This Chinese Motherboard Shows Intel LIED...
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,454 words · ~12 min read
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when Intel released their eighth generation core series processors
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they said something that many in the tech community were skeptical of they
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said that their eighth generation processors could not work on older lga
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1151 motherboards even though the socket was the same and architecturally the 8th
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gen is not very different from the 7th
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and the 6th gen did Intel
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lie well
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we have no way of knowing for sure but what we do have
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is a weird chinese motherboard from
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brand what is this onda or something orda whatever whatever this is
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that not only claims to work with 6th
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7th and 8th gen cpus
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but do it with ddr3
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this is going to be a good one
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and it's brought to you by who was it again elgato stream deck the
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that allows you to do all kinds of things i mean really it works for anything like streaming video editing
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now hold on just a gosh darn moment here so this is an
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h310c chipset basically the cheapest
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thing that you can solder to a motherboard to give it support for an
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Intel processor and
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is that technically 8th gen compatible so have they gone backwards compatible
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or have they taken an older one and made it 8th gen compatible here uh it's
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backwards compatible it's not supposed to be backwards compatible
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but in this case what they did is they took the h310 chipset which is
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8th gen and they decided to just remove any of
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the limits so you can run kb like you can run skylight you can run copy like
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and uh with ddr3
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and those of you who know what that means
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those cpus all have integrated ddr4 memory controllers now to be clear
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Anthony's not saying that this motherboard has no limits
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we can tell by looking at it it most most assuredly has limits this is far
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from a high end board i mean do we have a full-sized atx or even just a normal
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matx board to compare this to okay here we go so for perspective
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this is a standard full-sized atx board this is an matx board so that's anywhere
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from uh one to four expansion slots and
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this is the honda we get one pci express
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16x slot one 1x slot we get usb 3. i
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mean that's that's better than a kick in the teeth three SATA ports because like
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i guess that was the only spare room they could find to put them
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um an 8-pin power connector which surprises me on a board like this and
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then pretty limited i o ps2 wow two ps2 ports vga out HDMI for
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usb gigabit Ethernet and regular old 5.1
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audio packaging is pretty bare bones too you get kind of a quick start guide
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chinese only an io shield and a SATA cable
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the funny thing is that io shield if you look at it the Ethernet port is optional
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maybe they did that for grounding purposes so you bend this up and make sure it's oh you know what yeah
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what do we do see what it can do yeah basically the reason i have this down
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here it's got an 8700k in it right now okay um
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i'm a little bit wary of putting an 8700k into that but
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yeah let's fire ups in a bench see what it looks like and then we'll finally put
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the 8700k into that and see what it's like with ddr3 if it
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even works we'll be answering the question once and for all that nobody
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ever had how well would an 8700k perform if it was limited
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to ddr3 so we're using cs go as a benchmark
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because it's easily CPU bottlenecked which is going to tell us then with all
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the other hardware being the same if our CPU has its performance hindered
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in some way either by the motherboard or
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by our memory check this shiz out
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there's four jumpers here so you can select either SATA
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or PCIe wait it does support PCIe no i don't
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think so i think these just allocate the lanes
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oh or something uh 447.23
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and for our final trick here we're gonna run the v-ray benchmark
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then it's time to actually install hardware on this thing it's kind of
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terrifying all right we're done so let's go ahead and uh
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let's do this thing so a lot of you probably don't realize
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this but there's a very good reason that Intel's eighth generation cpus still
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have support for ddr3 and that's mobile
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a lot of laptops actually still ship
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with lp ddr3 because the low power ddr4
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at least this is my understanding uh just
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did it ever get up to snuff i kind of feel like no like ddr4 itself
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is pretty low power so there's that um if that's the case
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though then we need to make sure that we don't enable xmp on this ah why are
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these on so tight did you wrench them in i used the screwdriver
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i never actually did inspect that board for bent pins but it looks like it's
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fine from here yeah let's find me that looks hilarious
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yeah there's enough there's enough mounting holes it's all good
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sure here comes our CPU cooler
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oh man do they not have a right angle they don't feels like the mothership
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like descending on the unsuspecting populace
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wow do they even have oh yeah we've got one fan header
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uh two fan header
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ah that's about it dang
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there we go all right you ready sure
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now we're gonna have to jump that thing HDMI
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okay so so far it's not posting
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uh we expect this have we tried this no this is the first time this board has
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been booted is it possible it's outputting to the on board because it
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doesn't uh you plugged into the wrong
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HDMI cable
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come on baby hey
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well we didn't even get it oh
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oh AMD ryzenmasterdriver.cis there's our
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problem oh yeah okay we can get into safe mode and
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kill that our 8700k is there NVMe
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configuration dang wow it does have NVMe
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eight gigs ddr3 suckas
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and we could even set it to something else if we wanted but we're gonna leave it default for now okay so let's go
