in my hand is the single scariest GPU in
the world this Chinese GPU is so threatening that it's got Biden flying
around the world begging semiconductor manufacturers to stop working with China
why well because it's completely homegrown from the Shroud to the sand
that makes the Silicon this is a Chinese product and it took only 2 years to
create more threads has been extremely secretive about its development but now
that it's out of their Testing Lab there's nothing to stop it from spreading around the world into my hands
allow me to introduce then the brand new fourth player in the dedicated GPU space
but then if you consider that a behemoth company like Intel has had such a rocky
road to bringing a GPU to Market how could this unproven Underdog possibly
hope to compete with the likes of NVIDIA and AMD they're going to have to be
fierce almost as Fierce as this segue to
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first showed up on our radar in 2021 and since then they've gone from fledgling
startup to raising a total of half a billion US Dollars and no fewer than
five SKS listed on their website absolutely wild but also not as
unexpected as you might initially think you see they're helmed by James Zang who
previously was VP and general manager of nidia's Chinese Division and they're
funded by you guessed it the CCP so when
we learned that they had finally launched their first gaming GPU we had
to get one except we couldn't
unsurprisingly as members of the western media more threads was completely
uninterested in returning our calls and the first wave of gpus that they
released to customers were only available for those who managed to get
their hands on a purchase code through a lottery system kind of OnePlus style
thankfully we were able to find one such individual who was willing to send us
the GPU to take a look at thanks pal
okay the script just says unbox is there anything interesting ah well this is
interesting rather than use a standard PCI power connector more threads has an
adapter that appears to go from Dual PCI E8 pin to eight pin EPS which is the
connector that you would normally use for a motherboard not for a GPU this is
something we've seen before on server gpus but not really on gaming ones
whether it's due to the aluminum shroud or the relatively wide spacing of the
heat SN fins it's feels kind of light compared to a modern top tier card like
a 7900 XTX it's rated for 255 wats total
board power though so depending on the performance per watt it could end up
within spitting distance in games that 255 wat TDP could also help explain our
8 Pin CPU connector this guy is rated at 300 watts compared to the 150 watts of
an 8 pin PCIe connector though there are other strategies for that like putting
dual PCIe 8 pins on it the more likely possibility is that this is pretty much
the same thing as their new server GPU the MTT s3000 that happens to have the
same number of compute cores clocked slightly higher and twice as much RAM
just with a gaming oriented shroud on it in servers PCI based cards like NVIDIA's
Tesla now known as data center gpus commonly use EPS power connectors for a
couple of reasons first and foremost it's faster to plug in one cable than
two and also because the EPS 12vt connector was established by SSI or the
server system infrastructure Forum way back before PCIe power connectors even
existed and it's just kind of never really gone
away what makes this gaming then honestly not much it's got a triple fan
shroud compared to the blower style that you would normally find in server or
workstation cards and ample display outputs this is three DisplayPort 1.4s
and an HDMI 2.1 making it extremely modern and that's not the only way it's
modern this is the first GPU with a PCI
gen 5x6 interface that's right they beat
NVIDIA AMD and and Intel to the punch
it's got 16 gigs of gddr6 memory 496
Musa compute cores clocked at 1.8 GHz
giving it 14.4 teraflops of fp32 compute
power hm so maybe not trading blows with
the 7900 XTX that would put it between an RTX 3060 and a 3060 TI in terms of
raw performance which is sort of disappointing I mean I
thought this thing was supposed to be scary right adding to its modernness it
supports vp9 h264 h265 and apparently
av1 encoding and that 16 gigs of memory
is connected over a 256-bit memory bus
giving it about the same maximum memory bandwidth as a 3060 TI though with twice
the amount of RAM which again could beely its um server Heritage the GPU at
its heart is apparently based on their Chan Shia architecture Andy's not here
to help me with the pronunciation though so that could be way off this feels so
naughty as a member of the hated Western media I'm not supposed to be playing
with this thing at least not yet o it does have RGB it's kind of pretty oh
right and it has AI cores as well kind of like NVIDIA's tensor cor though
exactly what we can do with them we're not sure yet these Chinese gpus are
making me
thirsty a yawn response it was a good
time TT store.com that's it it's up I
don't know why but I expected this to require a little bit more faffing about
well there was some minor faf before you came here I don't know why I'm so
surprised I mean obviously if it didn't display a Windows desktop they wouldn't
ship the thing you'd think right but but it just works 120 HZ it only actually
supports 17 motherboards total they
actually only sell it in a bundle because they're so worried about people
buying the card and then not being able to run it so we tried it in other boards
and it just it's not a validation thing it just doesn't it it doesn't appear we
were very thankful that we had one in stock of the ones that they supported
does it support HDR there does not appear to be any HDR support it's not in
English I think I can infer a lot of this though GPU clock GPU usage GPU
temperature it's quiet
is oh man I just immediately want to go off-road Okay I lied I want
