How bad is this $5000 PC from 10 years ago?

[OhYou_]

I too had one of those.
Couple of things to add from mine:
I ran two x5470s

OC would not get over 4.12ghz 

It runs 8gb dimms for 32GB of ram!! but only 24gb was usable with 8gb reserved for some reason.

got about 812cb r15 score

air cooling couldn't really contain it with a OC, and it would thermal throttle. Maybe that is why the experience was a bit poor in this video.

 

The main reason these are still so fast I think is the MASSIVE amount of cashe. the cpus have just heaps and heaps of cashe

[Zodiark1593]

5 hours ago, GodAtum said:

Surely a modern Titan isnt supported on PCIe only PCIe 3??

The Time Travel slot happily goes forward and backward on a whim. 

 

I'm not impressed with 4K YouTube running on it though as it wqs running an modern GPU. With gpu decode taking up the slack, even a Core 2 Duo should prove sufficient.

[BobVonBob]

Neat little artifact of filming across multiple days, the task manager up time is 21 hours.

[TheQuentincc]

Hi, I think you should try samsung 950 pro nvme ssd drive mounted on a PCIE x4 to m.2 x4, it's one of the only nvme ssd that allow legacy boot, indeed they have legacy oprom. This should be the fastest bootable drive you can get for legacy motherboard, it should work as far as pcie goes, I tested it on P35 board and it was show as a regular drive, but you can't use UEFI/GPT partiition scheme on it otherwise it would not work on this platform. I think that you should be able to boot regular NVME drive that don't have legacy oprom by using a bootloader like clover on an USB stick then booting on the drive.

Also when overclocking this skulltrail platform you should try to push as far as you can the FSB, indeed the FSB is used between the CPU and the NB to communicate and it is also used between the NB and the RAM, so higher FSB means better performance (because sometime it is very limited by the ram bandwidth), so don't be lazy by only pushing core multiplier

When you will upgrade the ram you should buy 32gb of FBDIMM 4RX4 PC2-6400F, all of the 32Gb should be usable, if it's only 2RX4, only 24gb should be usable : https://www.overclock.net/forum/27566598-post353.html

I'm not sure (never tried before) but if you want USB 3.0, M.2 nvme SSD and 10Gbits lan you can combine USB 3.0 and M.2 nvme SSD on the same riser, there is pcie riser that allow the use of multiple M.2 nvme SSD, so if you grab a 950 pro along with an USB 3 adapter like this one : https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/NGFF-M-2-Key-B-M_60795350477.html it should work (not sure at all, you should test it in a cheap testbench)

Or if you don't want to use M.2 nvme SSD you can use combo card that pack USB 3.0 controller and SATA 6gbit/s controller like the ASUS U3S6

For this board, pcie x16 slot are 2.0 and come from the MCH (also called NB)

 

 

edit : and for the next board, you should test the famous dual 1366 EVGA SR-2 board

[hojnikb]

14 hours ago, kelvinhall05 said:

Yeah even my single X5650 at a modest clock speed is a good mid-range CPU today, and is phenomenal when you consider the CPU, motherboard, and RAM only cost $120.

If you're buying today, it makes much more sense to go 2011 route. There are new X79 boards (which funny enough use b75 or p67 chipsets) made by chinese manufacturers ranging from about 50$ and up. They even come with modern features like M.2 nvme support. CPUs are plentiful and cheap (decent 8 cores can be had for like 50-60$) ram is also cheaper, as you can use server ecc or fb sticks (15$ for 8GBs).

 

There can be some quirks (apperently standby isn't working on these boards) but otherwise it can be a viable option for multicore budget rig.

 

Another option is 1356 platform (a wierd inbetween 1155 and 2011). Boards and cpus are not as plentiful, but you can also rig something up if you hunt aliexpress.

[kelvinhall05]

4 minutes ago, hojnikb said:

If you're buying today, it makes much more sense to go 2011 route. There are new X79 boards (which funny enough use b75 or p67 chipsets) made by chinese manufacturers ranging from about 50$ and up. They even come with modern features like M.2 nvme support. CPUs are plentiful and cheap (decent 8 cores can be had for like 50-60$) ram is also cheaper, as you can use server ecc or fb sticks (15$ for 8GBs).

 

There can be some quirks (apperently standby isn't working on these boards) but otherwise it can be a viable option for multicore budget rig.

