every once in a while we come across something that is so bizarre that
whether it's a good value or not we kind of just have to buy it and that's
exactly what happened on taobao.com
this my friends is a core i7
4720 hq
what a 4720 hq is a solder only
processor for laptops i mean it's a few generations old but it actually
performed pretty decent but this is what's weird about it it's a 4720hq
and it looks like they have jerry rigged like a heat spreader and a
substrate for it so that you could install it in a desktop motherboard
so that translated to 123 canadian rubles is it
a good deal well we got it
so i guess we gonna find out today's video is brought to you by
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so step number one i guess is inspect the goods because when you order from
like weird random chinese sites and like how
long did this thing take to come just over a week dang that's not bad but when
you order from these kinds of sites you kind of never know what kind of
experience you're going to have so the first thing that stands out to me is
that this heat spreader is clearly
custom milled by whoever is
finding these cpus wherever the heck they're finding them here i'm gonna flip
them over and this is where stuff gets really crazy so this is a 4790k and this
is a 4720hq so desktop chip mobile chip
so you can actually that's great you can see the comparison between the thickness
of the but this is nuts you can actually see the ball grid array soldering job
between the original CPU and then this like
aftermarket substrate here and then you can also see that not all
the contact pads seem to be actually mapped to anything like some of them
look blank like they don't have a trace running to them which is especially
weird because the mobile versions of these fourth generation processors
actually had more pins on the bottom of them than the desktop ones so how do you
map more to less how do you find a board
that it'll work in you guess
now to be clear the manufacturer does list the compatible chipsets so anything
z87 z97 and then the more mainstream
versions of that couple of generations theoretically
should work but CPU compatibility from board to
board is not always as cut and dried as
that so we just kind of grabbed the best
bet z87 board we had lying around in oh boy we are running up against our first
hiccup here so on a typical Intel lga 11
5x CPU you've got these little tabs here
these are for these to push the CPU down into the socket and make sure these pads
are making good contact with the pins well it's too thick because you've
effectively got like two substrates worth here so we gotta kind of my
goodness it doesn't even come back up now we're gonna brick this thing for sure oh
crap it's coming out of the socket well if it falls back in the socket that
socket's probably dead so we're gonna go ahead and throw this little just washer
in here use that as a spacer and then hopefully we'll be able to install it
properly all right so that's it
mobile CPU desktop motherboard you guys saw it here first
that is unless you've seen this somewhere else in which case you saw it here second or third or whatever
all right put my cooler back on i like their shinier heat spreader
be very careful that you aren't mounting your CPU with too much pressure because
i'm pretty sure that's what killed that pf sense project that i was working on
like three times too much pressure is bad for the board so this is z87 which
means we're going to be using ddr3 memory and we actually had really good
luck with these particular g-skill rip jaws kits over the years
of course we have the one board left from this generation that
doesn't have stupid on-board power switches there we go hey
it actually detects it core i7 4720
i wasn't done with that oh there we go 4720 hq 16 gigs RAM our ssds working
press f1 to run setup heck yeah wow that
was painless 26 degree temperatures that looks fine voltage zero degrees that
looks less funny okay so the thing about CPU
compatibility is that sometimes you can get things to work that aren't
officially supported in fact there are people who have gotten coffee like cpus
to run in like z270 and z170 boards but
you might run into some unpredictable behavior so
let's go ahead and jump into advanced mode here and see what else we can dig
up i'm having fun like why does the cache voltage read and the core voltage
doesn't system agent voltage is fine too these are all CPU voltages of one like
one or another here we go i mean everything is actually showing up
like totally normally why do you not install chrome
yeah no it just like is very inconvenient because then we have to use
edge and then we have to just manually type wow this is very important news
worst ever dress the worst ever
so everything has been shockingly painless so far we fire up task manager
all four cores all eight threads are all detected so wow both speed step power
saving and turbo boost are working
who was it like which chinese reseller was like
you know what we have too many 47 20
hq's whatever shall we do with these you know what let's spend a bunch of time
getting them working in desktop motherboard do a lot of that
so our next step because you would think the benefit of a mobile processor would
be that it would be very power efficient and it would be very cool so we want to
find out just how cool it is so our next
step here is we're running a stress test so we're using Intel burn test
and then we're using hardware monitor in order to monitor our CPU temperatures
now a potential benefit of using a
mobile processor would be that you'd have less heat output and less power
consumption so theoretically compared to a 4770k which was the desktop equivalent
at that time we should run much cooler so we're going
to go ahead and we're going to run this guy for a little while and then
see how it's looking but quite frankly i am feeling pretty good so far because
we've had this running already for about a minute and our maximum oh it just