what's aav1 I've only got SVT av1 and a av1
well I've got x264 but that's CP so I I guess typically it would show like
NVIDIA nank or something yeah and it or Intel av1 we here we'll see if the usage
goes up okay well the encoder is there
but it's not supported at least by OBS at this time this might actually have um
screen cap in it I know it has overlays let's Control Alt
a I saw a yellow thing FL flash up I wonder if that was screen recording okay
well we know what that is that's gaming overlay or whatever
screenshot oh so we just hold it down it's basically screen cap okay so I need
let's get into a game what game do you want to play I want to play League of Legends really you do well I just assume
that this is going to be a beast for League of Legends
cuz that's like the most popular game in China yeah do you want to try anything
more modern like Shadow the tomb ra is a good place to start everything runs on Shadow the Tomb Raider sure it's good we
don't have a doom Eternal cuz the the demons are chin demons so we could J
really what oh shut
up no support for direct X12 my
resolution drop down has very few options uh I guess we'll go with 4K oh I
wonder if their scaler sucks and my monitor refresh rate options are super
weird 24 okay 30 yeah 60 sure thing 82
what are these refresh rates ooh see it
it can barely even render this box my first more thread gaming exper oh this
is okay I can tell from your face this is as far as it goes isn't it yeah oh
it's completely locked up die here's the situation aside from supporting only 17
motherboards it also only supports
direct X9 games with some direct X11
games and this is in large part thanks to its lack of tessellation support I
mean it booted really fast they actually just added 23 more games so back to my
initial Instinct then can we find fire up League of legendss yes oh my God
there's an update while you're doing that we'll compare it to this other system we have oh right there's a second
system here I assume that has a like RTX 3060 in it that would be the spec for
speec comparable it's a 1660 oh it's price comparable though
okay well that gives me a different set of expectations with respect to
Performance but then already it didn't run the first game of try to run look at
all the things in this stupid dashboard
that are not play the game start your Legend is not it play league is not it
the game is temporarily unavailable okay am I an idiot or I actually I don't know
either I don't know how to get this to open play DotA the superior MOA okay can
you put the gaming overlay up uh contrl
alt x no Windows key is not working
control alt delete hey there we go how dare you it is totally control All Tex
probably the game doesn't allow you to have overlays oh anti cheats I mean it's
smooth I really wish I had an FPS counter right now but it's working it's
at medium okay I'm setting it to very high
still working still smooth how's your experience on this great actually I'm
getting over 100 frames per second boys at 4K at 4K everything maxed out oh man
I don't think it's that hard to run Le I'm going to get dead press F but I don't want to pay
respects no it heals you I think look I don't play this game all right so
there's things called creeps and there's like I know how the game fundamentally
works there's more than one enemy hero that I have to fight it's stupid it's a
team game not only is this running but it's been Rock Solid I don't see any
graphical anomalies and it's actually really quiet all right
time for some Counter Strike what are your settings just go through and make
sure they're the same The Game just crashed so cool yeah maybe you should
get a more more threads GPU you have more luck interesting fact that I
learned is that the Bots are controlled by the GPU so having Bots actually
affects your GPU results I thought they were CPU maybe that's why they're so
dumb I get killed by Bots a lot in CS go
all right you're playing counterterrorist
oh this is not good that says 30 FPS but
these frame times are extreme ex L inconsistent yeah it's pretty smooth for
me I'm between like 160 to 200 yeah try
looking at the ground there you go look at all those
frames dang it I have to imagine that it's probably not designed with 4K in
mind with that said if you have 16 gigs of vram and a high performance GPU it's
not a big stretch to say oh well if performs well at 1080p it should also
perform well at 4K I'm going to try switching to 1080 wait I can't can't
remember my resolution drop down was borked and other stuff well I brought
another monitor out for you oh my god really okay well let's at least set it
oh I can't even set it above 60 wait why can't it but go above 60 this monitor
can almost certainly do at least 120 over HDMI try this yeah let's try
DP you nuked it monitor's doing stuff it
it's it's it's having a think yay there we go it's not a good
sign for your product that we're excited that it turns on at all 120 FPS on a
two-dimensional splash screen the smoothness of the frame delivery is
better what I suspect is that they basically just didn't test it at 4K at
all this is a smooth 50 FPS whereas that
was a dog crap 2530 the rough performance of this GPU
kind of sits around uh the gt1030 which
is a 30 watt card this card pulls about 250
watts gt1030 is also $80 yeah more threads more like less
frames there it is I got 300 FPS for a
second there wow I'm at 90 right now in the tunnel yeah so it's the Bots
interesting the hard part about making a CPU is that you're trying to make Hardware that can do everything mhm the
hard part about making a GPU you're trying to make Hardware that matches
these already established standards so you know what your Hardware is going to do but getting it to cooperate very
challenging I was getting like 400 frames per second in the tutorial for a
second there then this guy shows up I drop down to 130 I was so happy with my
