One of my favorite all-time videos is this retrospective look at an
absolutely incredible 8-core enthusiast PC from Intel that held up shockingly
well for its age. Today's subject is its much stupider cousin from AMD. On the
surface, everything about the Quad Father kind of checks out. It also looks flippin
badass, it also shipped with up to 8 processing cores, and it also supports
the best gaming technologies from the time, like high-speed DDR2 memory and
Quad SLI GPUs. Luckily for Intel, that's where the resemblance ends. Right out of
the gate, it was hot, slow, and comically overpriced to the point where I would
argue that QuadFX is the worst consumer CPU platform of all time. Okay, that's a
big claim, I know, but I think by the time we're done here, including taking the
4x4 out for a rip, even the most ardent of AMD fanboys is gonna come around to
my viewpoint and come around to this message from our sponsor. MSI, MSI wants
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below. Watching AMD is kind of like those videos, right, where you see the kid
ripping down the hill, they go flying over the handlebars, and you're like,
okay, it's okay to laugh, they're doing fine. But speaking as an enthusiast who
cheered when AMD brought 64-bit computing and dual-core processors to
the mainstream, in 2006, we weren't ready to laugh yet. It was a painful time. First
Intel jabbed with the Core 2 lineup of dual-core processors that made Athlon X2
look slow and inefficient by comparison, and then came the right hook! A family of
quad-core versions of those same chips that left AMD's premium offerings
looking utterly irrelevant. So what did AMD do? This. I mean, it kind of makes
sense. You know you're not gonna have a proper quad-core offering until some
time next year, you've got some room to move on pricing thanks to your mature
manufacturing process, and realistically speaking, even if no one buys it, you're
probably better off paper-launching some limited-edition nonsense rather than
leaving your competitor completely alone at the top of the performance charts,
which is a strategy that AMD has employed more than once. The issue, though,
is that AMD didn't just paper-launch it. In November 2006, AMD released not one
but an entire lineup of FX70 series processors. They were dual cores, of
course, since they were fundamentally just rebadged optorons with boosted
clock speeds, but they marketed them as a quad-core solution because they were
only available to be purchased in pairs and only intended to work in this dual
socket motherboard, the L1N64 series from Asus. And this board is actually pretty
cool. It uses a one-off version of Nvidia 680 series of chipsets, which gives it
some unique selling points over the server boards that optorons normally
relied on. First up, it had support for regular unbuffered DDR2, which could
operate at higher speeds than ECC-registered DIMMs at the time. Second,
it had much more consumer slash workstation-oriented IO. I mean look at
this thing. Tons of USB, got your eSATA, you got your optical audio out. I guess a
lot of people use that. Twelve SATA ports, though. My goodness. And finally, it had
support for multi-GPU SLI technology. This is actually where our second
curiosity today comes in. Remember how I referred to QuadFX as 4x4 earlier?
Well, that was one of the earlier code names and it referred to the platform's
ability to run four cores and four GPUs at once. The name ultimately died,
presumably when Nvidia limited SLI to only two of the slots on the motherboard,
but the capability actually remains if you use two dual GPU cards. Meet the
Asus Mars GTX 760, an unfathomably stupid product that actually came quite a
bit later but just felt like an appropriate pairing for this thing.
