AMD Quad FX (Quadfather) - AMD's obscure Dual Socket answer to Core 2 Quad
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- Опубликовано: 25 июл 2020
- Patreon: / fullybuffered
A look at AMD's very obscure dual socket platform which was meant to rival Core 2 Quad 14 years ago!
My Twitter: FullyBuffered
References:
www.anandtech.com/show/2125
www.anandtech.com/show/1676
www.anandtech.com/show/2045
www.anandtech.com/show/1960 
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Absolutely fascinating (no pun intended) deep dive into a platform I had *zero* knowledge about. All that power and it only manages to be a lowend "quad-core" equivalent. So glad you covered this, and thank you!
Thanks Nathan :D
@@FullyBuffered if you change the bios chip to a revision B chip thats floating around on ebay you can run dual quad opterons but you need fully buffered ddr2. It would be interesting seeing what would happen on the games when theres more cores. It would be a relatively easy process and cheap. Getting the board was the hard part.
@@wilfrido16 I would love to see this
Ya heard about it from The WAN show 2023-06-16
How many PCIe lanes did you get back then? did dual socket give you x3 the lanes?
I actually have and run this board with the WS/B BIOS and a pair of 2360 SE Opterons while running 32GB of DDR2 ECC ram.
I remember when this came out, but I've never actually seen one. It was really a DOA product because they couldn't price it competitively. It was really the equivalent of what Intel had done a few years before, when they took a Xeon and rebranded it as a Pentium Extreme Edition to compete with the Athlon 64, and people joked and called it the "Emergency Edition."
AMD did it again a few years later when they took a six-core Opteron and sold it as the Phenom II X6 as a competitive response to Sandy Bridge, but that was actually good and I ran one for a long time.
Thanks for sharing John. I got a good chuckle out of "Emergency Edition" - will remember that.
The Quora guy!
The Phenom II X6 CPU's were even better than the Bulldozer (faildozer) processors that came out later on.
Even the best "8-core" (which was really a hyperthreaded quad-core design) could not even match the i5 2500K, let alone the i7's.
I have good memories of the Phenom II being a really good budget option to Intel's offerings at the time
@@Skarfar90 They were more than a hyper-threaded CPU. They had multiple integer pipelines that shared a common front end. And although their IPC was pants, in highly threaded workloads it did compete with a 2600K. And as games started to make use of more threads, these CPU's proved to have a decent longevity. That and you could get an 8350 for $110 and overclock the nuts out of it. I know people that ran them for as long or longer than I ran my 2600K. They were far from what they needed to be, but they were not all bad, and some people really stuck with them.
Thank you for the interesting video of the Quad FX! I've got myself the spiritual father of this platform. A HP XW 9300 workstation with two Opteron 285. A major difference is, that it uses DDR1, but it has 8 RAM-Slots.
I had a similar system but with 275 CPU's on an asus mb. It lasted me a lot of years. Though it took a modified bios to be able to do any overclocking, and what it could do was pretty limited.
Your quality keeps getting better and better Guido. Awesome job 👏👏
Thanks Mike!
I had heard of Quadfather but never actually SEEN it ever. Interesting to see how it actually held up. Thanks for the cool showing!
Love it. How much did the board+CPUs etc cost you?
Thanks Ian!
Awesome retrospective, sad that such a cool platform faded into obscurity
It was borderline obscure to begin with, proved by only ever getting one single motherboard. While I did hear about it at the time, I never knew a single person that would have it (and that includes a number of high level enthusiasts).
Great trip down memory lane! Thanks for taking the time to make this retrospective.
Thanks!
Very informative video! I have one of these boards with a pair of FX74's in my collection as well. I remember reading about it back in the day when planning out my then updgrade from Athlon XP build. I of course ended up with a C2Q build, but I always wanted to get my hands on one of these because of how interesting they were (still are). It definitely was a challenge acquiring it. I'm glad it's being covered on youtube.
Question: how long did you use it? looks like that you could used it for like 6 years.
