 What if I told you Apple is selling iPads for only a dollar? Well that would be a scam and only remedial internet users should be clicking on that banner. But what if I told you instead that you can get an 8-core Intel processor, 16 gigs of RAM, and a motherboard combo for your next gaming rig for under 150 US dollars? That would be me spittin' mad truths, yo. So stay tuned and I will show you how. Corsair's RMI series power supplies feature premium components for great performance with very low noise. Check out the link in the video description to learn more. So the first step here is CPU shopping. Do a quick search for ARK, that's A-R-K, Xeon 5000 and scroll down the results until you get to the CPUs with front side bus speeds rather than QPI speeds listed. That's the generation we're after. They're old enough that due to their lower performance and higher power consumption compared to more modern products, they've lost a lot of their value in the data center, so fresh crops of used parts are hitting eBay pretty much constantly. But they're good enough that, as you'll see, in modern desktop workloads they can perform surprisingly well. From here, it's pretty easy to compare specs. For some context, the popular Q6600 desktop chips that I've used in Scrapyard Wars are 2.4 GHz quad cores without hyperthreading. But bear in mind that I'm usually banking on overclocking those to 3 GHz or so. So since you probably won't get any overclocking out of a server motherboard, try to find something that can do about that out of the box for comparable results. Top of the line chips, due to their rarity and ongoing value as a way of squeezing a little more life out of an old server, are usually still too expensive to be practical. But once you step down a couple tiers, you can find some amazing deals. Here's a listing with a bunch of 3 GHz quad cores for only 20 bucks a pop. Note that when you buy your CPUs, you will need two of the same model for your dual socket motherboard. So I ended up with a pair of L5420 chips at 2.4 GHz. Next up is the motherboard. Here things get a little tricky because there's the usual stuff, like making sure you have the appropriate connectors on your power supply. But given how many of the secondhand boards out there are salvage units from pre-built servers and stuff, there are some other things to watch out for as well. Ours is a Dell unit, and here are some of the things we ran into. Number one, while our board has a handful of mounting holes that would line up with a standard EATX case, some modding would definitely be required to mount it more securely. And this is about as good as you're likely to find, with some boards out there unlikely to fit in any off-the-shelf case. Number two, there were some other layout challenges, including a capacitor right behind the PCIe 16x slot that required me to saw off the lock on my video card, and a 4-pin CPU power connector that almost prevented the graphics card from being inserted. Number three, its expansion options are very limited. The top PCIe 16x physical slot is only a PCIe Gen 1 8x slot electrically, and much worse than that, it only has one PCIe slot total on the board. So if we wanted more than the mere four USB 2 ports for sound cards, Wi-Fi, USB 3, etc., then we're pretty much out of luck, since we'll be using a graphics card in the available slot. And finally, you'll need to look out for other eccentricities too. Very few boards will include I.O. shields. Hooking up the front panel switches and LEDs may take some Sherlock Holmes-level sleuthing, or even trial and error, and don't be surprised to encounter some other pretty random stuff. And ours was missing 4-pin power connectors for the CPU fans, since in the original server it was designed for the CPUs to be cooled passively. With the motherboard out of the way, it's RAM time, and once again, you need to be somewhat careful here. This generation of Intel server motherboards could be equipped with slots for normal ECC DDR2 or FBDIM DDR2, and while they are both available on the cheap, it'll hurt the bang for the buck of your system if you order the wrong one and end up being stuck with extra. And it doesn't help matters that many eBay listings don't contain all the necessary information. Here's a pro tip, though. You can identify FBDIMs by the full heat spreader that was used to cool the advanced memory buffer chip. These, for contrast, are regular ECC DDR2, and that's what we ended up using for our system. But there's another curveball here too. Server RAM compatibility. Even if you've got the right type, can be a bit of a bear. So either select a RAM part number that is on the QVL or qualified vendor list for that motherboard, or get the most generic thing you can and cross your fingers. Something like this Kingston set is a fairly good bet because it doesn't specifically call out that it is made for