We'll get into this in a bit more detail later on. First, I want to come back to
QuadFX. The initial reviews ranged from optimistic that it could maybe, hopefully
please, improve, to downright scathing, even outwardly mocking AMD's stated
intention of selling high volumes of this indefensible product. But something
that everyone agreed on at the time was that there could be an interesting
upgrade path for users who were willing to invest in the platform once AMD
started shipping true quad-core CPUs that could be slotted into this
motherboard's LGA1207 socket. And that is exactly what we're going to be
trying today. The viewer who lent us his QuadFX setup included a pair of
Opturon 2352 quad cores. These didn't arrive until 2008, by which time both
Asus and AMD had formally dropped support for the original quad father. But
with a revised slash B version of the original board, or with a clever hot
BIOS flashing trick, you could unlock the raw power of dual quad-core processors
operating at a staggering 2.1 gigahertz. And all for the downright reasonable
price of just $315.99. I couldn't think of it. That is pretty reasonable, but I'll let
you in on a little secret. The price says very little about AMD's
magnanimous nature and a lot about AMD's fortunes in the two years since this
platform first hit the scene when they were hoping to get a thousand dollars
per pair of dual cores. Fun fact, by the way, we've got the coolers on now. You
can see we actually had to 3D print a part for them, which I then had to zip
tie the bracket onto because the 3D printed thing didn't have a hook. And
that's not even the jankiest thing about this setup. Remember how I said that
QuadFX didn't need server RAM? Well, these are Optarons, so they do. So much
for the slot-in upgrade. Now, we could have easily obtained a pair of FX-74s on
eBay, including this delightful factory sealed one. But since I didn't feel like
spending $600 on e-waste, not to mention even more on dual channel DDR2 ECC
memory (sorry we’re running single channel), I didn't do it. Not when I could spend the money on the new fleece lined
jacket from ltdstore.com. It's a shirt. It's a jacket. It's both. A couple more
finishing touches, like adding our second Mars 760. I honestly just can't
believe people bought either of these things, like literally anyone. I remember
I was working sales at the time and on more than one occasion I saw orders come
in for QuadFX and I actually checked the invoice, called them. I got on the
phone with these people and I tried to sell them something different, something
faster and cheaper. But some of them were just such pathetic fanboys, but I just
couldn't do anything to help them. I also can't believe I hired one of them.
That's right, there is someone who works here whose judgment is so impaired that
they actually bought a QuadFX. In all seriousness though, Gary from the lab is
a tinkerer and he goes out of his way to subject himself to early adopter pain
for the learning opportunities. That's why he actually dailies an Arc GPU as
well. I question his masochism, but I do admire his moxie. Anywho, it's time to fire
up this mess. Oh wait, no it isn't. We're gonna need some power connectors. Imagine
having the 24-pin ATX power connector there and that not being the worst thing
about your platform. I mean, I make fun of it now, but at the time I'd have given
just about anything for one of these. I mean not just about not a thousand
dollars, less than that. It's alive! Full disclosure, I'm not 100% sure if this is
gonna boot up right now. Gary and Tim from the lab spent basically an entire
day getting this thing operational. They have forbidden me from touching
anything in the BIOS. We also had a couple of bent pins in the CPU socket
that Dan fixed and then it refused to install Windows XP, so we swapped it to
Windows 7, which theoretically is gonna turn on. Oh, also the onboard networking isn't
working, so we put in this PCIe card. Oh, I guess I should plug a cable into it. Yes!
Everything is working! We're gonna follow a similar playbook to last time, so the
first thing we're gonna try and do is just an everyday ta-. Oh, no it is not 2001.
One moment please. Oh wow. As I was about to say, the first thing we'll be doing is
just generally trying to use the computer, including playing back a
YouTube video. That took a long time to load. We could search though, right? Did you see
the delay between me clicking that text box and it actually highlighting? Let's
start with 1080p video, shall we? Oh, okay. Oh, at least it upgraded to 720p, but we
were sucking back 400 watts before. We've settled into 265 and I am currently
playing back 720p video. Okay, what happens when I go to 1080p? Did it go up
again? Oh my god, 400. Okay, let's switch to 4k. No, no 4k playback. Okay, what's
using up on my CPU? Chrome. Just Chrome. I think it's time to move on to gaming.
Video control panel. Is this supposed to happen? Sir. Screw it. I'm playing. No,
wait, no, wait, no. Oh my god. I mean, tell me this though. Is the FPS as expected?
About 40 frames per second. Okay, then I'm not gonna worry about. Oh my god. Oh wow,
that hitching though. This thing's a piece of ****. Why did you buy it? Because it was
there. My suspicion, this card is actually defective. Let’s go to the control panel.
Auto, is correct.
configure things, you know? Yes, I know, but, you know, you drop things also.