Interesting video - I had forgotten about this setup. Good job- thanks for posting :).
Before that they had the dual amd opteron socket 940 setups, with also 2 times 2 core cpus. I have a tyan Thunder K8WE S2895 board with 2x opteron 275. First bios is from 2005, ddr1.
glad the algorithm brought me here, I had totally forgotten about quad fx. subbed
Very enjoyable video and neat story! Nice to look back on those days! I remember us having an 2x Athlon MP system on a Tyan board at university. They were actually cheaper than a Pentium with HT. Those must be very rare also these days.
Having just recently discovered your videos - I find your presentation excellent - I could listen to you all day long - I love your accent though I can't place it - will definitely be watching more
Many thanks for the comment. I am Dutch, although I don't appear to have a standard Dutch accent.
That Vista support still sends shivers down my spine to this very day.
What an amazing finding! Thanks for sharing!
Great video 👍 When I was 18 I saw magazines about it. And now I finally see them in action thanks.
Awesome job covering this
What a beautiful system! Those VRM coolers too... As a cooling system guy, that was a treat to see!
Very interesting find, great vid, wasn't even aware these existed
This was pretty amazing, never heard of this platform. Thank you
Nice hardware collection you have, subbed 👍
I remember drooling over these as a kid.
Cool video!
Thanks!
I love seeing old tech videos like these!
What an interesting and pretty unique specimen. I had no previous knowledge of this platform and was pretty riveted by this.
Subscribed and notifications enabled, great content sir
Subbed. Good Content.
I had one of these, I loved it for its ridiculousness. Plus, it heated my home in the winter in buffalo, NY. I had it setup as an entirely liquid cooled system. It died many years later due to the CPU power connectors turning from blue to black and crumbling from heat cycles.
Very interesting video and good presentation. 😎👍
Subscribed.
Thank you!
i had one of these and i loved it a lot
Such a cool board! Ill be keeping a lookout if one ever surfaces on ebay again! I love niche obscure platforms!
Great video👍. I had no idea this platform even existed.
Thanks for this fascinating look into a unique and rare platform
Awesome video. Just curious to know where you manage to get these hardwares from..
I wish modern MB's still used those bare copper heatsinks, Kinda like the down-draft blower fans too
Love this platform. Would like to own one one day... hopefully. Are you going to do a follow up video? with maybe some Overclocking or this setup running with some time correct graphics cards in SLI 😎.
Nice and very rare setup to see running.
Thats why I like your content so damn much.
You talk about the hardware I grew up with, the hardware that I've loved for my whole life.
My first ever PC was a K10 Phenom 9750 125w model.
I've used core 2 duos quads phenoms athlons and everything in between.
I've even played with later piledriver chips ocing them to THE MOON AND BACK.
I may sound old fashioned but the larger the fet size the more overclockabilty.
Currently running my I7-5820k @ 4.3 on stock voltage and getting 1300cb on R15.
And this is why I love this era of hardware.
And gpus 5950 7950 R9s god damn I'm getting emotional..
thanks for the history lesson!
a lot of people forget how much of a bloodbath Conroe was. AMD went from the fastest x86 CPUs in the world to eternally second place for the next decade and a half.
Let's also remember Wolfdale and Yorkfield (45nm) which came after. I vividly remember being sucked into using an Athlon II X4 620 and hating every single cell in my body for doing that. Luckily, I had managed to snag a supposedly broken Yorkfield kit (which was basically a Gigabyte EP45T-DS3R, a Q9400 and 4x2GB DDR3.) that turned out to be fine and it went smooth sailing from then all the way up to early 2020, when I finally moved on to a i5-3470 + 16GB DDR3 on a B75M-D3H.
Who was knocking at the door at 14:16?
Excellent video by the way :)
Interesting chips. I have never heard of them. A while ago I had an E5200 and Q6700 on an evga board for overclocking, for fun. With the pentium E5200 i reached 214CB in R15 and 4.5GHz.
