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
um i don't know exactly what they do but
they've got weird geforce graphics cards with sort of uh looks like they
kind of came up with their own way of doing the nvidia logo and they're kind
of older ones like they'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 x-79 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 yes this motherboard can work for the game
yeah yeah and there's the memory stock yep yes is
it dual or quad channel yeah four channel four channel okay
um so where do you get x79 chipsets uh yes
chipsets chipsets and their cpu yeah
yeah but where do you get them does intel still make these two yes they
still make them yeah yeah really and then so where do you sell a
motherboard like this uh certifier yeah always sell to the
south america south america yeah
anywhere else aisha also south america and asia
so how do they buy a cpu for it because intel doesn't make these cpus anymore uh
we we collected the used cpu you know
signal hand yeah interesting
so if i'm in north america can i buy this
if you want you can buy it oh but like i can buy this one yeah you can you if you
want you can buy yeah so how much is it this one is about the 35
okay what currency is that currency yeah
us dollars us dollars okay i don't have any us dollars i have i have ntd
so how much how much ntd uh
i literally calculate okay all right thank you so according to the rep here
they're getting genuine x79 chipsets 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 cough 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 all right not bad 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 uh 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 m.2 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 blah blah blah et cetera
et cetera 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
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 sockets
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
4960x so that's the top end chip for this platform it's a
six core processor i think it peaks at uh four 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
know i don't get it i'm just so weirded out right now all
right 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 hydrox 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 going to be
going with their xc9 rgb cpu block which
has their pre-applied thermal compound their rgb lighting and of course their
skived micro fin 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
sockets so your thread ripper and your intel atdt all right next we're going to
try out their compression fittings these were made in partnership with bits
power so i'm expecting them to be freaking well bits power awesome
so this is my first look at the accessory package for the xd5 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 d5 pump uh 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 d5 is a really good choice there it's really well regarded
not just for its performance but also for its reliability
360 degree
peel oh my god for their radiators corsair partnered with hardware labs
a long time 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 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 that's neat
i still remember when bitspower 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 work for so
there you have it i also called their backplate flimsy if i recall correctly
and they were like okay fair point but um linus it's 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 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
um 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 the makers of this motherboard were never
expecting a titan x to be installed on it
see if it handles it okay i'm sure corsair has a better way for me
to fill this but um wait wait wait
gotta get that better product placement in there blindness tech tips water bottle
ltdstore.com this board does not have a lot of fan
headers on it 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 all right not bad okay so this motherboard actually has like
jumpers for what would normally be bios settings on
it this one is jpower one to two
one and two is always power two and three is s o power there it is why is
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 nvme 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 asus
not have an m.2 slot on it
see that you can't even just like put a pci
express to m.2 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
got to 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 so we can
daisy chain this one here okay and
hey now it's time for the moment you've been
waiting for we're going to do a quick cinebench r15 run and see if this
thing's actually even freaking stable if it turbos up correctly
now our score is 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 13 33
megahertz so maybe we can go into the bios 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 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 starred at four or five hundred
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 it turbo's up to 3.9 in a
lighter load so yeah we're getting close to that max 4 gigahertz turbo okay
honestly though that's everything i needed to know
that's a pretty smooth gaming experience okay so with some quick craigslisting
we've got uh 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 3960x for
100 us dollars and then this board is like 100 bucks so we're talking
less than the price of a brand new cpu potentially for a
board 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 it 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
yeah no 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 freaking on point 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 re-badging 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 m.2 drive 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 hydrox 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