3 to 400 FPS he's getting 1,000 okay what what settings are you
running at what settings are you running at okay I'm at I'm at very high let me
let me set that I still at a th000 once again I'm at an eighth of the
performance with double the power consumption it runs the game I mean
that's impress it's better than I could do Team Fortress 2 let's go I want to
see if it glitches that's all I need to know I know it used to be so good I it
started going downhill for me when they started having different weaps and stuff yeah it was flawlessly balanced there
was some pretty bad balancing especially at the start and I think that you're a
fanboy I'm not a fanboy it's actually legitimately so fair and it's because of
the size of the teams that allows for like kind of offside battles as well as
like the sheer variety of weapon combinations makes it so that there's
why don't you write a little poem about it dude I probably have already it's
obviously not getting the kind of performance that I would get out of a base tier NVIDIA GPU but I'm anywhere
from 70 to 100 FPS even in a
firefight that's not great look now when
we tried games that were not on the supported list was it just universally
not compatible like factorio is that supported no oh but you get a lot of
these they're making driver checks and calls at the start yeah and they'll just
be like nope so it's fairly crap then yeah it's basically garbage I mean I
couldn't build one but then I haven't likely stolen a bunch of Ip from NVIDIA
took them two years to make a GPU and you three years to make a screwdriver
yeah thanks for that Adam that's really helpful oh here we go oh interesting
they went and they created a custom
connector here so that they can carry all of these pwm signals and 12vt power
to the fans separately this 8 Pin EPS power connector passes through to a four
pin does it even actually draw 250 Watts
or whatever it's we saw it drawing 250 oh but they're actually doing it through
a four pin plus the 75 Watts from the
slot uh okay all the vrms are along the
top edge of the board I don't think I've ever seen that before this is a little
like grounding tab for the cooler
Samsung memory chips I mean they're labeled Sam
it's definitely a more threads die though what a curious product on the one
hand it supports the latest standards but on the other hand it barely works
you know if you were wondering if there's any Merit to it outside of
gaming unfortunately we weren't able to test AI maybe that's part of their play
since right now China's having a hard time getting their hands on powerful AI
accelerators but if the AI performance is anything like productivity
performance let's just say the lack of a 7-Day no question questions asked return
policy is not a big surprise to us so
why is it bad unlike CPUs there are very
few options for open or licensable GPU
architectures the biggest players all like to keep their secret sauce firmly
in their Satchel meaning that more threads had to design their architecture
from the ground up or well I mean they probably didn't even if you possess
considerable knowledge and funding making your own architecture iterating
on that putting it into to a board and shipping it could easily take 10 years
let alone too and this is just their first consumer GPU more threads have
already released several Enterprise gpus meaning something is a miss here and
that's where we got to kind of pull the sheets off of China's big secret this
isn't quite a fully Chinese GPU Korean
Tech Channel bull Labs did some digging and noticed that the company actually
licensed IP from imagination technology IES the company that owns the power VR
architecture you might have heard from them from when they helped make gpus for
Apple in the days of the early iPhones and iPads now lots of companies license
IP from others I mean all of Apple's impressive M series chips are based on
ARM but they also don't claim to be all
American chips except technically
imagination Technologies is owned by Canyon Bridge Capital Partners who are
in turn funded by the Chinese central government making this
well technically a Chinese GPU now China
understands the disadvantages of needing to lean on the rest of the world for their chips that's why the Chinese
government announced they were investing $1.4 trillion dollar into Tech in 2020
making Biden's government's 53 billion
chips act look like walking around money and while more threads is the most
prominent player that we've seen at least over here in the west China's not
putting all their eggs in one basket and actually has numerous GPU projects and
companies on the go so then does this mean we're going to see
ripping fast Chinese gpus in just a couple more years probably not I mean
first off tensions between China and the US are pretty high right now we've seen
the Huawei ban a potential Tik Tock ban and Joey B cracking down on Chinese
access to Western designed gpus from the likes of NVIDIA not to mention important
semiconductor IP so there is a chance that these gpus may actually never end
up being sold in North America though that could be a bit of an advantage for
them because it would mean that the was that big leak of NVIDIA IP a little
while back they could utilize some of
the things they found without worrying about any kind of import restrictions on
top of that the Chinese government seems more interested in limiting gaming
performance than investing in gaming Hardware so it's likely that this is
more of an AI play than a gaming Play Nothing is for certain though right now
except that this card totally sucks and even if you have access to it you
shouldn't buy it and that I have this message to tell you about from our
sponsor if you enjoyed this video why don't you check out the video we made on
China's homegrown x86 CPU
from I'd be interested to see what a new one looks like