 

Another option is 1356 platform (a wierd inbetween 1155 and 2011). Boards and cpus are not as plentiful, but you can also rig something up if you hunt aliexpress.

The new X79 motherboards are honestly quite shit. The thing with X58 and X79 is that they're amazing if you can find a motherboard, RAM, and at least an i7 for $150 or less. Otherwise, it's simply not worth it anymore.

[Madgemade]

3 minutes ago, hojnikb said:

There are new X79 boards (which funny enough use b75 or p67 chipsets) made by chinese manufacturers ranging from about 50$ and up. They even come with modern features like M.2 nvme support. CPUs are plentiful and cheap (decent 8 cores can be had for like 50-60$) ram is also cheaper, as you can use server ecc or fb sticks (15$ for 8GBs).

I forget if Linus has already covered these. A lot of youtubers have covered them already. There are some pretty nice Dual Socket boards coming out now.

[hui]

Pro tip for times when windows you are unable to close a game via task manager due to the game not giving up the screen space at the front (like at 16:23): press win+tab, add a new desktop, move the game to that window and peacefully open up task manager.

[Combat tweek]

My step dad still has the old Danger Den shop computer (he was one of the founders). It's fully water-cooled (CPU's, north bridge, south bridge, and GPU). It only has 4gb or RAM in it but you can play the HELL out of windows desktop experience (win7 at least). Just joined the forms to see if LTT wants it. If anyone can make sure the the LTT crew see this, that would be awesome. Thanks everyone and have an awesome day!

[Combat tweek]

3 minutes ago, Combat tweek said:

My step dad still has the old Danger Den shop computer (he was one of the founders). It's fully water-cooled (CPU's, north bridge, south bridge, and GPU). It only has 4gb or RAM in it but you can play the HELL out of windows desktop experience (win7 at least). Just joined the forms to see if LTT wants it. If anyone can make sure the the LTT crew see this, that would be awesome. Thanks everyone and have an awesome day!

Some of the message got cut off (mobile user). If LTT wants this computer they can have it. It just collecting dust in the backroom of my stepdad place 

[steelo]

22 hours ago, nicklmg said:

 

Buy Intel workstation parts on Amazon: https://lmg.gg/8KV3R

I had a 12 year old laptop laying around and I think it had a AMD Athlon 64 X2, a 5400rpm HDD and  2 GB of RAM. SOMEHOW I was able to get Win10 to install. It took about 10 minutes to boot into Windows and about 4-5 minutes to open anything. It was so slow that it was basically unusable.

[Bitter]

Do not give that away. That's an amazing PC, it should be in a mesueum.

[RobbinM]

Hello @LinusTech, I still have one of these motherboards up and running (see my profile)

 

My specs are 2x X5460 Quad Core chips

4x4GB PC2 6400 FB DIMMs (16GB is officially supported maximum, but because of the nature of the RAM, you could try larger sticks. Watch the ranks.)

250GB Samsung Evo SSD

Corsair RM-750x PSU because it has rock solid components and a second CPU power lead.

 

I was running a GTX 1060 3G for lols but I actually have a couple of 8800 GTS cards (the ones with the big GB's, AFAIK 640MB or w/e) for some period-correct GPU's.

It does run SLI, as in, you can enable it in nVidia drivers (tried with W10, 2x GTX 560 cards) but I've not tested actual performance gains.

 

Some suggestions.

The CPU's that were made for this board have much less cache memory than the later 771 chips. They are not the last generation of 771/775 chips to be produced. I suggest you take the highest spec X54xx chips you can find.

BUT, choose ones with 533Mhz FSB. NOT the 800Mhz FSB ones. All the non-core extreme, normal server Xeons were locked. You cannot change multiplier on these CPU's. The ONLY way to overclock, is upping the FSB for those chips. And that's why you need the 533Mhz FSB CPU's. Because, even though it is mentioned on the web, the RAM bus divider settings have never shown in the BIOS for me. So your FSB and RAM speeds are locked to eachother. With 533Mhz FSB CPU and 800Mhz RAM, you can overclock the CPU to at least 800Mhz FSB providing your CPU's can actually keep up. Mine are running 24/7 stable at 3.6Ghz, at almost stock voltage on hot days, and stock voltage in winter.

Upping Vcore hits deminishing returns very quickly for me, almost right above stock, I still have to figure out why. They are pre-core2duo quadcores so I don't blame them so much.