Really recommend doing some overclocking with old stuff, it can get very interesting. Although this seems so rare it be stupid
Boy howdy I didn't expect to see a 1090T in that lineup.
Does any mainboard (cheap enough) only one ram controller?
Dont know how to ask but i want to use both cpus easily like in a dell precision 690 where you have 2 4core cpus but windows only detects one 8 core cpu.
Sorry for bad english i hope you understand what i mean.
Very awesome video, what about Cinebench R20 results? Can it get to 500 score? Can this system be overclocked and how much would it help...
You are awesome, dude.
Thank you!
Very good.
Have this platform too with pair of Opteron 2220 fsb-overclocked. Installed Vista for more period-correct experience)
With a little bit of fiddling I actually managed to squeeze 671 pts from 1100T in R15 multi thread test compared to 496 shown in the graph. I bet with some of that fiddling this setup would show closer to 400 👍
Oh, and by 'a bit of fiddling' I mean putting the 4x180mm radiator on the outside window sill during winter 😅
I never heard of this. Makes sense why it failed though. Thanks for sharing this bit of history.
Sensacional, saudações do brasil.
Whete did you find that board? Amazing
The quadfather and megatasking 😆 PR people from the 90s?
i have a dual core socket 370 mobo for pentium 3 cpus. i had to go through several cpu pair before i found a set, at 866 mhz, which had similar enough power usage & temp properies
Can you share the video referenced used as history of amd64 in 2006
That was a lot of fans and cooling fins.
I've read that having links leading out of RUclips in your description can lower your chances with the algorithm
IMHO - the name is a kinda like a "following the trend".
Because,there was QuadGt by Abit,as well.
Interesting !!!
Going back to this video, the sockets look like socket AM5+ :)
I have that +3800 chip still runnin like a king
This is Incredible. I tough the FX CPUs were released since 2011 upto 2016 on the Bulldozer Architecture and it's later revisions Pilledriver and Vishera for Socket AM3+ and 760G, 970, 990X, 990FX Chipsets. This probe AMD worked in the FX concept before the K11 core.
These weren't "FX" CPUs, they were athlon CPUs, think of it as pentium 4 extreme edition compaired to an i9 extreme edition, they both have "extreme edition" on the end but are in no way related.
I'd love to have a play with this setup.
yup remember the days i had the 3000+ the 3700+ and the opteron dc165 overclocking monster
still got a dual socket 940 opteron 270 system.... its only a side rig curiosity but some day i pray i will finally have the spare change to order more of the required ddr 1 ecc ram to actually utilize the second 270 and put the unit in 2x 2x mode finally.
Funny enough I actually still own a Thermaltake Armor Quad FX case, it has 2 CPU trompet holes in the side panel, to extend over the CPU cooler so it would "always" suck in cold air
Ha neat, I didn’t know of that case
remember when this came out and a there was a lot of talk about "quad" core gaming, and that AMD was late to the game.
thing though was that AMD already had a "Quad-core" system before the socket 1207 with SLI support and all that, but it was even less marketed by AMD for enthusiasts or gamers.
and this was the old socket 940 with the dual Opteron 260 and up.
motherboard manufacturers on the other hand made some clearly enthusiast/gamer focused boards like the Asus K8N-DL, MSI K8N Master2 based on the nForce chipset that made for some very unconventional gaming rigs that made a lot of people turn their heads if you had your side-panel off back then (2005? windowed cases? what's that?)
bought the "bit" more expensive Tyan K8WE, a pair of Opteron 275's, 8sticks of Corsairs XMS 512MB CL2 Reg ECC and a pair of Geforce 7800GTX-512 early 2006 ready for the large LANparty "The Gathering" 2006.
only downside, the socket 940 Opteron's while having some lower power variants had even less power management making for some absurd idle consumption.
