BIZARRE Intel Core i7 from CHINA for $100!!

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 4728 q what's a 4728 q is a solder only processor for laptops I mean it's a few generations old but it actually performs pretty decent but this is what's weird about it it's a 4728 q 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 at translate it to a hundred and twenty three canadian roubles is it a good deal well we got it so I guess we go find out today's video is brought to you by Origin PC Origin BC builds custom desktops and high-performance laptops with free lifetime 24/7 tech support and they only use high-end components like Samsung's 970 Evo pro m2 SSD visit Origin PC today at the link below for a special promotion [Music] so step number one a guess is inspect the goods because when you order from like weird random Chinese sites and like how long this didn't 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 gonna 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 forty seven twenty HQ so desktop chip mobile chip so you can actually that's great you can see the comparison between the thickness of them 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 and 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 a 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 and oh boy we are running up against our first hiccup here so on a typical Intel LGA 1150 PU you've got these little tabs here these are for these to push the CPU down into the socket 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 they gotta cut it I can come back up now we're gonna break this thing for sure oh crap that's coming out of the socket oh if it falls back in the socket that sockets 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 east side here second or third or whatever all right but Maya cooler back home I like their shiny or heat spreader be very careful that you aren't announcing your CPU with too much pressure because I'm pretty sure that's what killed that pfSense 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 gonna be using ddr3 memory and we actually had really good luck with these particular g.skill ripjaws kits over the years of course that we have them one board left from this generation that doesn't have stupid board power switches there we go hey it actually detects it hore i seven forty seven twenty I wasn't done with that oh there we go 47:20 HQ 16 gigs ram our SSDs working press f1 to run set up heck yeah Wow I was painless 26 degree temperatures that looks fine voltage zero degrees that looks less huh okay so the thing about cpu compatibility is that sometimes you can get things to work that artificially supported in fact there are people who have gotten coffee like CPUs to run in like Zee 270 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 what is 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 not 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 ress 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 4720 age queues whatever shall we do with these you know what let's spend a bunch of time getting them working in desktop motherboard do as part 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 tests 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 gonna go ahead and we're gonna 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 60s 65 degrees Celsius range and that's right on the dies I told you it's all the way in I dunno how to man to see the first time if 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 + that would be an overclockable chip so let's see what that translates to in terms of perform so we decided to pair our cpu with the gtx 1060 because i mean the reality of it is if you're trying to spend a hundred dollars on the cpu off pal Baucom your weren't buying an RT x20 atti 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 triple a 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 freeze things to that and it 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 who are 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 I haven't and impressively our gaming performance story doesn't really change with assassin's creed origins or gta5 both of them were within five to ten 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 them to our last gaming test the one that separates the men from the boys when it comes to CPU gaming performance CS go blah blah 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 kinda 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 three point four gigahertz so I'm gonna be curious to see how our score here stacks up to a 4770k because even gamers occasionally do something else on their computers 670 100k that's not impressive what's that 4770k 746 so yeah that's definitely gonna be a noticeable difference if you are 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 eighty seven hundred case so remember this is more like a three hundred and seventy 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 fourth gen CPUs hold up incredibly well in modern games so the question really becomes do you grab a used forty seven seventy or 4790k on ebay like a legitimate processor that was actually designed to go in the motherboard or do you go that's how bow route now one of these is gonna cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of around two hundred US dollars so you factor in another fifty 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 that add up to 50 you goes to three hundred and thirty dollars 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 table 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 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 you could get a solid-state drive like it makes a huge difference you could get out a ball in a 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 lows at thirty five or forty five forty five US dollars for taxes and customs clearance into Canada a situation that you might run into so now we're sitting up within a boat you know thirty dollars then when the package arrived we ended up having to pay another fifteen 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 the 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 specialism ddr4 ram features a unique totem pattern design ultra-wide 120° panel lighting speeds of thirty six hundred to four thousand megahertz and support for a variety of RGB software like our sync 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 disliked this video then you can hit that but if you liked it cuz it's just cool then you can hit the like button get subscribed wait I tell them to hit the like button if they disliked it whatever everyone hit the like button you can get subscribed you can check out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description or while you're down there you can check out our merch store which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum which is definitely worth a joint that this shirts not but they're like this in the sense that they are aligned aesthetic see no like really though like it's got this be mounting hardware and stuff and it's like in the way can we can we throw it away okay can we throw it away anyway though it's stupid

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,824,370

Rating: 4.8836126 out of 5

Keywords: intel, core, i7, desktop, processor, 4720hq, mobile, laptop, gaming, workstation, china, comparison, soldered, ihs, heatsink

Id: tvXfgdyQxPQ

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 11 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Lowkey certain the seller scammed him of like 50bucks lol

[u/MrRedVsMrGreen]

also 1:1 scammy seller asks for 45 dollars once it shipped for 'customs clearance' and had to pay 15 more when the package came

[u/Thomas44566]

Lol wtc i7 processor

[u/clstrife]

We buy these ones for work. Older Xeon's but very good for mid range productivity stuff. https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a1z09.2.0.0.75532e8dMIp1na&id=531884712559&_u=c2rup9f5554d

988y for Xeon E5-2630L V2 (6 core, 12 thread) with 8 GB of ram. You get the mobo and cpu fan.

If you need more power, they have up to 2680 V2 (10 core, 20 thread). There's one more above that, but that's dual Xeon (2 x 8/16).

You're not getting an i5 set for 1000y new with mb+rm, so these are amazing deals. Pair with some cheap 250y SSDs (Us market has cheap 240g ssds now too) and you have great productivity machines.

[u/FluxRevived]

this post was sponsored by the ems gang

[u/Thomas44566]

Yo but shoutout Linus for gp’ing tho

[u/Fashionrepsaccount]

Are you fucking serious /u/automoderator I posted this yesterday and it got taken down

[u/drain-angel]

if anyone can find any newer i7s like 6-7th gen id appreciate it lmao

[u/TRG_V0rt3x]

Anyone know how to search for more good computer parts on taobao like this?