you could buy a CPU from AMD with more threads and more cash if you were willing to overlook some of the growing pains that came with it being an all new platform. So AMD's return to competitiveness could be part of the reason that we were able to get this CPU for just 12% of its retail price four years later. But it's definitely not the whole picture. Those of you who follow closely the secondary market may know this already, but for the uninitiated, there's kind of a pattern to the availability of cheap, powerful hardware like this. You see many data center and enterprise customers upgrade their hardware on a schedule. This helps them stay more secure by ensuring that their servers will be actively supported and patched by the manufacturer. And it also allows them to take advantage of the better efficiency of more modern processors. Well, that retired hardware has to go somewhere. So instead of just e-wasting it, a small amount might be given to employees to validate and use personally, while the majority will go to refurb server sites like bargainhardware.co.uk or more general auction sites like eBay. Because even though it's older gear, it's absolutely still useful and can be cumulatively worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. And these sales are great news for enthusiasts because even a single large data center dumping a bunch of CPUs onto eBay can have a profound effect, not just on the models that they're selling, but the used CPU market as a whole. So let's take a closer look at our chip. On the surface, I would say there is absolutely nothing out of the ordinary about it. And in fact, if you had told me when it arrived that it was brand new, I would probably have believed you. But this isn't quite an ordinary chip. And that is why it is so cheap. If you look closely at the listings for this kind of server gear, you're gonna see that they fall under three general classes. Let's start with the most expensive. Chips listed as retail were validated by Intel for end user delivery and then probably sold in fully built systems for large customers. They are gonna perform exactly as a brand new processor of the same specifications, other than that you are very unlikely to get any form of warranty support. Now, those chips are still going for less than their original price, around 1800 to $2,000. But given that you could buy a Threadripper 3970X with more, not to mention faster cores for that kind of money, I wouldn't recommend it. Now for the cheapest, ha ha, this guy. This is an engineering sample, Xeon Platinum 8176. We happen to have this one lying around. It's got 28 cores, just like the retail one, but you can buy one of these for under $200. Wow! Notice how it says Intel Confidential on it? This is because this chip was intended to be used by engineers to develop their own accompanying products. So Dell or Micron might get large batches of these prior to the official launch as they work to make compatible motherboards, and compatible memory, and all that kind of stuff, which leads us to a couple of small problems with ES chips like this one. First is performance. You know how the rumors about upcoming CPUs often get the clock speeds wrong? Well, that's because Intel is actually changing the clock speeds based on what they learn as they ramp up production. So early chips can run at sometimes drastically lower clock speeds. Another big one is compatibility. Remember how I mentioned, Intel sends these out before the product launch? Well, if they're not done designing the product yet, depending on how early the sample was, it's possible that it won't even boot in a normal retail motherboard. This $169 Xeon, nice, for example, only works in a specific subset of HP ProLiant servers. And then some of the 400 to $500 versions are only supported by some Super Micro boards and some HP boards. So can we still get a good deal here? Yes, that is where our original chip, the one that cost us $999 comes in. This is a qualifying sample. And in most cases, a QS is just a regular production, Xeon Platinum 8176 that reports in software as an engineering sample. It's sus like that. Ours, for example, has an identical stepping to a regular retail chip, meaning that everything from compatibility all the way to performance should be exactly identical to a retail chip. Though of course, there is only one way for us to find out. First, we should put it in the socket correctly. Big boy chip, we're gonna go with the Threadripper application method, draw the little X on there. Now, because functionally, the CPU should be no different from a retail chip, we should be able to use it on any C621 platform motherboard. These boards can be had for as cheap as $200, if you're lucky. But they can be significantly more expensive, going as high as around $500. But even at $1,500 for our CPU and motherboard, we could still be in pretty good shape here, if it performs. One thing you might have a little bit of trouble with though, is finding a compatible cooler. That's not kind of stupid. There's two different ILMs or hole patterns. So there's a narrow one and a square one. You