your computer is nothing without the motherboard it carries both power and
data between every critical system component be it a CPU SSD or lowly
keyboard if it was a system of the body it would be kind of like your
circulatory system and your nervous system combined everything plugs into it
thankfully we've got standards that tell us exactly what goes where which
uh wait what are these
and whoa what is this why does the CPU go on the
back of this one can this really be legal
only if it's legal to have fun so for fun today we're gonna show you
guys some wacky standard breaking motherboards and tell you why on earth
they should even exist in the first place speaking of existing ridge wallet does
do that ridge wallet has redefined the traditional wallet with its compact
frame and rfid blocking plates keep your wallet bulge down and use offer code
Linus to save 10 and get free worldwide shipping
let's kick things off with the portwell peb 9783 g2 ar it's a relatively
unassuming little board standard micro atx CPU socket memory slots pretty much
where they're supposed to be this one's a little bit off kilter but then bam look at the rear eye oh
20 usb ports of which six of them are
rated for 10 gigabit operation that is a
ridiculous amount of usb expansion so much that i can't even conceive of a
legitimate desktop use case for it which is probably for the best since you won't
be powering this motherboard off of a normal desktop power supply either it
uses this pair of screw-on power terminals and i have no idea where i'd
get a power adapter for this thing it did not come with one but ignoring that
we've got three display outputs along with dual gigabit Ethernet meaning this
is one hefty boy in terms of io i mean
you'd think you'd need a beefy CPU like a threadripper with tons of pci express
lanes to power this thing but in fact you do not it uses xeon branded 10th gen
core cpus that do get a few extra enterprise features but none of those
involve additional io it's just the same four lane dmi 3.0 link between the
chipset here and the CPU just like you'd have on a regular desktop board so some
back of the napkin math here seems to suggest that the total rated theoretical
throughput of all these usb ports would be nearly five times greater than the
bandwidth available between the CPU and chipset so
uh good luck with that to be fair to portwell here though this thing is not
intended for balls to the wall transfer speeds at all times and that's reflected
in how these usb ports are connected to the system with a mixture of chipset
connected ports and ports connected to as media controllers you can actually
see these three right here that means that no one controller is going to be
totally overwhelmed by high speed i o and it means that you can strategically
connect high speed devices and lower speed devices depending on your needs
according to portwell this type of board is intended for things like autonomous
vehicles industrial automation manufacturing robots and things like
that so lots of cameras and lots of low bandwidth io for controlling servos and
what have you that use case is exemplified not only by how many usb
ports the board has but by other things like how many serial ports it's got two
which can be switched between rs 422 and 485 modes and also this crazy pci
express 16x connector that's at a 90 degree angle and then also rotated 180
degrees meaning that this board is designed for some seriously weird
chassis layouts a lot of support components are actually
on the rear of the board as well and there are even eight general purpose i o
pins here somewhere those are very useful for controlling
simple electronics although i couldn't tell you where they are since they're
unlabeled and there's no manual available but that's okay you don't need
a manual to figure out how to wear a dad hat the hardest part is picking the
right color and design so you can get your dad to help
wow a dad hat thanks Linus portwell's great but we've got more in our batch of
weird boards and one of the more well-known ones is the anctech rev q270
cernia here which is a relatively normal looking motherboard you've got your
display outputs your type c your dual gigabit Ethernet actually pretty
impressive rear i o but then you look at the front and like what
this thing has no CPU socket you'd be forgiven for thinking that maybe the CPU
is soldered on because there's more to this story because even the chipset is
missing here it's when we flip around that we see what's really going on here
the CPU socket and the chipset are just chilling back here like it's no big deal
but yeah big deal how the heck are you
supposed to put this thing in a regular case without all kinds of headaches
mounting your cooler as it turns out this design is specifically made to
remove headaches that other cooling arrangements can create think about it
you've got your pc controlling the cnc mill or other connected mega tool and
there's shards of sawdust fiberglass metal you name it flying all around the
room that stuff's a recipe for a very bad time if it gets ingested by typical
air intake fans so if you still want to be able to access your i o your choices
are to use cable extensions or relocate your cooling to the other side of the
pcb it's the same story if you're dealing with extremely temperature
sensitive work equipment or maybe you're near a forage where the intake would be
inundated with extremely hot air gosh dang forge this way you can more
easily duck the cooling and potentially operate entirely passively oh and one
neat little feature is this at mode jumper it's not in the manual but what
it does is makes it so the pc stays on as long as the power button is active so
you can have a hard switch like you'd see on a power supply with on or off
again more of an industrial thing but chunky switches are super satisfying so
i like it okay that is a niche use case well how
about something that you might have actually seen before without realizing
it this bad boy right here is the shenzhen
zeal all za sk1050 and it has both a
regular CPU socket and a GeForce gtx
1050 ti built into it why
well it's actually billed as a tv motherboard which seems like a poorly
translated way of saying digital signage and that seems about right not only do
we have that 1050 ti which is much more capable of 3d acceleration than Intel
onboard graphics but there are twin lvds
headers on the motherboard both capable of driving a 1080p display and in fact
the i o on this thing is spread around in a very unusual way both the left and
right edges of the board are absolutely brimming with ports so if we assume that
the CPU is on top then on the right we've got a 19 volt power connector HDMI
gigabit Ethernet usb 3.0 SATA and audio but wait a second these are some of
these are internal connectors what's up with SATA and what's this little weird
