Wish, T-Mu, AliExpress, everyone's at least heard of these marketplaces that
[music] connect Chinese retailers with a global audience. But hearing about them
doesn't necessarily mean you should buy from them. Computer parts on these
sites, not to mention all the other things, are often lowquality and of
questionable utility, which has led to some hilarious shenanigans. I told you
this WOULD BE HORRIBLE. OH GOD. ON the streets late at night cuz
I'm small. That is not what pectoral muscles look like.
But surely Chinese consumers wouldn't put up with this kind of nonsense from
their countrymen. What are these same marketplaces offering to the Chinese
[music] domestic market? To find out, WE BOUGHT THIS. JUST KIDDING. It's really
light from Tao Bao, which is essentially a Chinaon version of AliExpress from
Alibaba. It's a pretty normal looking
pre-built computer except that it cost the equivalent of just $300.
I know, right? 300 bucks for a new
computer. I mean, sure, it only has a GTX 1060, but that alone would cost
about $70 over here, giving them just
over 200 bucks for a 14 core CPU, 32
gigs of RAM, not to mention motherboard, power supply, case, and storage. How
does the math work on this? While the system was listed at $2,000 yen or about
$300, we had to shell out significantly more
to have it inspected and then shipped out by a third party. Tabow does offer
international shipping, but it is limited to only certain items, and the
sellers expect to be interacting with customers entirely in Mandarin. That
means our out-ofpocket cost was closer to $600, but that is only due to extra
costs that would not be incurred by a Chinese buyer. So, let's have a look at
what they would get. Starting with the case, which is a case, actually, I don't
really have a ton of complaints here. You've got ample room for air flow. It's
not filtered, but you've got three fan mounts behind here, meaning you should
theoretically be able to install an AIO liquid cooler. The side panel is tinted
plexi rather than tempered glass, but it does use a convenient thumb screw-based
mounting mechanism. And the front IO is easy to access, even if I would have
preferred to have a USB 3 port rather than just USB 2. The only question then
is who exactly [music] makes it. You see, the manufacturer on the box is
Kintar, but they sometimes go by the name Jinda. The QR code on the box tries
to go to jindaw168.com, but that website is gone and the domain
can be purchased for less than the price of this computer. Jinda 168 seems to be
a shipping vessel of some sort, but we have no idea if it is in any way related
to Kentar. We eventually found Kentar's site, kintar.com.cn, CN and that
revealed that this case is called the Jinda or fighting knife which explains
the very warlike imagery on the box. Its English name would be probably something
like Kintar knife fight. Okay. Who told you that? Is that from Andy?
No, I I I I didn't do that. Wow. It's only $17
with the USB 3 port. Believe it or not,
the computer wasn't the only thing we got in our package. We also got a
keyboard and mouse. Copyright 2016. Ooh,
it looks like copyright a lot longer ago than that. [laughter]
But to their credit, at least they don't try to oversell the thing with the only
marketing claims on the front of the box being that the keyboard has 104 keys.
Yeah, that sounds like 104 keys. And that the mouse is 1,000 DPI. What else
we got in here? Oh. Oh, wow. This is far
more of an accessory package than I was
expect. This is hilarious.
No. [screaming] Okay, story time. There is a Razor
Mantis deskpad that has been in active service for over 13 years, making its
way from my desk at NCIX to Luke's test bench now to Emily's workstation. The
[music] thing is, it looks absolutely nothing like this. It's about four times
the size, significantly thicker, and is actually made by Razer. Anyway, that
doesn't mean it won't work well enough for our purposes. Let's get our setup
deployed here. Wait, I forgot about the other stuff. There's what appears to be
a very good 10-ft patch cable,
a USB drive that I would definitely plug into my computer, 32 gigs, and for some
reason, an HDMI to VGA adapter. That
seems like the kind of thing that I could probably just pick up separately if I really need it. Huh?
It also comes with a screwdriver.
What the Oh, what? Oh,
this is also inexplicable. The computer is assembled.
It's in case you need to open it. That quality molding. I want to take a bit of
a closer look at this computer. Cable management. You know what? Far from the
worst I've ever seen. They took the time to route the front IO cables around the
back of the motherboard tray. And actually, same goes for the 24 pin, the
8 pin, and the six pin GPU power connector. But there are a few eyebrow
raisers in here. I have never heard of this brand of power supply, the BUO CX
650 that manages, ooh, that's scary. [music]
A whopping 384 watts on the 12vt rail and is rated for
500 watt. That is a very deceptive name, Bisuo. Oh, and also it is only rated for
220 volt AC input. [music] How are we going to power this thing?
