what the heck look at this thing
i have never in all my years seen a CPU that looks
anything like that that's it
that's the CPU so the bare dye is
exposed it's got like this looks like
it's an aluminum like mounting plate thing that is then
screwed into what would normally be the
the mounting plate for the socket where the
CPU would fit the back plate's normal but hold on here
we go this is it what even are these things
how would you be expected to install them so our story begins
with the word from our sponsor Corsair Corsair's hydrox series of custom water
cooling components has great performance RGB etc etc you're going to find out a
lot more about it as the video progresses because we're going to be using a hydrox setup to cool
this okay not this this is a motherboard but
inside this box is something the likes of which i have
never seen anything quite like so this
is actually a big long note from tim
a big fan of the channel and the new local supplier of bga to lga 1151
cpus and tim has actually sent us over a
whack of these cpus to check out and what's interesting about them
is that these are laptop processors so bga or ball
grid array chips that are designed to be soldered directly onto a motherboard and
then with you know some kind of custom cooling solution applied over top of
them like heat pipes or whatever the case may be so these are these laptop
cpus these bga cpus that are soldered
instead of to a laptop motherboard to this
carrier adapter pcb and then in turn no wait okay so no this
is actually a super thick pcb that the ball grid array CPU is soldered
onto and then there's going to have to be pass-through traces inside it which
we can't see and then it's actually just machined out on either side so that this
bottom lga 1151 compatible
surface here full of contact pads can fit properly in the socket wow
there's a couple things that are unique about this solution one of them is of
course the adapter and the second is this piece right here so this is the
su-pch named presumably for mr sue who
is running this operation now this does a couple of things number one is it
takes our custom pcb here and allows us to
have it held in place so there's actually four little mounting holes on
the corners and those correspond to four little pegs on the inside of this uh
this adapter plate here the second thing that it does is it acts as a shim which
is a way of keeping the CPU safe when you're mounting a cooler to it now in
the old days desktop processors just like their mobile counterparts had
exposed dies like this but nowadays in
order to keep them from getting cracked while people are you know applying heat
things to them and stuff like that most manufacturers cover their chips with an
ihs or an integrated heat spreader now that comes with actually a heat transfer
penalty but it was seen as not being as important as keeping the things from
getting cracked and chipped and broken so this shin that goes around it
prevents us from putting a CPU on top of this thing and accidentally having it
rock back and forth and chip off a corner or something like that now let's
have a look at some of the CPU options that are available here uh we've got a
core i7 7820hk that should actually be an overclockable
chip i'm going to want to try that one for sure next up we've got a whatever
this is and uh whatever this is so these
are apparently a ql2x and a ql3x so
these are engineering samples that never got formal names so one of them runs at
2.4 gigahertz based 3.5 gigahertz boost and the other is 2.7 base 3.8 boost and
apparently both of them will overclock in the range of 4.2 to 4.6 gigahertz and
stay there so these are unlocked chips and you can get them for as little as 80
to 90 dollars which i guess reveals the whole point of all of this which is that
if you happen to have an old z170 motherboard or something similar and you
want a whole lot of performance for not a lot of money this could be a very
interesting way to do it the last chip that we've got here appears to be a 7700
hq and this is a qualifying sample so most of the cpus we've got are not
legitimate cpus that were pulled off of boards these are like
qualifying and engineering samples so this this whole
thing we're doing is super duper condoned by Intel i'm sure i actually
have no idea what's pre-installed in the board here so we'll find that out soon
enough first i want to just make sure it's working at
all so you're going to notice that i put a very very small amount of thermal
compound on here that's because the dye
is very very small we don't need to cover a whole lot of surface area now
mr sue claims that with this mounting shim here you
can actually install just a normal freaking
Intel stock cooler so i think that's the first thing we're going to try i'm going
to be really interested to see what the BIOS reports about this thing
we ready for the magic moment our RGB RAM is lit up we basically have
all the functionality we need now let's see if we can get into the BIOS
here f2 delete this doesn't appear to list
a CPU model anywhere in here
yes so we are unlocked ah
here we go oh so this is a 6700 hq why
would that be unlocked that shouldn't be unlocked
okay so why don't we throw one of our well first let's get into Windows let's
get some hardware info fired up here everything seems to be working
relatively normally there it is 6700 hq running just like you would
expect now as expected the CPU is running
really cool like 19 to 22 degrees at
idle let's go ahead and just throw a quick blender render at it and see
how it looks after that even this
pinner Intel stock one on it under load
we're looking at 45 degrees celsius so i think it's pretty safe for us to crank
that multiplier up to the maximum it'll reach and let's see what our performance
looks like as it is we're turboing to just 3.1 gigahertz on all course i think
we can do better all right so as expected yes that 35
multiplier is indeed the max single core
turbo frequency of this particular chip we're just going to see if we can hit
that all course now i have no experience trying to overclock Intel's locked
mobile chips even just to run all cores at the single core boost frequency
because even if Intel did allow this kind of behavior uh no mobile you know
device manufacturer in their right mind would allow you to do that