The CPU's actually can run the desktop, some benchmarks and gaming at 4.0Ghz on stock vcore, but games always randomly crashed after half an hour. I have been troubleshooting this problem and no memtest, cpu benchmark could get the system to crash, other than the Passmark CPU test. It is the only reliable tool to validate stability for me on this platform. It crashes on the CPU test instantly if the system isn't stable and if it doesn't crash, the system is 24/7 stable for me so far.

 

There are, or, there were, full system water cooling kits for this board, the RAM! and the chipsets etc. RAM gets hot on this thing. YOU NEED A FAN FOR THE RAM!!!!

Only 1 of 50 DIMMS of DDR2-533 came close to DDR2-800 speeds in my tests. It did 792Mhz at a whopping 1.92v

You won't notice immediately if your memory overclock didn't go well, untill you check task manager to see that there is huge amounts of memory reserved for system.

Because of it's server/workstation nature, it will allow you to run even if only a small portion of the RAM works on the higher speeds.

 

 

Some stuff you can include on the next video.

- This platform is actually server hardware, including the chipset, but rebranded and modified for consumer usage. The Core Extreme CPU's were in fact, unlocked and relabled Xeons. Server hardware is notorious for taking time to POST. Boot it in the background while you talk about it. Even with an SSD, you will have 50 seconds plus boot time. It is also the reason why the RAM gets so incredibly hot. Servers and workstations normally have active cooled RAM. There is a RAM fan header on the board.

- You can use 4GB PC2-6400 FB DIMM's from an old Mac Pro. Arguably, using error correcting memory was Apples secret to creating such stable hardware back in the day. Not that ECC could ever fix Windows' shortcomings, but it did run a heck of a lot more stable on a Mac than on a PC. Some wise guy said "The best PC is a Mac", now you now why. Hackintosh should run just as stable on this platform as with original Mac hardware.

- This platform is perfect to showcase microstutter. The dual socket, chipset, memory type and memory error correcting, the split north and south bridge, the PCI-e 2.0 to PCI-e 1.0 nVdia splitters, and SLI to top it off, ALL introduce latency.

Throughput, and raw CPU performance do not equal gaming performance because of it. It can do high FPS in some modern games, but the micro-stutter makes it unbearable for longer gaming sessions.

- Racing games are the ones that showcase the raw performance the most. FPS games show this platform's latency achilles heel the best.

- Show the difference between CineBench multi-core and single core scores, and show the single core score of a modern platform that equals it's multicore score.

- Show userbenchmark.com's memory latency ladder comparing it to the modern platforms.

- This platform was created in a time very similar to today actually. Intel felt AMD breathing down their necks. AMD beat them with the first TRUE dual core CPU's (Athlon 64 X2 series) and intel just edged AMD in the race for a true quadcore, with the Q6600. AMD had to respond with a non-true quadcore, the same way Intel had to respond with a non-true Dual core (remember the Pentium D?). Intel was not waiting for AMD to hit them with their true 8-core CPU but threw this Skulltrail platform together by modifying existing server hardware. Unfortunately, the world was not ready for 8-cores just yet and the platform died after a much hyped introduction.

The introduction of the 28-core 5Ghz, chiller cooled Intel CPU reminded me so much of this platform. Again, Intel has grabbed Server parts to show who's boss, or actually, who's not truly prepaired for a showdown with the competition.

 

Pull in Anthony, to showcase how you can add an EFI emulation layer on the BIOS, which enables you to boot Windows off a SATA3 or even PCI-e device. Booting Windows 10 off an Optane drive with this old crap? No problem...

Keep in mind, that using PCI-e 1.0 limits bandwith for a lot of controllers, especially if they don't have a lot of physical lanes connected.

 

The only thing that has succeeded this unicorn, is another unicorn, the EVGA SR2. Much faster, newer, DDR3 and 6-Core platform with the same acchiles heels.

 

LMG is allowed to use all, or any part of this post in their production. Cheers.

[RobbinM]

23 hours ago, Falconevo said:

I also have a EVGA SR-2 & dual x5690's but the board some soldering after it got dropped during a house move  If I can get that working, may send it across too as that was the SkullTrail's replacement back in the day.

Can you show a picture of the damage. As long as it isn't internal layer damage it should be fine.

 

My Skulltrail board was broken too when I bought it. It booted with CPU0 installed but putting in CPU1 didn't POST. That's why I could buy it for €50.