servers from a brand like HP or Dell. For CPU coolers, we went with some brand new stock coolers from eBay. Then because I had forgotten that this generation of Xeons requires the chassis itself to have threads for the heat sinks to bolt into, I ended up using some inserts from Nick Master Car and a piece of particle board for a backplate. But if you're really trying to get your system built on the cheap, a ghetto solution with zip ties might not be pretty, but should work just fine. Which leads us finally to the big question. All of this is obviously a lot more work than just going to NCIX and ordering a new system. So is it worth it? Well in part two of this video next week on Vessel, we'll find out. Just kidding guys. So to answer that, I ran a handful of games ranging from newish to just released a week ago in the case of Star Wars Battlefront to see how she holds up. So I paired the system with a modern enthusiast grade graphics card, a GTX 980, and monitored GPU usage while gaming to see if our graphics card was severely bottlenecked by our CPU. And while in some games I did have to turn the in-game details down significantly to get it running smoothly. Crysis 3 ran at medium and Shadow of Mordor performed best at very high, both with motion blur off. The results, while still lower frame rate wise than my usual test bench can achieve, even though it's running at higher settings, were still what I would describe as good enough. And the better optimized games even ran what I would describe as very, very well. I mean Battlefront ran at 75 or so FPS, at 1080p at the highest details, only 15 FPS less than a 5960X, and Tomb Raider ran pretty much the same on both platforms at ultimate settings. I mean, to put this in perspective, our whole base platform costs less than a 16 gig kit of premium DDR4 gaming memory. Cool, right? Yes, but if buying old server stuff was a magic bullet that killed all your problems, then everyone would do it. On top of the challenge of sourcing the parts and assembling them, there's no warranty, obviously. There's really no upgrade path to speak of. While backwards compatibility is a godsend, like it's great that your shiny new SSD works at all, you can forget about the latest, fastest data rates unless you want to put expansion cards in, and it's not like Intel has been sitting on ass for nine years. You can't expect your budget gaming box to run with newer systems in every workload. I mean, here's a Cinebench score from this system. Pfft. But back to gaming again, this shopping strategy is even more interesting than it appears to be on the surface, because our system handles just barely the last of the single and dual thread optimized AAA titles. Then, just as this system was about to get completely outdated, developer support arrived for multi-core CPUs, allowing it to stay relevant by spreading the workload out across its eight true processing cores. And the future actually looks even brighter, thanks to DirectX 12 and Vulkan promising dramatic improvements to multi-core scaling in games, yet again. So the answer then to is it worth it, finally, is that while I lied a little bit in the beginning, it's technically two quad-core processors, not an eight-core processor, yes. If you're willing to put a little work into it, and I'm sure you'd find some help on the Linus Tech Tips forum, linked up there, if you wanted to do this, this concept was a lot of fun for me to explore, and it is a worthwhile strategy for a budget gaming box. Speaking of worthwhile strategies, today's episode sponsor is NeedForSeat.com, makers of the MaxNomic chairs that you've probably seen in a lot of our behind-the-scenes videos on the WAN Show, and pretty much anywhere that I, Luke, or any other member of our team puts our butts down. They've got a wide variety of sizes and styles available, whether you're my size or Luke's size, and whether you want something kind of black and professional-looking for a boardroom, or you're more into just, you know, out-there vibrant colors. And if you go to NeedForSeatUSA.com, linked in the video description, and use offer code LINUS50 before December 1st, 2015, you can save 50 bucks on any chair on their site. Badass, right? Right? Wrong. Good ass. Good ass. Because comfy chair. I'll let myself out. Thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do, but if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or even consider supporting us directly by using our affiliate code to shop at Amazon. Hey, it's the holidays. If you're shopping at Amazon, use our affiliate code. Instructions up there. Buying a cool shirt like this one or with a direct monthly contribution. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our Channel SuperFun video where I and the team joust with long cardboard tubes on those hoverboard things and knock each other off them. It's pretty freaking awesome.