SATA labeled block next to it ah yes
these are cool right these SATA power connectors are common on a lot of
embedded motherboards because they take external power that means that kind of
like the atx 12 volt only standard that Intel's been pushing this motherboard is
responsible for handling all peripheral power usually using an adapter that
plugs in as a single block into the back of your drive like this one around the
other side we've got what looks like an HDMI port but is actually an lpc bus
port for debugging not entirely sure how you'd use it but it's nice that it's
there and then next to that are SATA power and data ports those lvds
connectors a usb 3 front panel connector a backlight inverter connector and a
single usb usb2 header to say that this is non-standard would be like saying
Linus drops things sometimes wait a minute was this written with alex in
mind okay you know what whatever it's just it's seriously weird presumably the idea
is that this would mount to a box in the back of the digital sign and then break
out into all the connectors that it needs from there and the 1050 ti is in
there to make sure that it's got enough power to drive whatever animations that
you're going to run on the displays aside from that there's not much else
going on with this other than the distinct lack of expansion slots other
than an m.2 SATA 2240 port and an m.2220
slot that's marked for wi-fi RAM is handled by ddr4 sodiums and you
thankfully get two slots stacked on top of each other to play with similar to
how a thicker laptop might keep a low profile boring
okay fair enough enough with the industrial boards let's talk about
something a little bit more practical this little number from pc win max
well it's pretty normal looking right out of the gate here you've got a pci
express 16x slot a 1x slot two ddr3 RAM
slots SATA ports a really poorly placed
usb 3.0 header and even fairly normal
rear i o ps2 HDMI vga four usb ports and
gigabit Ethernet wait are you sure this is a weird board
i mean have you guys noticed what makes it weird yet
ah yes it's the socket what is that
that is pga 989 and what uses it is
mobile 2nd and 3rd gen Intel core series
cpus yep we're looking at a desktop board
that was made for mobile cpus that first launched back in 2011. so you might look
at this and say well that's got to be some kind of ancient relic of the past
but if this date code on it is anything to go by it was actually manufactured on
christmas day in 2018. what gives well
remember back at computex 2019 when we started seeing new x79 motherboards for
ivybridge high-end desktop cpus this
just so happens to coincide with that and my best guess is that these
components were being recycled around that time and found their way over to
china where still good components were repurposed to become low-cost options
for pc builds it makes sense i mean you might have thrown out that old laptop
with a busted screen and a battery that looks like it ate too much at the buffet
but the components on the main board were probably still totally fine and we
saw something very similar recently actually with haswell mobile cpus being
transplanted into desktop CPU form factors
this kind of upcycling honestly is kind of awesome and i wish that it happened
more often unfortunately finding a CPU to match a
board like this is a little tough by
third gen most cpus were being soldered directly to the motherboard using ball
grid arrays rather than pin grid array sockets and the only one that i know for
sure uses pins is the core i7 3920xm
which goes for around 130 to 150 on ebay
worth it considering that i'm not even sure
they're selling these boards anymore probably not but why don't we take a
look at what was in the other pc win max box
okay this is a really weird board
it says it's itx but it's clearly much smaller than that i mean i can hold it
in one hand the model number says epic m37 which really doesn't help any you
certainly won't be installing an epic server CPU on this thing so from what i
can tell it's a similar concept to the other pc winmax motherboard but a little
more integrated because you can see if we flip it around ah yes our CPU is now
soldered and then we've got an additional chipset on here that
according to the marking seems to suggest it is an hm65 so this is an
earlier sandy bridge arrow board with a single ddr3 soda on the front and two
mini PCIe slots one of those is probably SATA only given that the age of this
chipset means you wouldn't be able to boot from an NVMe drive even if you had
a compatible SSD oh yeah speaking of chipsets get
subscribed because we are going to find out once and for all if you really get
more performance out of a high-end chipset motherboard
io on this puppy is pretty limited just four usb ports gigabit Ethernet vga and
HDMI input power is actually
kind of an unknown here it just says dc jack one
so just start trying things starting with 12 volt and hope you don't fry it i mean
it can't require that much juice all it's got on it is
CPU one stick of RAM maybe a couple mini PCIe devices Ethernet and usb
okay technically there's SATA power on here as well but that kind of goes
against the spirit of building with something that's tiny surely you're not
going to put a big old hard drive in it this one is so tiny that there's not
much else to say about it the one additional feature that would make it
interesting is a serial port and unfortunately there isn't one on here so
it's really just a tiny pc and your guess is as good as mine as to how
exactly the cooler is supposed to mount to it there's no mounting points for one
not even for the chipset maybe whatever CPU this is doesn't need one yeah no
that's definitely that's definitely not right this was but a small taste of
what's out there guys we had at least three more that we wanted to get in for
this video that just never arrived like this x79 motherboard with only two RAM
slots so let us know if some of the weirder motherboards that you've seen
and maybe we'll circle back and take another shot at this because there is
no shortage of them out there just like there's no shortage of segways
to our sponsor manscaped manscaped provides an all-in-one grooming kit that
has you covered from head to toe their performance package 4.0 features their
awesome lawnmower 4.0 waterproof body trimmer their weed whacker ear and nose
hair trimmer plus a whole lot of other goodies for a limited time you'll get
all of this plus two free gifts the shed travel bag and
manscape's anti-chafing boxer briefs so don't wait visit manscape.com tech or
click the link down below for 20 off and free shipping thanks for watching guys
if you enjoyed this look at some weird ass motherboards maybe go check out our
previous video looking at some weird ass gpus
they were they were very weird