this is an extremely unusual motherboard and it's going to get a pretty quick and
unceremonious unboxing because i want to get straight down to it today this came
to us straight from a factory in china that it actually
took us months to get in contact with and convince them to send us one of
these as soon as i saw this i absolutely had to have one on the one
side you've got a completely normal motherboard with an lga 1151 socket and
a couple of memory slots and some io and all that kind of thing and on the other
side is a graphics card in fact the
manufacturer claims that that is a gtx
1050 ti so we're not talking about your
grandma's onboard graphics here we're talking a fully gaming capable
graphics card soldered right onto a
motherboard so the first question for us to answer is why is this on here most
industrial applications either don't need much GPU at all and can make do
with onboard or they need a lot in which case they wouldn't want it soldered
directly to the motherboard then the second question we want to answer is is
this thing any good so let's take it for a test drive shall
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was just about to point out that instead of a 20 or 24 pin connector from a you
know more standard internal power supply this motherboard actually gets all of
its power from this dc plug on the edge of the board right here
when i realized uh-oh that the plug they sent me from the office isn't gonna fit
in there now i was able to determine from the manufacturer's website that it
requires 19 volt power so it's at least correct in that sense and it's got
enough amperage to run all the hardware that i intend to install on here so
that's all good but unfortunately what i didn't know was which pins were supposed
to be which and the only references that i could find to this connector didn't
seem to indicate that there was an industry standard fortunately we can
determine which ones are supposed to be the grounds fairly easily just by
grabbing a ground like the housing on a usb port and checking for which pins
have very little resistance those are going to be our grounds so as i
suspected it's the ones closer here and which pins are our power so that's going
to be these two right here with the much higher resistance but then
i didn't end up having to pursue that route of like ripping the connector off
of the power adapter and then jamming wires into those holes because they
actually found one that would work that we borrowed from a different system that
seems to have both the same pin out and
the same locking connector so progress
we're back at it let's talk about what else is unusual
about this motherboard so the form factor is something that i have actually
never seen before this is the size approximately of a micro atx motherboard
but it doesn't have the same mounting holes it doesn't have any pci express
expansion slots the i o is all over the
place so we've got a bunch of it on the back here we've got HDMI
gigabit Ethernet usb 3 SATA
audio like why does SATA need to be
on what is apparently the rear panel of whatever device this is intended to be
installed in and then making matters even crazier is over on the other side
of the board we've got mostly internal connectors usb 3 lvds so these are video
outputs another HDMI port okay and then more SATA so wait that's
an external HDMI port and internal SATA
and then that's internal SATA and an external HDMI port what is the front
side of whatever case this goes in i don't know i don't understand and then
the last thing that weirds me out is this mix of what feels like very low end
design choices like the fact that there's no cooling on the vrms for the
GPU or for the CPU for that matter
with things that are generally considered to be high end on gaming
boards like for example this little button right here is a nice convenient
little cmos clear switch i don't really know why i'm freaking out though because
none of this should surprise me i mean obviously i you know you never encounter
something like this at the local micro center but that doesn't mean that boards
with unusual layouts or features are
something that i've never encountered before like if you've ever hung around on a trade floor like computex for
example they it's just full of motherboard manufacturers you've never
heard of with walls covered in designs
that you could never imagine any purpose for and what likely happened the reason
that this exists zeal all
made the z a z-a-s-k-1050-embedded motherboard is
probably because some customer at some point requested this design and they
figured well we made it already anyway if anyone else
wants it we might as well list it on alibaba and then if they buy it then
you know we can sell these things you probably noticed by now that this takes
laptop sized memory modules as opposed to desktop ones that's pretty common in
these types of embedded motherboards here's some rip jaws 3200 cl 16
uh i really doubt that these are going to work but let's let's go let's go for
the moonshot here the CPU i installed is a core i7 7700k
and in theory it should be compatible i3i5 and i7 6 then second gen it's what
it lists on the website but one thing i'm a little worried about is this seems
to be one that we liquid metaled at some point and it seems to be seeping out
from under the ihs that can cause problems
like what is this is that just like a random dram chip and
like i don't even know what this chip does i'm gonna use the 1500 watt power
supply again a little bit overkill i think we're close now if i had to guess
i'd say this HDMI is the gpus HDMI and
this one comes off the onboard video or something like that finding a power
brick that plugs into it was only like a third of the battle though
so yes right connector but i also needed it to be 19 volt which this is and have
enough power for as you guys might have noticed i'm not in significant amount of
