Gadgetory

trade shows like Computex can be a complete sea of random companies you've never heard of but every once in a while the random gets so random that I sit up and pay attention so this is ght I don't know exactly what they do but they've got weird GeForce graphics cards with sort of looks like they kind of came up with their own way of doing the Nvidia logo and they're kind of older ones like we've got a GTX 650 Ti on display here and then they've got a poster back there let's go have a look at this one of the biggest selling points in their booth is apparently this x79 motherboard but that's weird because intel hasn't made any chips for the x79 platform in quite literally years so what's the deal behind this I would like to find out so what can you tell me about this motherboard yeah there's a memory stock yep yes is it dual or quad channel 4 channel okay um so where do you get x79 chipset oh yes chips at you yeah but where do you get them does Intel still make these yeah they still make them really and then so where do you sell a motherboard like this Sansa where yeah I always sound to South America South America anywhere else South America and Asia so how do they buy a CPU for it because Intel doesn't make these CPUs anymore we would collected the use this to be you you know stick with him yeah interesting so if I'm in North America can I buy this oh but like I can buy this one so how much is it okay what currency is that US dollars okay I don't have any US dollars I have I have NTD so how much how much NTD okay all right thank you so according to the rep here they're getting genuine x79 chipset from Intel but as for the CPUs well we know Intel doesn't make those anymore so apparently they collect the used ones and then they bundle them together for customers in South America and Asia now they don't currently have any sales channel in North America where I could obtain something like this but they said the pricing is about 95 US dollars and apparently if I can COFF up the money right now I can buy it and take it home with me to test oh I even get an i/o shield Hey Deluxe nice SATA cable okay there you go I am the proud owner of this random motherboard so I don't have any of the parts that I would need to test it here with me but that's okay I'm gonna throw this in my bag take it home and see how this whole thing shakes out all right it's been a while we're back in the studio I've got my test bench prepared here and we're ready to find out if our weird x79 motherboard made the trip back to the studio in one piece but before we even do that I've got a couple more interesting things to share with you so I did reach out to Intel about the current availability of x79 legacy chipsets and their reply was we have no idea what they're talking about no we don't still make those so that's cool and then number two is that I did notice that this motherboard had an MDOT two slot and that felt a little weird to me at the time but it wasn't until I googled it and I found this link to our forum that says nvme support is not included in the bios of x79 boards bla bla bla etcetra etcetra basically not a thing so naturally in addition to Ram CPU graphics card all this good stuff let's see if it works with this thing first order of business for me naturally has to be to pop this chipset heatsink off and have a look at what's down Oh interesting so they've got a couple of custom plastic shims on here to keep the heatsink from wobbling and accidentally cracking the dye and then they've actually got some writing in pencil on the chip that also appears to be fairly scuffed up so it looks like my first theory that they're pulling these chips off of dead and or recycled boards and repurposing them does appear to hold some water especially in light of that information from Intel so I don't know why they wouldn't just be upfront about that but hey one thing that is potentially new is the socket I can't think of a reason why Foxconn wouldn't still be able to provide LGA 2011 socket with that said I also don't know for certain that it's new that's not something we'll be able to evaluate though because we do know that this is a demo unit board I went with a 49 60 X so that's the top-end chip for this platform it's a 6 core processor I think it peaks at 4 gigahertz boost so not too impressive by today's standards but certainly still a very capable machine which is exactly where the use case for a motherboard like this really comes from because there's still all these very usable chips but because the motherboards die faster than the CPUs do there's no boards to put them in I don't get it I'm just so weirded out right now alright let's go ahead and install this on my test bench and as you guys might recall Corsair sponsored our trip to Computex 2019 where we got this board so we felt it was appropriate to use their hydro X series water cooling to make sure that we are getting the utmost out of our weird motherboard you know we wouldn't want to have any cooling issues holding us back so we're gonna be going with their XC 9 RGB CPU block which has their pre applied thermal pound their RGB lighting and of course their skived micro fan base really really tight base on that one I haven't actually installed one of these yet but it looks like the mounting mechanism is about as simple as it can be so this is the one that's designed for the high end socket so your thread Ripper and your Intel 80 DT all right next we're gonna try out their compression fittings these were made in partnership with bits power so I'm expecting them to be frickin well that's power awesome so this is my first look at the accessory package for the XD 5 RGB this is their pump reservoir combo that I really approve of their approach with so they've gone with like a really really durable material for every part of it and then they've gone with a genuine laying D 5 pump just rebranding it sometimes you're better off building something new from scratch but sometimes you're better off just going with something that you know is awesome and the D 5 is a really good choice there it's really well regarded not just for its performance but also for its reliability 360 degree God for their radiators Corsair partnered with hardware labs a longtime industry veteran fun fact hardware labs was actually one of the first vendors that I ever placed an order with when I was working as a product manager at NCIX so technically I ordered with them before I was actually a product manager I was still working in like the customer care area and answering support tickets about computer systems so so remember when bits power came onto the scene I was like oh so your entire company is making water cooling fittings good luck with that and here we are partnerships with Corsair now my test bench GPU is decidedly last-gen so I'm not going to be water cooling my card but I did want to address some of the comments I made about this thing in my video where I upgraded my personal rig where I criticized some things as cost-saving measures when it turns out they were actually very expensive to do like the molding for this piece up here it feels like kind of a cheap plastic but as it turns out it's made out of like this super rugged stuff that was really really expensive to