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Windows running on

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an xbox wait that's illegal

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also it's fake there's a laptop down there but what's not fake

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is this it looks like any other pc motherboard

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but if we look closely we find

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ah an AMD a9 9820

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the very same soc found in the xbox one s and supposedly this

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thing actually can run Windows

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so how does that work

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and is it any good well as you'd expect from any product called the funhouse a9

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a9820 there are some surprises

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but i don't want to spoil them now do i not like i spoil you guys with segues to

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sponsors like glasswire glasswire is the tool that shows you which apps are

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slowing down your connection in real time get 25 off today using offer code

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Linus at the link down below

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where do i even start this thing is so weird first things first we've got our

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CPU but actually it's the CPU GPU and

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more like it's more of an soc except that the board does have some kind of

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southbridge chipset that probably handles things like these SATA ports for

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example this is also an AMD chip down there it's got ddr3 memory four slots

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probably dual channel i would guess but we'll find out soon enough but then it's

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got an m.2 so it has like modern

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features but also super out of date features and i mean

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there's almost no pci express connectivity we've got whatever's

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linking it to this chipset down here four lanes for m.2 i mean presumably we

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don't even know for sure there's actually four lanes there and then

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another one lane for this puppy and

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i would assume that this much usb and Ethernet is probably handled directly

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off of the soc or off of this chipset over here so just four usb twos two usb

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threes and gigabit lan i was about to say i love that the memory slots are on

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either side of the CPU like an hedt platform but you know what i think it is

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it's probably because this soc was designed with the idea of RAM being

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soldered to the board around it so in order to have the traces make sense

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you have to have them on either side like that oh man this thing is so weird

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oh that's weird it looks like the board is actually

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designed upside down

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so whatever the intended use of this was it would have been in like an inverted

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case you can actually see everything from the front panel to even just the silk screen

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text on the pcb is all this way up okay

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so it's lga 11 5 x

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1200 except for one small problem

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it's nowhere near making contact with the chip

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even Noctua's mounting mechanism won't save us we're not

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are we mounting it with zip ties zip ties and down force

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before we do that though there are a few more weird things there's a ton of what

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appear to be probe points in the vrm so

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where you would take a multimeter and probe voltages there are two m.2

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selector jumpers curiously silk screened the other way around this may be because

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of a different revision of the board that had two m.2s Anthony did find a

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reference on a turkish website to a board like that and then finally there's

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dpn no idea what that could be for

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and well there's just there's only one of them so yikes so which cool are we

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using this one we're gonna use that one oh my god

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it's pretty easy to like strap down yeah that just makes me extremely

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uncomfortable we only have one of these things oh

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i don't i don't like it sir i had no alternative you know this actually is

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not that bad you're right no it's pretty solid once you get it on there the

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funniest part of this is that our viewers are basically used to it by now

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the comment section is just gonna be like yeah and there's gonna be like one guy

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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

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replies it must be new here yeah pop this puppy on here got kind of an

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matx hole pattern pretty standard 24 pin

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power connector got your 4-pin CPU connector or i should say soc connector

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let's put on some RAM so uh do we know

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which slots would make it dual channel no is it even dual channel i don't know

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sweet we are so close to the point where this

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is pretty much all there is to building a computer you just buy a motherboard

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with whatever CPU you're gonna use pre-soldered onto it throw in some RAM

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storage cooler will probably just be included in your kit and then that's it

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that built a computer good job me okay i think i've got the

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front panel plugged in right moment of truth you guys ready

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you know what would have worked we could have liquid cooled it speaking of which

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cooled playstation 5 is coming get subscribed so you don't miss it well if

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you want to make it a little bit more exotic we can always do this just what i

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did on the bench to make sure that the mounting pressure was correct wait no

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hold on

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lttstore.com oh my god that's a lot of mounting pressure it's pretty full

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should be fine don't knock it

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until you tried it oh there you go wow

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just like that just like that and was installing Windows on it just like simple uh yeah

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it just ran really yep but it that's so weird

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primary video adapter integrated graphics well i mean it supports

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external graphics which is weird and look at this you can actually

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bifurcate the internal pci express link between

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the CPU and the GPU on the soc

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into two 8x links oh you know what that's probably for the other board that

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has two m.2s oh maybe could be to share

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lanes or something i'm just guessing possibly rx 8120 a98

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wait what what's rx 8120 rx 8120 from as

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best as i can tell is the same clock speeds as the xbox one

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s oh so we want to run it at the higher one then the a9 98 20 is a higher clock

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speed it's like 2.35 versus seven five that's crazy okay what else should i be

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looking at here is there anything else significant uh subsystem settings literally doesn't do

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anything yeah there's literally nothing is the temperature monitor there oh okay

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wait what what does plus eight degrees celsius mean does it mean like plus

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eight degrees over what it's supposed to be or like do they think it's actually

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eight degrees in here ten RPM whatever that means that's not right there's only

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two there's only one fan on this thing there isn't too fan

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there's a fan header for a different fan yeah okay maybe it's 10 rpms of like i