can see the board that we have. You see this is a square ILM, because the socket is more square. If you had a narrow ILM, it would be more narrow. Hey, there we go. All right, chips showing up, all that good stuff. We've got our 96 gigs of memory. This is a six channel memory controller. Something the writer brought up that didn't even occur to me, is that it uses like a non user friendly style, non graphical bio. So I was like, just a bios, you mean? But yeah, it occurred to me that you young whippersnapper kids might not be familiar with navigating those. As for can it game? The answer is a resounding yes sir-y Bob. We're running at anywhere from a hundred to 120 FPS in Doom Eternal. Oh wait, what the crap? Why would it default to this? How is this game so bad at just running at your native resolution? Okay, so running at native res, the answer changes somewhat, that's unfortunate. We are dipping down as low as 40 frames per second on this puppy. Is the CPU cooling like working? One moment please. These things don't actually run that hot, which is kind of crazy when you consider they've got 28 flipping cores in them. Yeah, well there's your answer David. How many cores this game is using? The answer appears to be a big fat, I don't know, a couple of them. Look at the frame rates, they're all over the place. Like, okay, yeah, we're at a hundred and whatever, but then, oh man, look at it just tank, we're at 40. Okay, so not a great gaming experience for a thousand dollars. Ah, there's your problem. While we're getting cores boosting up to 3.1, even as high as 3.5 gigahertz, that's plenty for modern gaming, the cores on average are running anywhere from one to 1.1 gigahertz, which tells us that this particular game anyway is jumping from one core to the next, which might explain why it's running really well for a bit and then, choking on its own vomit in the next moment. What we can maybe do is pin a handful of cores to this process and see if that helps. That's a big fat no. Oh, oh, as soon as I have to look at anything in the distance, it's not the GPU though, cause it's not about what the GPU has to render, it's about what the CPU has to, like, is it just, it must just be a draw call thing then, which in Vulkan is theoretically like, really well optimized for that, but as soon as it needs more draw calls, as soon as we go off into the distance over here, and it has to be like, oh yeah, there's a bunch of stuff over there, it's like, oh, interesting, we're up to like 150, 200 now. What the heck is going on here? Why is our FPS gradually climbing? It's really choppy though. This frame counter here is not representative of the smoothness of this gaming experience, like you can see it probably David, right? So yeah, we're running well in excess of 200 FPS, and it smooths out sometimes, this must be just kind of the same issue here. What a bad gaming CPU. And not only is it bad for gaming, but if you needed to do say, 3D work or high resolution video editing in Premiere, the CPU wouldn't be ideal for that either, that's because many 3D engines greatly favor GPU rendering, thanks to GPUs vastly superior performance in parallel applications. Also programs like Premiere tend to disproportionately favor single core performance, versus having as many threads as you can climb into a socket. That's not to say that a many core CPU, like a 5950X is a bad idea for Premiere, it's just that the 5950X also has strong single core performance, and this one just doesn't. Where you might see some benefit would be in anything that involves complex parallel computing. So maybe you want a personal server that can do everything, like host a few Minecraft servers and some websites and act as a media server and do all of it simultaneously. Well, now we're talking. Even then you can also get a lot of other CPUs for around the same price or less that can perform those functions. Take for example, the Xeon E5-2670V2, with a board and cooling, you can get a pair of those for around 250 US dollars. That's 20 cores and 40 threads, and definitely all that you need for some home automation and NAS and media transcoding duty, though it does come at the cost of higher power consumption. And check out our sponsor, Micro Center. You can get the best prices and selection at any one of Micro Center's 25 locations across the United States. If you use the Micro Center custom PC builder, you can spec out the best PC at any price point. And once you're done, add your computer and your setup to the Micro Center custom builds showcase, which is a great place for people to gather and discuss each other's builds and get inspiration for their next PC. If you click the link in the video description, you can get a coupon code for a free pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones at Micro Center, so don't wait and check it out today. And right, check out that $400 extreme edition video. It's pretty sweet. So all in all, neat chip, but not nearly as big a find as our $400 extreme editions, which by the way is a great video, so make sure to go check that one out now that you're done watching this one.