Turned out to be a broken pin on the CPU1 socket. Replaced the pin with succes. 

 

I also still need Linus to ship me the $10.000 CPUs and a board to see if I can get it working again. I can't stand such things not working and I refuse to give up until all memory channels show up.

[arankthnar]

Hye everybody. I'm quite a french noob on your forum. Please be nice with my poor english.

But I really love what the Linus Tech Tips team do !

And I'm in love with these old dual platform. I've got a litlle collection of this platform (Asus DSBV-D, Supermicro X7DCL-I, several servers with dual s711...).

And I've got one skulltrail.

I really love this machine ! An it is still good enough for my need. And I have'nt even tried to overclock it yet.

I really need to try this. I will watch the next video for sure !

But I really want to manage to boot a quad-sli configuration. But I do not find lots of informations to help me.

 

So if there is someone kind enough to help me, I will appreciate that a lot !

 

Please, @Linus's team, try to make sli alive on this platform! 

And please try to make quad sli alive again ! And why not same process with crossfire.

 

As a collectionnist, is it possible to share a scan of the door message ?

 

And for sure, the next step will be the EVGA SR2. 

 

A french guy on the forum HFR, is trying to make a skulltrail alive again.

But all the radiators are gone.

Is ther someone who have plans of watercooling blocks ? Or pictures.

Thanks a lot for helping

[UnlikelyPotato]

I have a quad Opteron 8431 board with 48GB of ram. If people care, I can run some benchmarks on it for comparison of AMD vs Intel and how 10 year old hardware has held up. The Opteron 8431 is a 6 core 2.4Ghz processor and launched mid 2009 with a retail price of $2,149 which basically blows the $5,000 budget out of the water.

 

Edit: I'm a dummy and windows 10 pro only supports single or dual sockets. Unless someone has a workaround or suggestion aside from buying windows server, I'd be limited to 'only' 12 cores.

[Madgemade]

8 hours ago, UnlikelyPotato said:

Edit: I'm a dummy and windows 10 pro only supports single or dual sockets. Unless someone has a workaround or suggestion aside from buying windows server, I'd be limited to 'only' 12 cores.

Use Linux. I don't think you would be able to run cinebench but some benchmarks have a Linux version you could use.

[Bitter]

Cinebench runs on Linux natively I think, I know I've ran it but I can't recall if it was native or needed WINE.

[thesweetiger]

On 8/6/2019 at 12:36 AM, Zodiark1593 said:

The Time Travel slot happily goes forward and backward on a whim. 

 

I'm not impressed with 4K YouTube running on it though as it wqs running an modern GPU. With gpu decode taking up the slack, even a Core 2 Duo should prove sufficient.

Same for rocket league in 4k , this is only gpu not cpu  , linus clearly forget to mention this point in his video that playing 4k video and playing 4k games ithis is mostly gpu task and not really a cpu task , the 4k is effective on the cpu in premiere pro , this is a lot of cpu calculation just to get a preview , running premiere pro with an onboard graphic card or a high end graphic card don't affect the speed of rendering a preview in this software 


 the part 2 it would be awesome to do a real comparaison 
using different 8 core cpu with no hyperthreading (or disabling it) and at  the same frequency, side by side,   with the same amount of memory .M aybe a good idea to bring back this chinese board which work with core I 6th to 9th gen to run it on ddr3 memory 

[RobbinM]

On 8/8/2019 at 4:03 AM, UnlikelyPotato said:

I have a quad Opteron 8431 board with 48GB of ram. If people care, I can run some benchmarks on it for comparison of AMD vs Intel and how 10 year old hardware has held up. The Opteron 8431 is a 6 core 2.4Ghz processor and launched mid 2009 with a retail price of $2,149 which basically blows the $5,000 budget out of the water.

 

Edit: I'm a dummy and windows 10 pro only supports single or dual sockets. Unless someone has a workaround or suggestion aside from buying windows server, I'd be limited to 'only' 12 cores.

Have a look at Windows 10 for Workstations. I use it in my quad socket 604 server. It runs 6-core Xeon chips with 32 sticks of 4GB DDR2 memory :')

Windows for Workstations works better for me too. It essentially doesn't give that 'you stupid consumer, I will tell you what is best for this machine' user experience, but without the unneeded server environment. It supports up to 4 sockets iirc. 

I'm not sure if the highest performance scheduler is included in this version, it's a couple of months ago since I last booted it.