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don't even know background radiation no i'm done i'm out i'm out we're going to

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the we're going to the we're going to Windows some other weird stuff the AMD chipset

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has features exposed for which there's no hardware like firewire sd card and an

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ide controller of all things there's menus for surround view and power

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express which are typically mobile features and not to mention hcf

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underscore dgpu sounds a lot like hybrid crossfire and it's even got infrared

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support this is crazy so you found all the drivers for this like what is a

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Radeon rx 350 series yeah it's like a

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kryptos chipset that's what they call it anyway

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i actually found it on the forum the mad hacksaw and shrimp prime mel

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they went and found a driver on a japanese blog about this

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and the blogger in turn got it from some strange file repository called

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djproduct.com and i have no idea how they figured that one out because it's

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literally just a file dump aha NVMe

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performance looked low and as it turns out the four lanes are actually split 2x

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for the NVMe slot and then one and one and they're coming off the chipset

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so that would explain why it's kind of junk and networking performance is also junk

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only 500 to 600 megabit per second which

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is like half of what we'd expect from a gigabit connection it seems like this

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thing really does not respond well to being loaded up heavily and apparently

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transferring files over the network counts as loaded up heavily look at this

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changing the mode of the CPU actually changes what it's reported as in task

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manager crazy all right here we go CPU

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multi-core center bench r23 is this going to work

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oh god there it goes finally yeah it's going

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we'll be right back oh wow

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holy bananas 1896.

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uh so that puts us at about half of the

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performance of a quad core mobile chip

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today and i don't mean like uh gaming laptop i mean like the light

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oh my god i don't know if i want to run any more benchmarks on camera uh what

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was the single core score i got 235 but then again i got 1744 multi-threaded so

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okay so it's kind of all over the place it's kind of all over the place got it

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how about a game okay wait HDMI tops out at 1080p 60 yes

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so that's HDMI 1.2 but then it supports free sync in the

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Radeon software and it works it does work hey what is going on here what is

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this thing i don't think that monitor is freesync

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no no it's not but like what the Radeon

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saw i can't even believe the Radeon software runs yeah

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like i would have thought it would just be like kind of like a random crappy

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just like yeah the driver but no no control panel you would think so yeah

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good old counter-strike i was going to start with doom eternal but i have now decided to start with counter-strike

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i've lowered my expectations while we wait for this to load can we

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take a moment to appreciate that games run as well as they do on the dog jaguar

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cores in the xbox one s one x and uh

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one it's been like five minutes there Linus

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is Windows still okay yeah Windows is still okay i don't think this is gonna

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launch sir okay rocket leg oh my god

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this is working oh my god it's running at 15 frames per second all right we're

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playing an unranked casual match 3v3 good luck team you're online i'm going

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online i'm going on the line

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should have voice chat be like hey guys i'm playing on my xbox no that's

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actually running better than i thought it would it's 14 FPS

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the minimums are pretty savage um

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is the game actually running a little bit slow motion here

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i think i might yeah i think you just got kicked dang it

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i was we were gonna win it at the end of the day it's pretty

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obvious then why AMD never officially

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released this soc outside of the xbox because

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far more goes into a console than simply the hardware alone which leads us to the

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question of the day what is this thing

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on the surface the fact that there are seemingly so many of these make it

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appear to be overstock or in our system's case b

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stock from xbox 1s production but the

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true story could go a bit deeper as of shooting this video AMD hasn't commented

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on this and i doubt that they ever will but considering that almost everything

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about it is beta the driver is from 2017

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and the motherboard says AMD bl2

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we think it probably first came to life as an attempt to reuse engineering work

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that had already been done probably at least partially on microsoft's dime to

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build affordable commodity pcs for emerging markets and at the time it

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probably looked like a decent stop-gap solution to the poor performance of

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their excavator-based apus and ryzen

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delays it's important to remember that zen hadn't even been officially

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announced yet when the development on this would have started and AMD was in

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pretty hot water at that time whatever the intended purpose though it was

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obviously put on ice once it became clear that it wasn't competitive and

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ryzen apu's showed up on the horizon another idea we kicked around is that it

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could have been produced as a collaboration with a chinese game

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console manufacturer kind of like the subor z plus which also happened to

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contain a semi-custom AMD soc retail

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availability of chuwi's aerobox which is also based on this soc seems to suggest

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that the true answer is some combination of

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all of the above but like i said we'll never know for sure it's always fun to

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ask what might have been but sometimes as in the case of the a9820

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what might have been was far worse than what we ended up getting but at least we

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got a cool story out of it so hey thanks AMD and

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thanks chinese board manufacturers for unearthing these freaking things and

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soldering them to board so we can enjoy them and you cannot buy them

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you know what else you cannot buy

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your time back if you waste it freshbooks is the easy to use accounting

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Linus if you guys enjoyed this video go check out our video on another

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interesting story out of china the

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xiaoshin kaichan CPU i honestly i cannot remember

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how to pronounce it but it's very interesting

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x86 even and not AMD or Intel