Oh no, we have that sketchy adapter Alex
bought. I knew that was coming.
Yep. For those wondering, by the way, we did
try it with North American 120 volt wall power and it did work for a little
while. So, their universal AC input from
150 to 264 volts is misleading at best
when there's up to 47 countries that it won't even power up in. Also, we're
pretty sure we were supposed to get a GTX 1070, not a 1060, but the page
disappeared in between the time that we ordered the product and when it arrived,
meaning that I guess that practice also takes place on domestic Chinese sites.
The SSD is supremely unremarkable other than being so no-name brand that we
weren't even able to find a listing for it. It's 256 gigs and CrystalBench
clocked it at around half a gig on both reads and rights, which is about what
you'd expect. What you wouldn't expect is this RAM. Both are DDR4 as
advertised. Both of them use Samsung chips, which is good, but one of them
comes from a Lenovo pre-built, and the other one seems to come from some kind
of network switch. The bad thing about that is it means these are almost
certainly secondhand. The good thing though is it means they're almost
certainly not counterfeit because why would you go out of your way
to put a random third party sticker on it when Samsung is what's going to sell
it as quality? Anyway, it's DDR4 2133
and it's ECC, which raises some questions about the rest of the
components. You see, ECC memory is for
servers. And this motherboard is like no server motherboard or really any
motherboard that I've ever seen before. It is neither as short as an MATX board,
nor is it as long as an ATX board. And
in fact, the mounting pattern on it is so unusual that only six of the 10 holes
were able to be screwed in in this case.
What are you to find out? Let's get it
fired up. [laughter] Look,
sorry, this isn't really supposed to be part of the video, but look how short
the cord is on this [music] mouse. How the heck am I supposed to plug this in?
I can try to um Oh, we never talked
about IO. That is a lot of USB 2 for a
modern motherboard, which h could be foreshadowing. Moment of truth.
Whoa, that is a gigantic American Mega Trends logo. I don't know how you got
into that BIOS because every time I've tried to get into the BIOS with a USB
keyboard, it hasn't let me. I've had to use a PS2 keyboard. That really throws a
wrench into that thing.
Zeon CPU. Well, that explains the whole
ECC memory bit. That doesn't tell us the full story of this motherboard, though.
We'll get into that later. PCIe Gen 2 only.
Overall, nothing too weird in here other than NVMe configuration.
A platform this old shouldn't support NVMe devices. And yet, there it is.
This is weird. Oh, is this just an external drive we don't have plugged in?
Uh, no. Oh, if it's Synaptics. Synaptics. Why does it have Synaptics
drivers? Oh, no. It's in Chinese. Hold on. I can do this. Device manager. Crap.
Oh, actually, this is useful, too. I'll get to that later.
Device manager. Crap.
Device manager. Why don't you try just opening the start
menu and typing in device manager? Why don't you try minding your own business?
Yeah. No, I mean, no, I know other ways to do it. I'm just I want to I WANT TO
GUESS IT. No results for device manager.
Uh, okay. Hold on. Hold on. Properties.
Yes. It's still all in Chinese except network
adapters for some reason. That's all English all the time. Let's go back to
system properties. 32 gigs. Zeon E5 2680
V4. a 14 core chip. That's not the
fastest by modern standards, but hey, 14 cores is 14 cores. And that would be
what? Haswell generation. So, should even be fast enough to game, especially
if you don't have a super OPG GPU.
One ongoing problem that has kept
happening with this is that it doesn't like when you just kind of plug a
network cable into it when it's already on. Oh, what? What a piece of But hey,
at least it has rocket ships for arrow keys. Wait, I was mistaken. Products
formerly Broadwell. So, a slightly more tuned 14 nmter chip from Intel.
Retailed for $1,700 back when it was current. It's not so
much anymore. Speaking of current, what on earth is this presumably web browser
icon? Everything we installed is over here on the right, while the
pre-installed software is over here on the left and I guess in the start menu.
No, there's basically nothing there, which raises a couple of questions like
where is Microsoft Edge? Nowhere, it turns out because the system is running
a cracked version of Windows 10 Enterprise. That might also explain why
we booted straight into an admin account rather than being prompted to create an
account and a password. As it turns out, this piece of software is called 360
Secure Browser, and it's made by, I'm sorry, I'm going to butcher this, Chihu.