And you don't need to buy it if you don't mind the watermark. 

[Krisalex]

RAM is bottleneck for, 2 reasons:
1. 8 Gigabytes is not enough.... at least 16 gigabytes will do nicely, maybe 32 to be on the safe side and 2. Really? DDR2? These CPUs can run faster than this. Use DDR3 1333 MHZ to reduce bottleneck or DDR3 1600 to be on the safe side if chipset support it. I Really want to see these CPUs with 16 or 32 gigabytes of ram DDR3 1333 mhz or DDR3 1600 mhz to reduce bottleneck caused by ram

[Bitter]

17 minutes ago, Krisalex said:

RAM is bottleneck for, 2 reasons:
1. 8 Gigabytes is not enough.... at least 16 gigabytes will do nicely, maybe 32 to be on the safe side and 2. Really? DDR2? These CPUs can run faster than this. Use DDR3 1333 MHZ to reduce bottleneck or DDR3 1600 to be on the safe side if chipset support it. I Really want to see these CPUs with 16 or 32 gigabytes of ram DDR3 1333 mhz or DDR3 1600 mhz to reduce bottleneck caused by ram

You do realize that DDR3 support on socket 771 is like...not a thing. The northbridge he's using doesn't support it, DDR3 didn't even exist when that northbridge was made and was JUST coming out when this board was released to the public. Very few Core2 boards support DDR3.

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/34474/intel-5400-memory-controller.html

It's not like you can just slap in DDR3 to that board, the slots are different and the memory controller can't understand it.

 

There are a few boards that support DDR3 and socket 775, the earliest would be the Bearlake+ series stuff such as G33 and P35 based boards. Socket 771 and DDR3...nothing I'm aware of.

[RejZoR]

I was hoping to see system having highest end graphic card from THAT era and try running games with it...

[lysyjacek666]

And I thought that I was the only one still using this system.

Actually I have three of these boards now, It used to run like this when it was still kind of relevant in terms of performance, with different cards and cases over years:

I definately wouldn't recommend this, all of this weight on the chipset caused a NB failure.

 

I found another one with broken PCB but functional NB, so after some reballing it lives to this day in this rather ascetic form.

I use it very rarely but thanks to this board I'm stuck with dual socket systems ever since.

I still have one thats fully original and functional, with original box and most of what it came with. I'm keeping it as a piece of history, because honestly I think it's one of the most interesting pc components ever made.

I think I learned a lot about these boards over the years, so if you have any problems feel free to ask me.

 

BTW I think that after Linus's review prices might spike up a little bit, there's already one on ebay for ~1700$

I was lucky enough to buy all of my boards for no more than 170PLN which is about 50$.

 

Cheers!

 

[thewelshbrummie]

On 8/11/2019 at 9:39 PM, Krisalex said:

RAM is bottleneck for, 2 reasons:
1. 8 Gigabytes is not enough.... at least 16 gigabytes will do nicely, maybe 32 to be on the safe side and 2. Really? DDR2? These CPUs can run faster than this. Use DDR3 1333 MHZ to reduce bottleneck or DDR3 1600 to be on the safe side if chipset support it. I Really want to see these CPUs with 16 or 32 gigabytes of ram DDR3 1333 mhz or DDR3 1600 mhz to reduce bottleneck caused by ram

Of course it's DDR2 as the board just doesn't support DDR3 - the notch on a DDR3 stick in in a different place to a DDR2 stick for starters.

On 8/11/2019 at 10:12 PM, Bitter said:

There are a few boards that support DDR3 and socket 775, the earliest would be the Bearlake+ series stuff such as G33 and P35 based boards. Socket 771 and DDR3...nothing I'm aware of.

I still have mine, the Asus P5E3 Deluxe/Wif-APi@n, which I upgraded from a cheap Pentium Dual Core to a Q9650 with a small overclock to 3.6GHz. The board is maxed out with 8GB RAM (4x2GB DIMMs @1600MHz). The main downside is that the original 2x 1GB sticks of 1,333MHz I bought were £150 for the pair (the 2nd pair I bought a few months later were £100) - not only that but LGA775 DDR3 boards supported 1.8V DDR3 DIMMS - which aren't supported on any other DDR3 based platform as the voltage was capped at 1.65V for Nehalem and newer. So my IvyBridge based HTPC couldn't take those sticks when I upgraded.