How Bad is This $10,000 PC from 10 Years Ago??

[Plouffe]

Can you really future proof? The Classified SR-2 seems to think so, and we're maxing out its upgrade path to see what it can REALLY do with 24 threads from 2011.

 

Buy a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 2TB SSD: https://geni.us/dbZt8As

Buy an EVGA Supernova 1600 T2 PSU: https://geni.us/IaGmV

Buy Corsair 1600MT/S CL9 1x4GB DDR3 RAM: https://geni.us/5ctrysL

Purchases made through some store links may provide some compensation to Linus Media Group.

 

[Middcore]

A PC from 10 years ago, and Linus looks like Linus from 10 years ago without the beard. 

[shactheorb15]

Posted about it here before but the SR-2 is such a cool board. Got it a while back in a mystery fb marketplace desktop listing for around $60, opened it up to find this beast. I don't own it anymore but I played with 80GB of RAM and new CPUs. I still own the old Noctua coolers, the GTX 480 it came with, and the Lian Li PC P80 HPTX case which is absolutely massive. Loved it while I had it, unfortunately I never tried SLI. Coolest thing I've ever owned

 

 

[brandishwar]

With dual CPU, you have the NUMA node barrier. And the PCI slots on multi-CPU boards are split between CPUs as well. So you might have quad-SLI, and it looks like quad-SLI to the NVIDIA driver, but it's more like dual-SLI due to how the PCI-E slots are actually wired up. That NUMA node barrier also means that any data going across to the other graphics cards needs to go across to the other CPU to the GPUs in question across the second CPU's PCI-E lanes. That's.... painfully slow. I'm actually surprised Windows was actually allowing it to happen, to be honest.

 

Having a single CPU with triple or quad-SLI would've been better to avoid the NUMA node limitation, but then you likely still would've been CPU limited simply because the CPU likely couldn't keep up with trying to coordinate 4 GPUs in SLI.

 

ETA: Okay scrap the above since that doesn't apply since those old CPUs didn't have the PCI-Express lanes handled by the CPU directly. It's handled by the chipset, which is obviously slower. The Intel 5520 chipset supports only PCI-E 2.0, and the GTX 900 series is where 2.0 vs 3.0 really started to matter, along with lane counts. And the chipset provided a max of 32 lanes and the mainboard uses an NF200 bridge chip (similar to a PLX) to spread that out.

[OhYou_]

I'm really not sure why you guys went with windows 7. The board runs windows 10 without any jank or extra steps, you simply install it.
I daily mine on win10 with a 3090 and its fine. That's pretty upsetting because many of the issues you faced are a result of that.

You also should have spent a tiny bit more time overclocking because the jump from stock to 4.2 is just the same as the jump from 4.2 to 4.5, and the system starts to really throw hands at that point thanks to the bump in ram speed
iirc its as simple as: turbo/speedstep off, qpi link lowest option like 4800mt iirc, ram 1333 still, bootup vcore 1.45v, eventual 1.52v, 1.4ish on the IOH, and start at 4.4ghz and creep up to 4.5 till it crashes and back off a click.
You need better cooling for that kind of voltage though.

the top two pci-e 6 pins are just extra cpu power, you can even use them instead of the 8 pins lol.
the lower pci-e 6 pin powers the lower 5 I think slots. You can run without it for single gpu config, you really dont need any of the extra cables for single gpu and air or water setups, just the two 8 pins and the 24 pin, same as any normal board. That being said, I've seen 1300w of power draw out of mine in synthetic cpu+gpu loads so the big psu is still needed.

14 minutes ago, shactheorb15 said:

Got it a while back in a mystery fb marketplace desktop listing for around $60

Thats pretty good, I think mine was 90 off a sketch ebay listing. Now they are worth a ton more haha

[Somerandomtechyboi]

i wonder if the 2nd cpu actually helped or not in games

 

the oc was very underwhelming though especially for x5690 which are supposed to be higher binned chips, can do 4.2ghz with my x5650 vcore 1.36v and this chip seems to be a pretty shit bin considering the weak uncore, currently set to 3100 ish at 1.42/1.45v vtt and 6x4 micron d9qbj at 1910 9-12-12 2v (trash rams cause i thought these ics would do tight trfc consdering the volt scaling but nope), slow rams due to <200bclk since the p6x58d-e i have is a trash sample that isnt stable above 200bclk

 

4.6-4.8 should be easily acheivable for most of those x5690s considering their bin, unsure about bclk on an sr2 but youd usually run 200-220 for westmere on a normal board pcie set anywhere from 115-130, uncore at 3900-4200 with vtt 1.45-1.55v, and westmere xeons are limited to 10x multi unfortunately so stuck at only 2000-2200 ddr3 even if the imc should be capable of 3200+ but that means even trash microns or samsung 4gbit are somewhat usable