kind of thing because you would overwhelm the cooling and i guess i have
no more experience than i did before because as you can see here it doesn't
work we're still running at 3.1 but that's okay because between the
qualifying samples the engineering samples and the straight up k series
unlocked chips we can still do some overclocking today so i was actually in
the middle of swapping cpus and i realized that we haven't actually seen
under this thing yet so let's have a look at what if anything mr
su has modified about this motherboard here
yeah it looks like not really anything all they've done is remove the normal
mounting plate here you know it would have that little that little lever and
all that kind of stuff so they've just removed that and then the CPU
is held in by the hold down plate or the shim up
here this shim that came pre-installed seems to be like a pre-production one or
something because it looks like it actually has some um some sanding marks on the top like
they were trying to dial in the height just right so we're going to do
away with that one we're going to use one of the one of the finished samples
here uh what CPU to want to go for alex do you want to go for one of the mystery
meat ones or do you want to go for the 7820 hk the expensive one pick a hand
that one okay we're going with this one no just
if it's a little looser i think than a real CPU i mean i shouldn't say
it's not a real CPU it is a real CPU it's a little looser than one that you're
supposed to put oh wow that's interesting uh okay so when i removed
the mounting plate before
i heard a plank that's what that was so here's our original back plate here
so i'm going to have to hold that on while i install the CPU so it's a little
jankier that's okay back in my starving student
days i would have easily put up with this much jank to save like 100 bucks or
whatever just a little bit of thermal compound
now you really don't need a lot on these bare dyes look at that even the amount i put on
before almost all gooped up around the edges
there the good news though is that means that our mounting pressure was pretty darn
spot on which means the height of their adapter is about right
oh turned off turning back on probably memory training
or something
nothing yet so here's one thought remember how i
said i really wasn't sure how tight it was supposed to be because there doesn't
seem to be any kind of stopper to prevent you from going ham on this thing
i'm gonna try backing it off a little bit and making sure that the tension feels
kind of even you know okay let's try that
so that didn't help what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna grab the other one the one
that was in my right hand we're gonna give that one a shot
LTT shirts also a thermal paste wipe
lttstore.com to be clear i'm not actually recommending rubbing a shirt all over a
CPU it's just my cameraman wants to go home on time
okay bowser has been reset beautiful all
right let's have a look at what we got here so this little puppy runs at 3.4
right out of the box so what does that make it then
not sure oh this is the boring one this one's
locked okay swapping cpus again i gotta say the review sample ones really look
like they've been through hell and back this one has what appears to be glue or
something or thermal compound on the bottom of it so we had assumed the two green ones
were like the weird engineering sample ones and then the blue one was not but
that turned out to not be the case so what i'm really hoping is this is
going to be the qx 2 engineering sample because that one's
apparently good for 4.5 to 4.6 gigahertz
um well that ain't a good sign i mean it posted hey
oh interesting yes so mr sue's associate
who sent us over these cpus had informed
us that they might be a little touch and go when it comes to pci express gen 3.
we might want to change our pci express
slots to gen 2 to avoid some complications with the NVIDIA driver so
we're going to go ahead and try that but first i want to know what chip this is
and we don't know oh bummer i think this is the slower one of the two engineering
samples ah man they're not labeled i'm having a hard time keeping track of
which ones are which hey there we go we're in Windows now
heck yeah uh
hacking
you know what why don't we dial in the overclocking settings that they recommended here
yay all right 4.2 gigahertz let's go ahead and do a
quick uh stress test so it is a disadvantage to run at pci
express gen 2 but not a huge one unless you're running
some kind of like compute application on your graphics card now what is a problem
is if you go to run a stress test and your system restarts kind of like that
but uh yeah so that's engineering sample cpus for you
all right so we're pretty close to water cooling the 78 20 hk but
before we do that i want to try that one that wouldn't post one more time it's
possible it just bricked itself while i was
touching it it's also possible it just we didn't get a good mount so oh boy
wow oh wow the the reset button isn't
working wow hey
oh it's off hey
oh it's off so what we're going to do then is we're
going to move on to our proper like real CPU our 7820hk which does happen to be
the most expensive one out of the bundle but it's also the only one that is
legitimately unlocked and overclockable
something i haven't mentioned up until now is that motherboard compatibility
with these cpus is not a guarantee there are a handful of chip sets including
h310 z390 that would be compatible with 7th
gen desktop chips but that will not work
with these even with a modded BIOS and
as i am now coming to if you want your motherboard to work even if it has a
compatible chipset you will need a modified BIOS which mr su says will be
available to download at some point
code c1 again i wonder if it is to do with tightness
in the socket maybe i overcooked it a little this time
needs a fidget spinner we have a screwdriver
hey nice
system experience to boot failure blah blah blah load optimized defaults all
right so we've got our 7820hk all our RAM is detected everything is looking
perfectly normal
now we're on a2 okay so we did an isopropyl alcohol wipe
on the bottom of the CPU just to make sure the contacts were all good and it
does seem to be booting now
come on baby come on
just just boop max link speed okay so we're
already at gen 2 i don't know why don't we try