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ahead and save our configuration exit let's get that m.2 drive in there
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oh yeah oh wait that would how difficult is it to extract from this uh just two
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screws let's do it
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oh yeah you know i like to do it all right
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minor glitch oh it would help we plug the GPU in nah now i'm not the only one
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yeah one thing i'll give this board is that it gets into the BIOS real quick no NVMe
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device found okay but what we don't know is if changing those jumpers
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will fix it how much was this motherboard anyway it was like 55
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dollars so it wasn't even that cheap no well
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that sucks yeah that's uh that's 55 you're not
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getting back thanks Anthony i had not realized that
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yet until this moment i mean it's past the return date we we've been hanging
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out with this board yes thank you Anthony
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okay so i've changed them all over to PCIe just to see what happens like does
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that actually take like four individual PCIe lanes and allocate them to SATA is
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that what we just did i don't get it we just booted to our SATA drive when i
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just theoretically disabled every state of port on the board
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it could be that you were just individually splicing the lanes over
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i that doesn't make sense to me
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hey dang
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this thing's pretty cool if it wasn't 50 bucks well
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all right let's get it booted okay so this is it we are looking at a
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desktop 8th gen CPU
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ddr3 uh we need a driver for our network controller here boom
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well that didn't take much this is nuts it's not cytelya
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yeah why don't you just fire up cpuz or um task manager
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we're turboing so the CPU is behaving as it normally would six cores 12 threads
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oh we got our driver we are ready to run benchmarks that was quick yeah cinebench
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now do you have an older chip for us to try on this thing yeah that's a 7700k
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right there heck yeah all right cool
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which theoretically should not work in a three series chipset theoretically
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oh oh that's ouch
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you know it's funny because back in the ddr3 days we did some testing and
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determined that the memory speed of your ddr3 didn't make that much of a
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difference but like i guess cpus have gotten faster
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i mean to be fair it's probably running at 1066. it's running at 13.33 yes
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cs go time let's cs go
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how's your focus motor there how's your control of it
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boom what if i was in here boom what if i was out here
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sorry i'm just not being very helpful right now actually uh you can cut
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wow that is something what did we get 345.12
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i feel like we have to go in try to run the RAM at stock speed at
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least give it sort of enter it and go and see
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what happens and then uh run these again because we
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can't i mean we can't accept that what do you want to run it at
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what do you think is fair 1600 or 1866 would have been
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1866 then yeah will it post
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looks like it yeah wow hey there we go
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okay all right yeah the cinebench it
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i want the local result you worthless piece of garbage and the stupid thing is
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it's not even like it's filtering out exes or something it's like
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there's all these files that have the word cinebench in them
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see now it comes up Windows is good
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wow that did not improve much no
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12 58. what was our last run
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12 54. i i'm not even going to bother running the rest of the benchmarks
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clearly that didn't help so the only thing you have to do now is to
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put the 7700k in and see if that actually works the only thing left to do
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now is to find out if Intel lied that's what you're trying to say all
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right CPU me
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out comes the 8700k so this is the officially supported chip
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and in goes a 7700k
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who can we trust Intel
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or the weird chinese motherboard manufacturer we've never heard of
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oh all right let's reset it then
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all right here it goes okay so check this out
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7700k uh yeah it went back to 1333 you're
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right ddr3 memory and
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h310 chipset so
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was it possible then for Intel to give backwards
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compatibility to their 300 series motherboards
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the empirical evidence would suggest that yes
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yes in fact they could have done that but as for whether they could have made
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the older ones forwards compatible well there's a lot of conflicting evidence
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there there are people who have gotten 100 and 200 series chipsets working
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with 8th gen chips like this one but
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we have no way of knowing what the longevity of the motherboard
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and or the CPU would have been so we don't know even if it could have worked
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whether it would have passed Intel's quality control standards
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in the meantime you said there was a special surprise for me in this video yes
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as it turns out they released a BIOS update
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and that BIOS update adds another number to the list of supported cpus and that
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number is nine we can go all the way to eight cores on
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this thing do we really want to put our 9900k in
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here either it'll work and it'll be oh amazing or
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there'll be a fire so this is it
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moment of truth the latest BIOS is on
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so you mentioned different revisions of this motherboard
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yeah there's a 1.0 2.0 and 3.0
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this is the 1.0 i probably spoke a
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little bit too soon on that one the 3.0 does
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support the uh 8th gen or 9th gen
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well either way i'm impressed onda made the first motherboard that
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i've seen in over 10 years that supports
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more than two generations of Intel chips and even though i don't think it's an
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amazing deal especially because you're giving up so much of your performance on
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the newer processors thanks to its ddr3 limitation
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it's a cool piece of tech and uh
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you should you should watch this video about it
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jk you already did speaking of watching the whole video
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