do the workforce so there you have it I also called their back plate flimsy if I recall correctly and they were like okay fair point but - its PCI certified so you can actually install it slot to slot with another card that's something that you can't do with the thicker ones and I was like now this is one key thing that I would have done differently from the Corsair on this product line I wouldn't have gone with a thin wall tubing I like me a 3/8 inch ID 5/8 inch OD tubing but the reason that they did it this way is that if you use their dies you end up with less of that kind of transparent you know border effect and it ends up looking more like that color just kind of flowing around your system so that's their justification this stuff does tend to be a little bit harder to keep from kinking but because it's nice and pliable it's also not too bad either fun fact I pioneered the concept of selling tubing as pre-cut 10 foot lengths as far as I'm aware I forced our suppliers back when I was at NCIX to stop selling by the foot to us because we had no way of tracking it as a single SKU and made them create part numbers for me of 10 foot rolls which I had determined were the right amount to plumb a basic system and not too much overkill for a much bigger one I do have to give corsair credit for a first attempt this really is very simple to do like there's not much to screw up other than getting the inlet and outlet wrong on the CPU block or the pump and as long as you consult the manual you shouldn't have trouble with that anyway I bet to makers of this motherboard we're never expecting tight next to be installed on it let's see if it handles it okay I'm sure Corsair has a better way for me to fill this but wait wait wait gotta get that better product placement in there this board does not have a lot of fan headers on it huh so yeah we're getting two fans here kids what have I gotten us into you know what I'm gonna use the SATA cable that they provided me nice SATA cable alright not bad okay so this motherboard actually has like jumpers for what would normally be BIOS settings on it this one is J power 1 2 2 1 & 2 is always power 2 & 3 is s Oh power there it is highest classic start menu installed on this whose Drive is this so I plugged in my SATA Drive thinking I'll deal with that first and then I'll try the envy me one later and check this out it booted up right to my nvme SSD no configuration no hassle nothing we're running nvme on x79 to put this in perspective not only does a fully-featured x79 board like this x79 deluxe from a soos not have an MDOT to slot on it see that you can't even just like put a PCI Express to MDOT to riser card in it because to my knowledge none of the motherboard manufacturers like the mainstream ones implemented the support for booting from it not necessarily because the chipset couldn't do it it's just PCI Express just because they were legacy products and not supported so the fact that this thing exists kind of blows my mind before we go any further priorities gotta get our RGB lighting hooked up now obviously I'm not doing the greatest job of cable management here right now but I think you guys get the point to daisy-chain this one here okay and hey now it's time for the moment you've been waiting for we're gonna do a quick Cinebench r15 run and see if this thing's actually even frickin stable if it turbos up correctly now our scores a little on the low side but something I noticed when I was checking out our turbo speeds is that our memory is only running at 1333 megahertz so maybe we can go into the BIOS and do a little bit of tuning well that is a retro looking BIOS right there if I've ever seen one Northbridge configuration modern motherboards and by modern I even mean this one do not have North bridges but I see what they mean here the North Bridge used to be the link between the memory and the CPU so this has all the memory settings in it I see where they're going with it all right so we can load up an XMP profile so that's cool well okay then so there are a lot of settings in here but whether or not they do anything appears to be a different story there's no way that's accurate so wherever their probe is somewhere in the middle of nowhere all right it's starting to show its weakness a little bit our XMP profile does not appear to have in fact done anything I mean this is an extreme edition processor overclocking it should be as simple as changing the multiplier but now that I think about it I didn't see any voltage adjustments in there you know we take for granted that an x79 motherboard should be very expensive but the part of the reason that they're so expensive is because they have this much more robust vrm solution that's designed to deliver tons and tons of current within like a very very narrow margin if anyone was crazy enough to build a super basic hundred dollar board for you know CPUs that start at 4 or 500 dollars for the lineup I guess this is kind of what it would look like no memory overclock I'll give it this it has really good failed boot condition recovery all these buttons you can tweak and then when they don't work it's like hey didn't work it's fine we didn't expect that to work anyway put it back to default hey it turbos up to 3.9 in a lighter load so yeah we're getting close to that max 4 gigahertz turbo Oh okay honestly though that's everything I needed to know that's a pretty smooth gamey experience okay so with some quick Craig's listing we've got 20 bucks for four gigs so that you could do 16 gigs times four sticks for 80 bucks so somewhere between 60 and 80 bucks gets you either quad-channel 16 gigs or dual-channel 16 gigs all right so you can get a 39 60 X for a hundred US dollars and then this board is like a hundred bucks so we're talking less than the price of a brand-new CPU potentially for a bored RAM and CPU if you're willing to do some bargain hunting okay so we've got ourselves a pretty cool budget little gaming platform here but I can't take credit for this idea was actually David my cameraman today who came up with this there's one more thing that we can try out could it possibly support SLI okay well that answers that question David you know what it was a good idea so there it is guys yeah it wasn't a perfect experience but I mean that's Deus Ex mankind divided running on very high 2560 by 1440 and looking pretty freakin OnPoint so as far as budget gaming systems go if you can get your hands on one of these my understanding is you can find listings for it on sites like Aliexpress under different brands presumably they are rebadging it then hey it looks like honestly not a terrible option we didn't have any compatibility issues it boots up fast and the nvme MDOT 2dr worked exactly as expected on another note massive thanks to Corsair for sponsoring this video as well as our coverage of Computex 2019 in general their hydro X lineup of water cooling is super simple to use looks absolutely fantastic and we had no performance complaints about it during this video whatsoever so you can check that out at the link in the video description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and oh yeah soon-to-be this one this one's really cool as well as our community forum which you guys should totally join