 

even with an underwhelming oc performance is not bad at all so kinda makes me wanna build an ultimate x58 system with a binned xeon w / i7 and ddr3 3000+ but no x58a ocs available and i have no idea if foxconn flaming blade/bloodrage or evga x58 boards can run 1:1 uncore

 

Spoiler

very fun platform to oc with a board that can run 1:1 uncore memclk since the imc on both bloomfield and gulftown is on steroids considering their age, 3300 ddr3 on an i7 930 from 2008 only a year after ddr3 was released is not bad but can still be alot better since this chip wont even boot 4600 uncore with vtt 1.8v let alone a golden chip that can run 4800 with vtt 1.6/1.7v, also helps that its pretty durable being able to run this kinda volt with no degradation though some rams might not like 2.6v+ =p

 

unfortunately not very useful on bloomfield since triple channel refuses to run at 1:1 uncore and needs uncore to be atleast +3 over ram multi and even then it wont get into windows, and this board has a trash third channel that wont go over 2800 and is inconsistent >2600 =(

 

 

welp i guess ill be board hunting for something thatll run 1:1 uncore (rip most amibios boards) and ddr3 3000+ on the third channel and cpu hunting for both a binned bloomfield and gulftown (xeon w and i7) thatll run high uncore and high cpu freq

[emosun]

without watching it , i sure hope you didn't do a SINGLE THING the hardware was actually good at..... like you do in every single video that features old hardware.

Have a video where you try and run windows 11 on an NES next. Then complain and be surprised that it can't do it.

it'll fit in real nice next to all the other videos.

[luckybob77]

The single SSD really kneecaps this system.  You can still boot win7 from the SSD, but dropping in an nvme disk to run the games from is SO much better.  

 

I ran a similar setup, and having multiple ssd disks in a stripe raid was the baller move.  You had a pair for the OS.  and another pair for games.  You then had a couple spinners for important data/video/etc.

 

I personally was a big Civ V player then, and large games would slow to a CRAWL while the cpu crunched the Ai players.  A 2nd cpu helped so much, just not in FPS.

 

I still have my supermicro X8DAH+-F, and I bet it still works....  oh the memories...  

 

[FuchsFuchs1]

I have a Mac with simular specs. Dual X5690, 128GB of ddr3 ram and a 1080 ti.
I was shocked to see linus make a video of hardware from my computers generation or should i say one newer since my mac is a 4,1 with 5,1 firmware.
I cant overclock it and i wont, im not going to risk the death of my beloved X5690 and apples design of it makes it that it gets pretty hot and i have no way of changing the fan speed. 
Macs are annoyng so i might get this board instead. Way more PCIE wich is all actualy x16 and im not limited to a 1080ti anymore.
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[Bitter]

Boot loader on SATA is not hacky at all, works great with GRUB.

[FuchsFuchs1]

i searched up Classified SR-2 on ebay and only one person in the entire world is currently selling one.

[Needfuldoer]

Beardless Linus, in a polo shirt, tinkering with 980tis in SLI, and there's an intro?

 

What year is it?!

[CaptainFluffy]

Even though this video was just uploaded today, seeing no-beard Linus do a video with 10 year old hardware is actually kind of nostalgic in a way. 

[MultiGamerClub]

Love the video seeing an older board like that.. Remember friends having 980's at a lan party at my old school a long time ago, thought it was good cards.. Oh boy i was under estimating those cards.. They ran incredibly well.

 

Now back on the AMD platform with 5900X and 7900XTX, all i can do to both of these are just pbo on cpu and pray it runs well or undervolt the 7900xtx and find a decent spot it wont crash, still miss the old times of unlocking my old 4570 non-k intel processor finding out i can overclock it xD

[Pewl]

Heyyyyyy the old SR-2 gets another showing. Unfortunate that OC was misconfigured and you didn't use a newer OS. 

 

Also did an unreasonable SR-2 build about 2 years ago. Some elbow grease to fit an SR-2 into a modern ATX case and it's a tight fit, but relatively compact for an SR-2 now.

 

Specs:

* SR-2 + 2x X5680 @ 4.3GHz OC
* 6x8GB DDR3-1860/10 @1.55v
* R9 295X2 (now a 980Ti)
* 1x 840 Evo + 1x RevoDrive 3 X2 PCIe SSD
* 360mm custom loop water cooling (D5, dual Bykski blocks)
* dual SFX PSUs SF750 + SF600

* Azza Cast 808W with modded internal frame and custom laser cut mounting plates

 

Power draw is completely nuts:

* Boot: 300-350W
* Idle: 340W
* CPU-Z Stress: 600W
* Heaven 1080p Max 8xAA: 900W
* Heaven + CPU-Z Stress: 1140W 

 

 

I should really take some nicer pictures in its final state...

