Windows running on
an xbox wait that's illegal
also it's fake there's a laptop down there but what's not fake
is this it looks like any other pc motherboard
but if we look closely we find
ah an AMD a9 9820
the very same soc found in the xbox one s and supposedly this
thing actually can run Windows
so how does that work
and is it any good well as you'd expect from any product called the funhouse a9
a9820 there are some surprises
but i don't want to spoil them now do i not like i spoil you guys with segues to
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where do i even start this thing is so weird first things first we've got our
CPU but actually it's the CPU GPU and
more like it's more of an soc except that the board does have some kind of
southbridge chipset that probably handles things like these SATA ports for
example this is also an AMD chip down there it's got ddr3 memory four slots
probably dual channel i would guess but we'll find out soon enough but then it's
got an m.2 so it has like modern
features but also super out of date features and i mean
there's almost no pci express connectivity we've got whatever's
linking it to this chipset down here four lanes for m.2 i mean presumably we
don't even know for sure there's actually four lanes there and then
another one lane for this puppy and
i would assume that this much usb and Ethernet is probably handled directly
off of the soc or off of this chipset over here so just four usb twos two usb
threes and gigabit lan i was about to say i love that the memory slots are on
either side of the CPU like an hedt platform but you know what i think it is
it's probably because this soc was designed with the idea of RAM being
soldered to the board around it so in order to have the traces make sense
you have to have them on either side like that oh man this thing is so weird
oh that's weird it looks like the board is actually
designed upside down
so whatever the intended use of this was it would have been in like an inverted
case you can actually see everything from the front panel to even just the silk screen
text on the pcb is all this way up okay
so it's lga 11 5 x
1200 except for one small problem
it's nowhere near making contact with the chip
even Noctua's mounting mechanism won't save us we're not
are we mounting it with zip ties zip ties and down force
before we do that though there are a few more weird things there's a ton of what
appear to be probe points in the vrm so
where you would take a multimeter and probe voltages there are two m.2
selector jumpers curiously silk screened the other way around this may be because
of a different revision of the board that had two m.2s Anthony did find a
reference on a turkish website to a board like that and then finally there's
dpn no idea what that could be for
and well there's just there's only one of them so yikes so which cool are we
using this one we're gonna use that one oh my god
it's pretty easy to like strap down yeah that just makes me extremely
uncomfortable we only have one of these things oh
i don't i don't like it sir i had no alternative you know this actually is
not that bad you're right no it's pretty solid once you get it on there the
funniest part of this is that our viewers are basically used to it by now
the comment section is just gonna be like yeah and there's gonna be like one guy
who's like what the hell they just they just zip tied it to the motherboard and there's gonna be like a whole bunch of
replies it must be new here yeah pop this puppy on here got kind of an
matx hole pattern pretty standard 24 pin
power connector got your 4-pin CPU connector or i should say soc connector
let's put on some RAM so uh do we know
which slots would make it dual channel no is it even dual channel i don't know
sweet we are so close to the point where this
is pretty much all there is to building a computer you just buy a motherboard
with whatever CPU you're gonna use pre-soldered onto it throw in some RAM
storage cooler will probably just be included in your kit and then that's it
that built a computer good job me okay i think i've got the
front panel plugged in right moment of truth you guys ready
you know what would have worked we could have liquid cooled it speaking of which
cooled playstation 5 is coming get subscribed so you don't miss it well if
you want to make it a little bit more exotic we can always do this just what i
did on the bench to make sure that the mounting pressure was correct wait no
hold on
lttstore.com oh my god that's a lot of mounting pressure it's pretty full
should be fine don't knock it
until you tried it oh there you go wow
just like that just like that and was installing Windows on it just like simple uh yeah
it just ran really yep but it that's so weird
primary video adapter integrated graphics well i mean it supports
external graphics which is weird and look at this you can actually
bifurcate the internal pci express link between
the CPU and the GPU on the soc
into two 8x links oh you know what that's probably for the other board that
has two m.2s oh maybe could be to share
lanes or something i'm just guessing possibly rx 8120 a98
wait what what's rx 8120 rx 8120 from as
best as i can tell is the same clock speeds as the xbox one
s oh so we want to run it at the higher one then the a9 98 20 is a higher clock
speed it's like 2.35 versus seven five that's crazy okay what else should i be
looking at here is there anything else significant uh subsystem settings literally doesn't do
anything yeah there's literally nothing is the temperature monitor there oh okay
wait what what does plus eight degrees celsius mean does it mean like plus
eight degrees over what it's supposed to be or like do they think it's actually
eight degrees in here ten RPM whatever that means that's not right there's only
two there's only one fan on this thing there isn't too fan
there's a fan header for a different fan yeah okay maybe it's 10 rpms of like i
don't even know background radiation no i'm done i'm out i'm out we're going to
the we're going to the we're going to Windows some other weird stuff the AMD chipset
has features exposed for which there's no hardware like firewire sd card and an
ide controller of all things there's menus for surround view and power
express which are typically mobile features and not to mention hcf
underscore dgpu sounds a lot like hybrid crossfire and it's even got infrared
support this is crazy so you found all the drivers for this like what is a
Radeon rx 350 series yeah it's like a
kryptos chipset that's what they call it anyway
i actually found it on the forum the mad hacksaw and shrimp prime mel
they went and found a driver on a japanese blog about this
and the blogger in turn got it from some strange file repository called
djproduct.com and i have no idea how they figured that one out because it's
literally just a file dump aha NVMe
performance looked low and as it turns out the four lanes are actually split 2x
for the NVMe slot and then one and one and they're coming off the chipset
so that would explain why it's kind of junk and networking performance is also junk
only 500 to 600 megabit per second which
is like half of what we'd expect from a gigabit connection it seems like this
thing really does not respond well to being loaded up heavily and apparently
transferring files over the network counts as loaded up heavily look at this
changing the mode of the CPU actually changes what it's reported as in task
manager crazy all right here we go CPU
multi-core center bench r23 is this going to work
oh god there it goes finally yeah it's going
we'll be right back oh wow
holy bananas 1896.