Don’t worrying it’s not bothering- I can text him, whoa. What if he drops it? Okay, fine, we'll flip the cards. I think
that'll probably fix it. This wasn't meant to be part of this video, but hey,
it's a fun little lesson anyway. You can have a graphics card that's just a
little bit defective. Like, say for example, the memory is no longer capable
of running at its stock clock speed with stability without corrupting the data.
And so what can happen is that GPU can still be performant, right? So you could
hook it up in SLI and if it's not the output, you can actually get a clean
image and you can get some, if not most, of the performance scaling that you would
get from two fully functional GPUs, but you won't really notice that the thing
is broken unless you have the display hooked up to that one, unless it's running
as the primary GPU. I've seen it a handful of times. Hey, no green. I might
have been right. Hey, it's running on high though. I have no sound, but I can do the
sounds myself. Medic! Get on the point! It's a really rare platform, so most
people don't have any context for it, right? But guys, it's really slow. Like in
games, this thing was like half the performance of a core 2.0. Yes! Oh, it has
its moments. Oh, remember guys, SLI was bad enough for Nvidia to just
unceremoniously discontinue it. Quad SLI was a lot worse. And the problems
exacerbated by running a more demanding game, which by modern standards, Team
Fortress 2 obviously isn't, but for the setup it certainly has. Okay, this is
pretty bad. I don't even think I'm gonna bother with Shadow of the Tomb Raider,
but this is a CPU from 15 years ago with a small army of GPUs from 10 years ago.
And it was worse before labs managed to hack together the Nvidia and the ASUS
drivers for these GPUs, which took us from a screen teary 60 Hertz mess to the
relatively smooth operation that you just saw. With all of that said, there
are some things that are clearly holding us back, and a big one is these awful
Mars GPUs. What a weird product. I mean, on the surface, again, it kind of made
sense. ASUS recognized that buying two mid-range GPUs and running them in SLI
sometimes was more cost-effective than buying a single high-end GPU. But then
they did the whole thing wrong. 760s had only two gigs of VRAM, meaning that
these four GPUs in the quad SLI configuration had 66% as much
effective frame buffer as a single 780. Making matters worse, the combined card,
just the individual card, never mind four GPUs, cost more than a single 780, and
also cost more than two regular 760s, which you could equally just run an SLI
if you really wanted to. I mean, you were there. Did anyone at ASUS think of that?
It was convenience factor. What do you mean convenience? You know, one card, it's easy.
Oh shut up, you never believed that. The only use case that I could imagine for
this thing is if you could run SLI in a non-SLI board. But then, of course, Nvidia
didn't allow that, making the Mars the kind of thing where you just go, how did
this ever make it out of the R&D lab? But nobody bought these. In fact, I think they
were even a limited edition product. So where would you be right now if you had
actually purchased a quad effect setup and we're still running it to this day,
but with a more modern card? We're gonna throw an RTX 3060 on here and find out
just that thing. Is this PCIe Gen 2? No, I don't think it is Gen 2. I think it's
Gen 1. Theoretically, it's still backwards and forwards compatible. Look at this
mouse go. Or rather, look at it not go. Look at it skip. Oh, hey, we're back. Oh, why
would RTX 30 series be supported in Windows 7? Wait, that was a Windows 7
driver. There totally is a Windows 7 driver. It just didn't work at all. It
doesn't really matter. The point is the performance would suck. These are dual
quad-core CPUs and modern games do benefit from higher core counts, but
their core architecture legged behind the competition even at launch and it
hasn't aged well. Also, these are clocked a whopping 30% slower than the FX dual
cores that came two years prior. That is a huge problem, especially in games at
the time which heavily relied on single core performance. Imagine getting an
upgrade path that is worse than nothing. Congrats AMD, you invented Metapod and
that is what makes this the worst consumer CPU platform of all time. I
mean, if it was cheap and cheerful and had a great upgrade path, I'd be willing
to entertain what? Pentium D maybe? Prescott? Something in the Rambus era for
that crown? But QuadFX made a sucker out of everyone who bought one and then AMD
promptly rewarded their most loyal fans by offering them a joke of an upgrade
path. So goodbye Quad Father. It's been an experience. Just like you should
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the last time we built an expensive PC from the past. It was a lot better.