BIZARRE Intel Core i7 from CHINA for $100!!
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2019-05-06
·
2,573 words · ~12 min read
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every once in a while we come across something that is so bizarre that
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whether it's a good value or not we kind of just have to buy it and that's
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exactly what happened on taobao.com
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this my friends is a core i7
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4720 hq
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what a 4720 hq is a solder only
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processor for laptops i mean it's a few generations old but it actually
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performed pretty decent but this is what's weird about it it's a 4720hq
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and it looks like they have jerry rigged like a heat spreader and a
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substrate for it so that you could install it in a desktop motherboard
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so that translated to 123 canadian rubles is it
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a good deal well we got it
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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
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like weird random chinese sites and like how
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long did this thing take to come just over a week dang that's not bad but when
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you order from these kinds of sites you kind of never know what kind of
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experience you're going to have so the first thing that stands out to me is
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that this heat spreader is clearly
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custom milled by whoever is
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finding these cpus wherever the heck they're finding them here i'm gonna flip
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them over and this is where stuff gets really crazy so this is a 4790k and this
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is a 4720hq so desktop chip mobile chip
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so you can actually that's great you can see the comparison between the thickness
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of the but this is nuts you can actually see the ball grid array soldering job
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between the original CPU and then this like
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aftermarket substrate here and then you can also see that not all
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the contact pads seem to be actually mapped to anything like some of them
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look blank like they don't have a trace running to them which is especially
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weird because the mobile versions of these fourth generation processors
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actually had more pins on the bottom of them than the desktop ones so how do you
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map more to less how do you find a board
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that it'll work in you guess
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now to be clear the manufacturer does list the compatible chipsets so anything
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z87 z97 and then the more mainstream
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versions of that couple of generations theoretically
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should work but CPU compatibility from board to
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board is not always as cut and dried as
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that so we just kind of grabbed the best
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bet z87 board we had lying around in oh boy we are running up against our first
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hiccup here so on a typical Intel lga 11
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5x CPU you've got these little tabs here
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these are for these to push the CPU down into the socket and make sure these pads
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are making good contact with the pins well it's too thick because you've
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effectively got like two substrates worth here so we gotta kind of my
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goodness it doesn't even come back up now we're gonna brick this thing for sure oh
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crap it's coming out of the socket well if it falls back in the socket that
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socket's probably dead so we're gonna go ahead and throw this little just washer
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in here use that as a spacer and then hopefully we'll be able to install it
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properly all right so that's it
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mobile CPU desktop motherboard you guys saw it here first
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that is unless you've seen this somewhere else in which case you saw it here second or third or whatever
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all right put my cooler back on i like their shinier heat spreader
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be very careful that you aren't mounting your CPU with too much pressure because
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i'm pretty sure that's what killed that pf sense project that i was working on
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like three times too much pressure is bad for the board so this is z87 which
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means we're going to be using ddr3 memory and we actually had really good
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luck with these particular g-skill rip jaws kits over the years
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of course we have the one board left from this generation that
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doesn't have stupid on-board power switches there we go hey
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it actually detects it core i7 4720
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i wasn't done with that oh there we go 4720 hq 16 gigs RAM our ssds working
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press f1 to run setup heck yeah wow that
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was painless 26 degree temperatures that looks fine voltage zero degrees that
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looks less funny okay so the thing about CPU
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compatibility is that sometimes you can get things to work that aren't
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officially supported in fact there are people who have gotten coffee like cpus
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to run in like z270 and z170 boards but
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you might run into some unpredictable behavior so
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let's go ahead and jump into advanced mode here and see what else we can dig
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up i'm having fun like why does the cache voltage read and the core voltage
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doesn't system agent voltage is fine too these are all CPU voltages of one like
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one or another here we go i mean everything is actually showing up
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like totally normally why do you not install chrome
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yeah no it just like is very inconvenient because then we have to use
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edge and then we have to just manually type wow this is very important news
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worst ever dress the worst ever
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so everything has been shockingly painless so far we fire up task manager
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all four cores all eight threads are all detected so wow both speed step power
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saving and turbo boost are working
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who was it like which chinese reseller was like
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you know what we have too many 47 20
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hq's whatever shall we do with these you know what let's spend a bunch of time
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getting them working in desktop motherboard do a lot of that
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so our next step because you would think the benefit of a mobile processor would
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be that it would be very power efficient and it would be very cool so we want to
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find out just how cool it is so our next
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step here is we're running a stress test so we're using Intel burn test
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and then we're using hardware monitor in order to monitor our CPU temperatures
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now a potential benefit of using a
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mobile processor would be that you'd have less heat output and less power
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consumption so theoretically compared to a 4770k which was the desktop equivalent
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at that time we should run much cooler so we're going
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to go ahead and we're going to run this guy for a little while and then
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see how it's looking but quite frankly i am feeling pretty good so far because
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we've had this running already for about a minute and our maximum oh it just
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jumped it was sitting at about 40 degrees still
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this is very respectable somewhere in the 60 to 65 degrees celsius range and