uh so that puts us at about half of the
performance of a quad core mobile chip
today and i don't mean like uh gaming laptop i mean like the light
oh my god i don't know if i want to run any more benchmarks on camera uh what
was the single core score i got 235 but then again i got 1744 multi-threaded so
okay so it's kind of all over the place it's kind of all over the place got it
how about a game okay wait HDMI tops out at 1080p 60 yes
so that's HDMI 1.2 but then it supports free sync in the
Radeon software and it works it does work hey what is going on here what is
this thing i don't think that monitor is freesync
no no it's not but like what the Radeon
saw i can't even believe the Radeon software runs yeah
like i would have thought it would just be like kind of like a random crappy
just like yeah the driver but no no control panel you would think so yeah
good old counter-strike i was going to start with doom eternal but i have now decided to start with counter-strike
i've lowered my expectations while we wait for this to load can we
take a moment to appreciate that games run as well as they do on the dog jaguar
cores in the xbox one s one x and uh
one it's been like five minutes there Linus
is Windows still okay yeah Windows is still okay i don't think this is gonna
launch sir okay rocket leg oh my god
this is working oh my god it's running at 15 frames per second all right we're
playing an unranked casual match 3v3 good luck team you're online i'm going
online i'm going on the line
should have voice chat be like hey guys i'm playing on my xbox no that's
actually running better than i thought it would it's 14 FPS
the minimums are pretty savage um
is the game actually running a little bit slow motion here
i think i might yeah i think you just got kicked dang it
i was we were gonna win it at the end of the day it's pretty
obvious then why AMD never officially
released this soc outside of the xbox because
far more goes into a console than simply the hardware alone which leads us to the
question of the day what is this thing
on the surface the fact that there are seemingly so many of these make it
appear to be overstock or in our system's case b
stock from xbox 1s production but the
true story could go a bit deeper as of shooting this video AMD hasn't commented
on this and i doubt that they ever will but considering that almost everything
about it is beta the driver is from 2017
and the motherboard says AMD bl2
we think it probably first came to life as an attempt to reuse engineering work
that had already been done probably at least partially on microsoft's dime to
build affordable commodity pcs for emerging markets and at the time it
probably looked like a decent stop-gap solution to the poor performance of
their excavator-based apus and ryzen
delays it's important to remember that zen hadn't even been officially
announced yet when the development on this would have started and AMD was in
pretty hot water at that time whatever the intended purpose though it was
obviously put on ice once it became clear that it wasn't competitive and
ryzen apu's showed up on the horizon another idea we kicked around is that it
could have been produced as a collaboration with a chinese game
console manufacturer kind of like the subor z plus which also happened to
contain a semi-custom AMD soc retail
availability of chuwi's aerobox which is also based on this soc seems to suggest
that the true answer is some combination of
all of the above but like i said we'll never know for sure it's always fun to
ask what might have been but sometimes as in the case of the a9820
what might have been was far worse than what we ended up getting but at least we
got a cool story out of it so hey thanks AMD and
thanks chinese board manufacturers for unearthing these freaking things and
soldering them to board so we can enjoy them and you cannot buy them
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Linus if you guys enjoyed this video go check out our video on another
interesting story out of china the
xiaoshin kaichan CPU i honestly i cannot remember
how to pronounce it but it's very interesting
x86 even and not AMD or Intel