i signed a non-disclosure agreement with Intel that prohibits me from reviewing
any of the 12th gen core alder lake family chips that they sent me until the
embargo lifts what it doesn't prevent me from doing is going out on the open
market and buying this core i9 12900k
engineering sample on chinese craigslist is it legit how's it going to perform
should you go buy engineering samples to get early access to upcoming platforms
will Intel ever talk to me again the obspot tiny 4k gives you a smoother
webcam experience with ai powered auto framing gesture controls and 4k
recording learn more at the end of this video or at the link in the video description
this cost me 4 500 chinese yuan which is
about a hundred dollars more than a retail chip but i'm hands-on with what
is supposedly the core i9 12 12900k
or at least some variation of it now i've talked about this in detail before
but when you buy anything other than a retail chip in a sealed box you're
risking a number of things it could have been tampered with maybe ihs swapped
with another lesser CPU it could be faulty
or it could be an early engineering sample with entirely different
performance characteristics i believe that this one falls into that latter
category let's have a closer look at this thing so you can see it's not
square like Intel's old cpus it says lga 1700 so it has 1
700 contact pads on the bottom we can surmise that many of these extra pads
are for additional connectivity or additional power delivery theoretically
this is a top spec chip so it's going to have eight performance cores eight
energy efficient cores and a total of 24 threads since the performance course
will have smt or hyper threading and the efficient cores will not frankly it
looks exactly like our retail sample other than the fact that it says Intel
confidential at the top so where did it come from here's the thing
for any new release Intel works with platform partners like ASUS and MSI to
ensure that when the new cpus launch there are accompanying motherboards and
with partners like crucial or g-skill to ensure that there are shiny new ddr5
memory kits on the shelf right next to them in order for that to happen these
partners need early access to processors like before their specs are even
finalized to test their hardware hundreds thousands of chips can go out
as part of the sampling process and inevitably some of them end up falling
off a test bench into a technician's pocket and onto the
open market once the retail chips launch these engineering samples turn from
pretty hot to pretty not because no one in their right
mind would pay full price for a potentially broken CPU when they can
have a perfect one but that hasn't happened yet has it
now Anthony and i already did a video outlining the main deeps for the z690
platform but here's what you guys need to know you can expect 16 lanes of pci
express gen 5 for your GPU or other high performance add-in cards four lanes of
pci express gen 4 which is also coming directly off the CPU for a high speed
NVMe storage device and a dmi 4.0
connection to the southbridge or iohub or whatever the heck they're calling it
at this point it's about equivalent to two gen 4x4 links which is double last
gen for lots of high speed storage and network connectivity for power users and
workstation users i do hope to see the x
699 atdt platform that leaked come to
fruition sooner rather than later but this is a great start and more than
enough for most gamers the memory slots can be ddr5 or ddr4 with support for
speeds of up to 4 800 mega transfers per second or 3200
not at the same time it's one or the other and any higher speeds are going to
require the integrated memory controller on the CPU to be overclocked
and that is one of the things that i'm expecting to be kind of crap about my
engineering sample you see there are different kinds of engineering samples
es1 is typically going to be pretty early often running at very low
clock speeds while they dial in the manufacturing process
qs or qualifying sample is at the other
end of the spectrum and can have issues but it tends to be
basically retail silicon with a different stamp on the heat spreader es2
which is what i have in theory that lies somewhere in between so on
paper this should be pretty close to full functionality but often with higher
power consumption lower clock speeds turd level memory compatibility
especially when you're moving to a new type of memory ddr5
that kind of thing oh thermal compound i'm gonna need that
what a gaming beast this thing is supposed to be we don't want any bottlenecks so we're going rtx 3090 very
last gen technology okay PCIe gen4
i'm kidding obviously i feel like i need to say that it's very
fast unfortunately i have an LTT Store desk pad over here and i'm not even
showing off our best feature that you can get in any size you want and it
won't have to hang off the thing ltdstore.com we have all different sizes
don't do this don't be this guy moment of truth andy
that's a good sign ah where's the remote now the thing about unreleased hardware
is that you can't exactly just look up error codes
and see what problems other people have had and how they've solved them this
motherboard has a button called the retry button
should we try it man if i just got ripped off i'm gonna be
pretty not stoked hi
it's not posting uh truck there on the cmos well i couldn't find the pins
is there there's a button there's a button on the i o i really hope i didn't
just get completely i mean i expected to get ripped off a little i was paying a
hundred dollars over retail for an es CPU you know i do it for you right
can i have it no no not you i was playing the camera
if this doesn't work i am mostly out of options here i'm plugged directly into
the onboard i actually don't know this might be a 12 900 kf in which case it
won't have any onboard video so everything is fine except for that it
isn't working this is why dr sue will always be pat
gelsinger in a fight i wonder if Intel's done something to
brick compatibility with es chips in retail bioses
i've never heard of them doing that before but i also haven't played around with es chips for any of the most recent
platforms so i'm gonna try another PCIe slot
maybe there's a problem with the gen five slots or something i don't know
should have bought two that's the solution after going through four more
motherboards from two different vendors we've figured it out the postcodes seem
to indicate that the CPU is working but we can't get a display out because
at some point in the validation process motherboard manufacturers switched over
qualifying samples or retail chips and Intel issued a management engine update
that seems to break compatibility with es2 chips
since they are engineering samples that ultimately are supposed to be returned
to Intel or discarded Intel is obviously not going to burn engineering resources
fixing compatibility with them so Linus
bought a paperweight i guess i'll call Linus and break it to
him hey hey uh so i got some bad news for
you um you just bought a 700 paperweight
oh um okay
yeah like it powers on but it's like
some version thing with the BIOS it's like just not gonna work i wish it was
at least heavier because it's not a very good paperweight
well i mean you could weigh down one sheet of paper probably maybe
slightly thank you very much for that okay thanks for thanks for finishing the
testing yep bye bye
to be honest while i was hoping to run some performance tests ahead of the
official release these kinds of compatibility issues are not that
uncommon with engineering sample chips and we've even seen examples before of
sellers who list not only their engineering sample for sale but also
specific boards and BIOS revisions that they have validated to work and
maybe something like that is going to emerge in the future for these es2 elder
lake samples but as i outlined before whenever you're buying something like
this your best case scenario is crap your performance and or weird bugs and
your worst case scenario is getting absolutely hosed by a shady seller
no offense no offense to the seller it's just that by definition anyone
dealing in es chips is a little shady unlike our sponsor
thanks obset for sponsoring this video following up the popular obspot tiny
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webcam users and you can get yours today at the link in the video description if
you guys enjoyed this video maybe check out the es chips that we bought for our
six workstations one CPU project after i accidentally dropped one of the official
ones that Intel gave me rendering it inoperable those ones we locked out and
they did work they just offered poorer performance because the clock speed
wasn't as high