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that's right on the dies
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i told you it's all the way in i do know how to mount a sequence
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the first time that you're saying that so that's pretty impressive we're stable
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which was not a given
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and we're running about 20 degrees cooler than a 4770k but there's a clear
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trade-off here so our maximum turbo speed is only about 3.4 gigahertz
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compared to 3.9 on a 4770k plus that would be an
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overclockable chip so let's see what that translates to in
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terms of performance then so we decided to pair our CPU with a gtx 1060 because
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i mean the reality of it is if you're trying to spend a hundred dollars on a
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CPU off taobao.com you weren't buying an rtx 2080 ti that wouldn't be a good
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match anyway so we still think 1920 by 1080 we should
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be able to get darn near very high or even ultra details even in a aaa game
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like shadow of the tomb raider so let's just see that is as long as our CPU can
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keep up this is really impressive i mean other
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than some wicked tearing when we pan the camera around which is i mean we're not
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using g-sync or freezing so that kind of comes with the territory
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this is running really smooth so it did
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a great job with shadow of the tomb raider it actually ended up performing
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nearly identically to our 4770k which
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means we could even go higher than a gtx 1060 graphics card and still be getting
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the full experience bearing in mind of course that we had
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our details cranked meaning that we are less likely to be CPU bound let's move
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on to another title you're using a hard drive
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and impressively our gaming performance story doesn't
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really change with assassin's creed origins or gta 5 both of them were
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within 5 to 10 percent of the performance which
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as long as we're getting a pretty good price difference means that this could
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make a ton of sense for someone who wants to game on the cheap bringing us
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then to our last gaming test the one that separates the men from the boys
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when it comes to CPU gaming performance
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csgo
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oh crap so clearly it's usable and more
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than that it was actually within again
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10 20 frames per second of our 4770k
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which i don't know what is that like three percent or something stupid like that like
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not even much of a difference but i guess that's kind of to be expected
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because our low core count turbo is a little bit
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higher than our all-core turbo so we're running cinebench now and you can see
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we're maxing out at 3.4 gigahertz so i'm going to be curious to see how
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our score here stacks up to a 4770k because even gamers occasionally do
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something else on their computers 671.
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okay that's not impressive what's the 4770k
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746. so yeah that's definitely going to be a
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noticeable difference if you're actually doing any 3d rendering or if you're
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editing video or something like that but probably not the end of the world i
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guess the real question here becomes one
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of value so here's the deal
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we ran all our numbers through again this time with an
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8700k so remember this is more like a
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370 us dollar CPU and obviously there is
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a performance improvement but if you're looking at it from a pure bang
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for the buck perspective these 4th gen cpus hold up incredibly
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well in modern games so the question really becomes
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do you grab a used 4770 or 4790k on ebay
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like a legitimate processor that was actually designed to go on the
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motherboard or do you go the taobao route now one of these is going to cost
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you somewhere in the neighborhood of around 200 us dollars so you factor in
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another 50 bucks for your motherboard another 80 bucks assuming that you want
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16 gigs of ddr3 memory of some sort and
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you're looking at what's what's that add up to 50 plus 200 plus 80 stuff 330
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which means if you could save a considerable amount here you'd be
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sitting pretty peachy keen and
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on the surface of things anyway that is exactly what our taobao CPU
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manages to achieve because based on the pricing on the website you
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could save almost half the price of the
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CPU i mean of course you still need the motherboard and you still need the RAM
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and all that but saving even 80
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on a budget gaming rig is a lot more money to put into i mean you could you
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can do a lot of things with 80 bucks you could get a better graphics card uh you
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could get a solid state drive like it makes a huge difference you could get a
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ball and cooler for example the issue for us
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is that it just didn't end up actually working out that way so after we placed
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our order the taobao seller contacted us
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and wanted another what was it 35 or 45. 45 u.s dollars
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for taxes and customs clearance into canada a situation that you might run
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into so now we're sitting up within about you know 30
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then when the package arrived we ended up having to pay another 15 bucks at the
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door so the issue here is that by the time we
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actually get this thing to our doorstep it's kind of ghetto you can't use a
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stock cooler meaning you got to factor that into your price
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and you've paid almost as much for it as a normal CPU
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meaning that it's really cool and i'm glad we bought
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one for the tech museum here at Linus media group
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but i probably wouldn't recommend it t-forces excalibur special edition ddr4
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RAM features a unique totem pattern design ultra wide 120 degree panel lighting
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speeds of 3600 to 4 000 megahertz and
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support for a variety of RGB software like rsync RGB fusion and more it's
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compatible with xmp 2.0 one step overclocking and they've worked with
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motherboard manufacturers to get their sticks qvl approved check out the link
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below to learn more so thanks for watching guys if you
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subscribed you can check out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description or while you're
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down there you can check out our merch store which has cool shirts like this
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one and our community forum which is definitely worth a join
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that this shirt's not but they're like this
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in the sense that they are Linus tech tipsy
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no like really though like it's got this shitty mounting hardware and stuff and
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it's like in the way can we can we throw it away no no you just you no no no no
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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
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it's stupid