They often brag about having a high install base, but in actuality, it seems
more to do with the fact that it comes bundled with Chioo 360, which is kind of
the Norton of China. Naturally, it's
nearly impossible to uninstall to the point where the US has accused Chiu of
acting as spyware for the CCP, particularly during the Xenz Jang
incidents. [music] There's otherwise nothing remarkable about the Windows
install. And while we didn't go out of our way to monitor for it, it doesn't seem to be calling home in any
particular way. Shall we play some Vinc games?
Uh, that is not a lot of FPS's.
60. Yep. 65 at the 1% lows.
Give it a sec. Give it a sec. She's settling. Oh, actually that's weird. It's not bad according to frame view,
but it feels awful.
79 FPS, 1% lows. This should be more
than okay. You know what? It probably is. It's got to be the terrible mouse.
See if it can handle something a little more demanding.
Not bad. Not bad at all.
medium settings, 1080p, solid 60 to 70 frames per second. I
mean, this is absolutely playable. I
mean, you might not be playing Starfield or anything like that, but if you keep
your expectations realistic, this is an awful lot of gaming per
dollar. So, it works. But let's fire up hardware info and see if there's
anything else we can learn about it. Well, one thing we learned is the CPU
temperature monitoring isn't accurate. Actually, neither are a lot of these
numbers. And another thing we learned is that this motherboard is even [music]
weirder than we thought. Notice anything about the CPU chipset? Yeah, me too. You
see, B85 was designed [music] exclusively for LGA1 1150, Intel's
fourth generation Core consumer product. It shouldn't be possible for that to be
paired with an LGA 2011 socket that's
designed for servers and high-end desktops. Also, B85 motherboards used
DDR3 RAM and lacked support for NVMe
storage drives. And yet, here they are, plain as the LT underwear on my Nether
regions, ltstore.com. We may never know exactly what's going
on here, but what we can do is take some educated guesses. You might have
encountered these videos of people reclaiming old chipsets from dead or
useless motherboards using an angle grinder. And the B85 chipset along with
its other 8 series siblings was widely used in office pre-builts like the Dell
Optiplex or the Lenovo Think Centers of the early to mid2010s. Meaning there are
millions of these chips out there in machines that businesses will literally
pay to have removed. Sounds like a business opportunity, but
who would want a Piddley quad or worse
dual core CPU these days? If you could
modify the capabilities of the chipset to create a lowcost board that could
support a more powerful workstation CPU, then obviously that would take some
extra steps. But it seems that there's a very active community of Russian tech
enthusiasts that are doing just that.
not only using these boards, but actively developing for them. There are
thousands of pages of forum posts and wiki entries covering custom BIOSes,
overclocking tips, and general quality of life improvements on motherboards
very similar to this one, all in Russian. This could be driving not only
additional sales of these boards from people that stumble across these resources, but also an improved outofbox
experience for them if sellers of these systems are updating their products
using the work of these forum and wiki posters. Judging by the date of the BIOS
on this system, that could very well be the case. Chipset repurposing has been
going on since at least Computex 2019
when I bought a motherboard on the trade show floor that the seller claimed used
a brand new X79 chipset, only for me to
discover when I got home that Intel had, as I suspected, discontinued production
of X79 years prior, meaning that it was almost certainly harvested just like
this B85. At that time, however, I guess
the market for these things was relatively small and could be served by
desoldering real X79 chipsets and
resoldering them onto new board designs. This LGA 2011 motherboard from Machinist
is the first example that I've encountered of stretching the truth when
it comes to the specs for these things. The name implies that it has an X99
chipset, but in fact, it's using a C612
chipset, a workstation chipset that is functionally similar. That is to say,
it's intended for the same class of CPUs at least, but includes support for dual
CPUs, meaning that these are probably getting harvested from retired servers.
These boards are really interesting, but
I think the real question is, are they worth anyone's time? The prospect of
recycling chipsets definitely holds some environmental appeal to me, especially
if they're coming off of non-functioning hardware. But as we demonstrated in our
last $69 gaming PC series, it's very
inexpensive to buy old castoff office machines and workstations from
businesses, making it hard for something like this to be cost competitive. If
you're gaming on a budget, I would definitely recommend the liquidated
hardware route, assuming it's available. We'll have a couple of really good
options for that linked down below. Of course, that strategy assumes that you
live in a place where nearby businesses have such workstations in the first
place, which might be why sellers on Taow have taken this approach instead.
It's not [music] the best deal for everyone, but it's almost certainly the
best deal for someone. And if you're looking for a way to get gaming on a
budget along with a chance to do some tinkering and research, this certainly
offers the opportunity for all of the above. It also offers the opportunity
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