Since then I've added custom screws, diffuse LED strips, all that. 

 

[CDR_Xavier]

Dumpster diving at my school got me into contact quite a good number of big/large boards.

A SuperMicro X5DA8 is the first device we found that have working SCSIs (we tried some old Adapter AICs but the freakin on-card BIOS is so ridiculous)

Then a X7DWA-N. This is the first one that I actually bothered to attempt to put Windows 10 on it (and succeeded in doing that).

Then a X8 ... DAH? My friend really want to get the board up and running, and I said "no it's not worth it". We got as far as mismatched Xeons. No RAM or cooler.

 

An X9SRA. And a X11SLL-F in the mail for that odd e3-1245v3 (for the IPMI and "fastest e-machines"), though all these are single-sockets.

 

Oh. Once we bumped into some ... EVGA nForce 790 Ultra SLi. And an XFX equivalence (though the XFX won't go beyond RAM). Shoved a Pentium D inside because we don't have a proper cooler, I don't have a Core 2 Duo on hand and don't want to risk the Core 2 Quad. Undervolted it by a bit, pretty happy with the result.

 

Along the way there are multiple Full/Ultra Towers. My friend got a Cooler Master Cosmos II, another one a MBX full tower, and myself a "3DBox" ...
Oh, it's "Boxx", and they still exist. Very interesting.

[luckybob77]

I never owned an X5, but I did have an X6DA8-G2.  Oh man, back in the day when everything was single thread...  you put in a pair of 3.8G Irwindale chips, and that thing ran like a hot damn.  I actually ran a Minecraft server on it for me and a few friends.  Back when the server was single threaded, this thing was FAST.  It was a marriage made in heaven.

 

But once multi core systems became the norm, I had to retire the old girl.  she sits in a box on a shelf.  

 

 

[KiKiHUN]

They did not even tested with BF3, BF4 or BF1. Wtf? Those games were made for sli, not like the others...

[freeagent]

I ran an X5690 ES for closer to a decade, was a solid setup. Pretty hard on PSU's though. When the PSU was strong I would run in the 4500-4700MHz range. As it petered out I would end up down in the stock voltage range and run at 4000-4200MHz.

[aisle9]

So question: I had an X58 system back in the day, and I remember hearing so much about how much better triple-channel RAM was than dual-channel. 15 years later, was triple-channel RAM actually better, or was that marketing hype for LGA 1366? The fact that triple-channel disappeared immediately thereafter and was replaced by quad-channel at the high end and dual holding steady in consumer systems kind of suggests to me that it was, sadly, BS.

[Pewl]

Triple channel is better (well, as in, faster) than dual channel. It's just that quad channel is even better/faster (and I think in servers we're up to 8 channels these days?). 

But for consumer platforms, cost is a major factor, and dual channel is way cheaper. It needs less board space, fewer traces, less material, (also fewer DIMMs)...and since RAM speeds have risen rather steadily, consumer platforms haven't run into serious issues with it yet. Besides, for most consumer workloads, memory latency matters more than raw memory bandwidth, which is where RAM has actually not progressed a lot in 20 years, and instead different software architectures and better CPU caches are constantly being developed to alleviate that.

[Pewl]

On 3/16/2024 at 6:31 PM, OhYou_ said:

tiny bit more time overclocking

Another quirk about OC on this particular board: socket/CPU 0 needs a little more voltage than socket/CPU 1 to run stable (even if you switch around the CPUs) because it droops more.

 

And another quirk: for readout in the OS, the sockets are reversed, so socket 0 reports as 1 and vice versa, iirc. Which makes monitoring and adjusting OC confusing at first. 

[Motifator]

Literally the PC to carry with a trolley man, it has the highest end board with a Hyper 212... is this real life?

[freeagent]

5 hours ago, aisle9 said:

So question: I had an X58 system back in the day, and I remember hearing so much about how much better triple-channel RAM was than dual-channel. 15 years later, was triple-channel RAM actually better, or was that marketing hype for LGA 1366? The fact that triple-channel disappeared immediately thereafter and was replaced by quad-channel at the high end and dual holding steady in consumer systems kind of suggests to me that it was, sadly, BS.

Yes, it does not matter how fast you run in dual channel, you would never match the bandwidth that triple channel could generate. I have various sets of different style Hypers just incase I come across another X58 system that I like.

[JCHelios]

Commenters: "Windows 7? I wish Linus had used a newer operating system!"

Monkey's Paw finger contracts.

Commenters: "NOT LIKE THAT!"