Came in looking for this thanks to Linus talking about it at the WAN SHOW
I implore you to get off the Linus plantation. How can you continue to watch Imbecile Linus when you know that actually good channels exist?
at the time, that would've been total bad ass setup :)
What a gem you've found yourself there. That rarity will surely hold up well in value. Maybe for your retirement 😜
Ha who knows ;)
Call ❤
i had two fx 74s and had them oced to 3.4 pretty damned good for the time LOL and itw as so fun
That's awesome, thanks for sharing!
When I want to get one of this kind of hardware and realize how expensive/difficult to find are, I remember even a low end hardware can be better than this, but still is amazing and I want it to put it to game or work
ASUS old marketing: Rock Solid - Heart Touching......The Quad-Father
..i never knew about fasten8.. that idea makes me sad they never seen it through..
old but gold
YOOO i have one of theese too!
It's fun looking back at how things were in the past where Intel and AMD traded blows for being the top manufacturer. From the early days of AMD making licenced Intel processors, to making their own architectures. Athlon vs. Pentium, and the rise of multi-core CPU's. Then the long stretch of time where AMD was so beaten to the ground (by the far superior Intel Core line) that they bet the company on the success of Zen, which was a huge turning point. And from there, Intel was the one lagging behind. Today it seems like they are more evenly matched, both in terms of gaming and productivity. And with the upcoming Zen 4 and Raptor Lake parts, it looks to be an interesting autumn
I remember my core 2 quad 6600 well
Ah this platform, think der8auer showed this a few months back.
Certainly needs some better cpu coolers, a pair of 120mm tower coolers on a bench setup would keep it somewhat cooler.
Got a core 2 quad q6600 not being used atm for my testrig in case i decide to go back too that.
Currently that testrig is running a core 2 duo e8400 @ 4 ghz, bit stability issues with dual channel ram configuration but it is quick for a dualcore at that speed for sure, specially with most of the things i benchmark favoring faster dualcore stuff anyway. 3dmark 2k1, 2003,2005,2006, aquamark, quake 1 timedemo, quake 2 timedemo, & a few games like f.e.a.r that has built in benchmarks or benchmark tools available.
3dmark vantage uses quad core i think though i do have that installed there too test some heavier loads besides metro 2033.
I'd love to mess around with this sort of hardware, I really like these strange motherboards
I swear fan stickers make the fans wear out faster. I take them off. And I got some pretty old fans.
At first I thought about four FX-8350.
Hmm.. those SATA connectors! This is back when I still found computer hardware really interesting.. It just feels like it's not as fun any more.
Damn cool platform despite its flaws
You should do a part 2 with max upgrades with max ram because ive heared AMD can handle 4gb ddr2 stick rather then intel core 2 and maybe with better cooling some overclocking?
Throw a RTX card into it to really see it shine. Also try 4Gb sticks of Ddr2, those weren’t around when the board was made. But usually on most amd setups 4Gb Ddr2 sticks work
wow I see for the first time :)))
Хорошее видео про интересную "железку".
i love that old underdog tech company amd its a shame intel was able to outmarket them and lock them out for a while in the p4 era
athlon x2 3200, athlon x2 3400 are more stable versions than the next newer versions due to changes in the processor core
Imagine the spaceheating potential
threadripper 1950x processor, two geforce gtx titan x maxwell 2.0 gm200 sli graphics cards, ddr4 ram memory 128 gigabytes this is a computer supported by manufacturers until 2040
P.s, How much that good condition board costed like i got a rampage 2 extreme for a 100 euro i bet the skulltrail and quadfather both alone costed 500+$
Look at all those SATA connecter's!!
I only new about AMD Athlon MP dual socket , but never about quad FX
LMAO just about to say " skulltrail flashbacks anyone?"
90 nm yup still good with my intel pentium gold which is 22nm
Fascinating piece of tech history. BTW, I might be wrong, but didn't Intel start throwing around the "Megatasking" buzzword lately?
Romantic video ❤🤣😎👍
I did not realize AMD made LGA CPUs before.
Opteron line has been for over a decade