gen 3 then who knows i wonder if it has something to do with our m.2 storage
let's just just try stuff
hey we're in all right so now we're
looking good let's make sure this bmw render runs at stock speed then we can
overclock this puppy oh we'd be blending slow what is this
what is this speed yuck
screw it let's overclock it so challenge number one we're uh hitting right off
the bat here is that our xc7 water block
has pre-applied thermal compound in a uh
on a much larger patch than we're going to need for our processor so we're going
to open by just cleaning off all of our thermal compound and
using something much smaller so what's cool about this mounting mechanism is
that on both the bottom and the top it doesn't interfere with using a
completely normal cooler in any way so i can just go ahead and
chuck my water block on here and i should be pretty much good to go
all right well i don't think this is either mine or alex's finest wiring or
plumbing job but uh we're going for performance not
looks here all right let's see if i got the
plumbing the right way around
that's what a non-lubricated pump bearing sounds like
for the uninitiated get that air bubble out of there what are you doing
dang it i got the radiator actually oh i got the whole thing the wrong way around
well realistically it won't make much difference this thing is like a 45 watt
CPU should we turn it around no we should probably turn it around i
don't think you need to we should probably turn it around it's going through the CPU block backwards do
you think it's going to make any difference a couple degrees
you know what no we're doing it we're turning it around uh we didn't think
this through okay so here's the plan yeah you're pulling pinch all plugged
okay but what about this hole well that was fine okay ready
three two one
shoot
oh that's so many trees
okay now we're going the right way for the loop to actually
bleed and the performance to be right that was worth it totally worth it
so apparently this chip will do about 4.6 gigahertz 1.3 volts all cores let's
see if it'll do it underwater wow
sure didn't so we're stable in Windows or
we are booted to Windows stable is a strong word we're at 4.4 gigahertz had
to back it off a little bit let's go ahead and try a quick stress test and
see if this is actually working are we thermal throttling or thermal
throttling did you take the sticker off the bottom
yes i did
so you can see that our shim actually
interfered with us getting good contact between our CPU block and our processor
something a lot of people don't know is that thermal paste is actually not a
great conductor of heat all it's meant to do is fill in like micro gaps between
the the two pieces of metal so when you actually have like a thick
layer of paste in between you get very very poor thermal transfer so i'm not
100 sure how to solve this problem maybe we could see if it's down to
manufacturing tolerances and try a different shim i mean even just to the
eye it looks like it's a little below
i wonder if it's relying on a cooler design kind of like the stock cooler you
see here how the slug at the bottom is actually slightly raised compared to the
aluminum fins that puts quite a lot of pressure Corsair's water cooler by
contrast is exactly flat so we remounted the CPU and
it's not booting now honestly it doesn't matter anyway though because this is
clearly very poor contact again what we're going to try and do is use
the one that came pre-installed on the board okay so i'm just going to throw
that on there and then see if we get oh that's so much better look at that okay
i'm expecting much better results this time assuming it actually posts
okay this is it this is go time
and you know what we're gonna go straight to 4.6 gigahertz
hey we got into Windows this time turns out having a functioning cooler is a
good idea how about that what do you what do you know
4.6 gigahertz there it is interestingly
one of our CPU cores isn't reporting temperatures let's fire up a blender
render bloop and it's gone let's try that again
and
it's back no it's gone blender's just gone we're gonna we're gonna drop the
frequency a little brb tornado let's see if our rendering program
manages to stick around with uh and it's gone
we're going to dial back the frequency okay
4.5 gigahertz let's try that again hey
that's more promising wow
hottest core 47 degrees
coolest core 25 degrees that's the thing about having a bear die is like very
slight difference in the mount can make a really big difference performance
looks like it's getting a very significant uptick look at this render
chug along here this is great of course if what we were after was 3d
rendering oh yeah we might need to do the graphics
drivers here of course if we were going to be rendering all day and we had 150
dollars to spend we would just go for uh core i5 8400 or something like that with
six cores the only reason we'd want a quad core that's higher clocked would be
for gaming so how's the experience there
then well it's fine i guess
uh we did have to drop the frequency down to 4.4 in order to get it
completely stable in game but i think the overall problem that we're
running into here is that the benefits
of a solution like this simply do not outweigh the drawbacks at this time
we're paying 150 bucks which means for less than that we could pick up a 6700k
or something like that on ebay for even less or
we are really rolling the dice as we experienced with those unnamed zero zero
zero zero cpus where we're potentially getting a great value or we're ending up
with something that's not going to be particularly usable for us now if you're
the kind of person who likes to tinker you've got a motherboard that happens to
be compatible with the BIOS mod lying around anyway and you just want to like
have some fun and maybe take something that is currently non-functioning and
get a decent little gaming rig out of it for 70 or 80 bucks with a weird CPU
upgrade hey recommended but
it just isn't the kind of thing that personally i would daily drive and i
think alex is on the same page over there yeah
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guys if you enjoy budget upgrades like this one check out our recent video on
this weird chinese x79 motherboard that you can pair with a refurb CPU to make
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