hardware so 7 700 k is like 95 watts or
whatever and then a 1050 ti is whatever
that is probably somewhere in the same neighborhood somewhere in like 75 85
range so this is 19 volt 13.1 m so it's
about 250 watts here k mode exception not
handled i hate it when my k-mode exception doesn't get handled well isn't that
interesting here i thought i was just doing a quick off-camera SSD swap so i
could put a fresh Windows install on this thing and then i was still getting
errors so i tried a couple different memory modules and i was still getting
errors just trying to install Windows and lo and behold
remember that liquid metal that i pointed out and said oh gee i hope this
isn't a problem uh it might be a problem that's the underside of the ihs and you
can see where it's kind of dripped down here
and here all over the CPU package there's liquid
metal hopefully cleaning it up will resolve the issue
but honestly i uh have my doubts right now last idea i've
got a crazy hunch that Linux might behave a little bit better with this
either weird or defective hardware so i've loaded up a
live bootable version of ubuntu on that usb drive and i'm gonna go ahead and
fire this puppy up whoa whoa ho
NVIDIA gp107 GeForce gtx 1050 ti okay
hold on a second it's working by the way i never followed up on what happened
with uh trying the other HDMI port that's a debugging port that is not an
HDMI port so that didn't work now it's working
no way you gotta oh no steam won't install any
usb you have got to be kidding me can i do a
hot swap rooney here hey all right we up basically i tried to
launch shadow of the tomb raider and the weird pre-launcher thing
says your current active CPU governor is not optimized you can still play the
game but may experience performance issues how do i change it
there's i think there was an app that i used to use
oh my god it's probably on demand what they're probably recommending is performance
which is full throttle wait your computer's graphics card or driver is
not supported by the game what well why not i installed the NVIDIA
driver i think oh this is very good news my graphics driver definitely installed
because i'm now running at 4k 60hz which makes more sense for a 1050. HDMI 2.0 is
working no it still doesn't like my active CPU governor whatever i'm going
to continue anyway hey no warning about the graphics driver
good tip all right i'm going to try and give this a shot i'm definitely not
going to try and run at 4k app is not responding okay
let's try something else you know what i think it is i think it's a dead graphics
card a lot of those errors that i got when i was trying to install Windows
seemed to be related to hardware directly i have now done CPU intensive
things and not had any crashes in Linux
look at that line through the screen there i think we do have
a defective graphics card in this thing it's gone now but that is a strong
argument against a fully integrated solution like this isn't it not only
does it cost more but if something goes wrong you're left with no options to
swap things in and out for diagnosis and
once you've confirmed that there is in fact a problem there is nothing you can
do aside from just get a new one 150 frames per second
that actually does sound probably about right is that GPU working now oh yeah
definitely working all right give me that d glue
ah okay oh wow no that looks pretty good
oh that is pretty nice well i don't know how much of that the
editor's gonna use but long story short it's working perfectly right now with
performance that about meets my expectations for this class of hardware
i'm getting 130 to 150 frames per second
in cs go at 1080 with things i wouldn't say cranked but definitely
high and it's
running smoothly and fine so i don't know what that was with all the Windows
errors and i don't know what that was with the instability i initially
experienced with Linux but what i can tell you is that this is
100 not worth it for people like you and me
because whether we do have a dead graphics card or whether we don't it's
clear that this solution makes troubleshooting more difficult and even
if you do determine what the problem is replacing something impossible and it
actually costs significantly more now as for why this exists in the first place i
do have some ideas one might be a dvr like a a video
surveillance system or something like that that relies on a light amount of
GPU compute in order to perform better or perform facial recognition or
something like that another idea i had was maybe it's a control board for some
kind of piece of industrial equipment or medical equipment but with all the
issues i had i sure hope it doesn't end up in any medical equipment um that does
that requires x86 compatibility and maybe uses the GPU for real-time
rendering of something is working on like i don't know maybe it's a cnc machine and it
shows a a visualization of what it's doing or uh one other weird idea i had
was maybe it's for like a budget game console or or something whatever it's
for i'm sure that the manufacturer had
to work closely with the integrator to ensure that they had a better experience
than i did because this certainly was anything but plug and play drop.com is
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great headphones if you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out the one we did it must have
been over a year ago but we checked out like five weird graphics cards just
super unusual graphics cards maybe not as weird as this motherboard but
definitely weird we're gonna have that link down below as well so weird i just don't know what all that
instability was in Windows and then even in Linux when i was running off the usb
i got a weird crash a couple times and now it's just running flawlessly
so bizarre shut her down and never look at this thing ever again because i hate
it