jumped it was sitting at about 40 degrees still
this is very respectable somewhere in the 60 to 65 degrees celsius range and
that's right on the dies
i told you it's all the way in i do know how to mount a sequence
the first time that you're saying that so that's pretty impressive we're stable
which was not a given
and we're running about 20 degrees cooler than a 4770k but there's a clear
trade-off here so our maximum turbo speed is only about 3.4 gigahertz
compared to 3.9 on a 4770k plus that would be an
overclockable chip so let's see what that translates to in
terms of performance then so we decided to pair our CPU with a gtx 1060 because
i mean the reality of it is if you're trying to spend a hundred dollars on a
CPU off taobao.com you weren't buying an rtx 2080 ti that wouldn't be a good
match anyway so we still think 1920 by 1080 we should
be able to get darn near very high or even ultra details even in a aaa game
like shadow of the tomb raider so let's just see that is as long as our CPU can
keep up this is really impressive i mean other
than some wicked tearing when we pan the camera around which is i mean we're not
using g-sync or freezing so that kind of comes with the territory
this is running really smooth so it did
a great job with shadow of the tomb raider it actually ended up performing
nearly identically to our 4770k which
means we could even go higher than a gtx 1060 graphics card and still be getting
the full experience bearing in mind of course that we had
our details cranked meaning that we are less likely to be CPU bound let's move
on to another title you're using a hard drive
and impressively our gaming performance story doesn't
really change with assassin's creed origins or gta 5 both of them were
within 5 to 10 percent of the performance which
as long as we're getting a pretty good price difference means that this could
make a ton of sense for someone who wants to game on the cheap bringing us
then to our last gaming test the one that separates the men from the boys
when it comes to CPU gaming performance
csgo
oh crap so clearly it's usable and more
than that it was actually within again
10 20 frames per second of our 4770k
which i don't know what is that like three percent or something stupid like that like
not even much of a difference but i guess that's kind of to be expected
because our low core count turbo is a little bit
higher than our all-core turbo so we're running cinebench now and you can see
we're maxing out at 3.4 gigahertz so i'm going to be curious to see how
our score here stacks up to a 4770k because even gamers occasionally do
something else on their computers 671.
okay that's not impressive what's the 4770k
746. so yeah that's definitely going to be a
noticeable difference if you're actually doing any 3d rendering or if you're
editing video or something like that but probably not the end of the world i
guess the real question here becomes one
of value so here's the deal
we ran all our numbers through again this time with an
8700k so remember this is more like a
370 us dollar CPU and obviously there is
a performance improvement but if you're looking at it from a pure bang
for the buck perspective these 4th gen cpus hold up incredibly
well in modern games so the question really becomes
do you grab a used 4770 or 4790k on ebay
like a legitimate processor that was actually designed to go on the
motherboard or do you go the taobao route now one of these is going to cost
you somewhere in the neighborhood of around 200 us dollars so you factor in
another 50 bucks for your motherboard another 80 bucks assuming that you want
16 gigs of ddr3 memory of some sort and
you're looking at what's what's that add up to 50 plus 200 plus 80 stuff 330
which means if you could save a considerable amount here you'd be
sitting pretty peachy keen and
on the surface of things anyway that is exactly what our taobao CPU
manages to achieve because based on the pricing on the website you
could save almost half the price of the
CPU i mean of course you still need the motherboard and you still need the RAM
and all that but saving even 80
on a budget gaming rig is a lot more money to put into i mean you could you
can do a lot of things with 80 bucks you could get a better graphics card uh you
could get a solid state drive like it makes a huge difference you could get a
ball and cooler for example the issue for us
is that it just didn't end up actually working out that way so after we placed
our order the taobao seller contacted us
and wanted another what was it 35 or 45. 45 u.s dollars
for taxes and customs clearance into canada a situation that you might run
into so now we're sitting up within about you know 30
then when the package arrived we ended up having to pay another 15 bucks at the
door so the issue here is that by the time we
actually get this thing to our doorstep it's kind of ghetto you can't use a
stock cooler meaning you got to factor that into your price
and you've paid almost as much for it as a normal CPU
meaning that it's really cool and i'm glad we bought
one for the tech museum here at Linus media group
but i probably wouldn't recommend it t-forces excalibur special edition ddr4
RAM features a unique totem pattern design ultra wide 120 degree panel lighting
speeds of 3600 to 4 000 megahertz and
support for a variety of RGB software like rsync RGB fusion and more it's
compatible with xmp 2.0 one step overclocking and they've worked with
motherboard manufacturers to get their sticks qvl approved check out the link
below to learn more so thanks for watching guys if you
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that this shirt's not but they're like this
in the sense that they are Linus tech tipsy
no like really though like it's got this shitty mounting hardware and stuff and
it's like in the way can we can we throw it away no no you just you no no no no
no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no you only use this okay okay can we throw it away anyway though why because
it's stupid