- I signed a non-disclosure
agreement with Intel that prohibits me from reviewing any of the 12th Gen core Alder Lake family chips that they sent me until the embargo lifts. What it doesn't prevent me from doing is going out on the open market and buying this core i9 12900K engineering sample on Chinese Craigslist. Is it legit? How's it going to perform? Should you go buy engineering
samples to get early access to upcoming platforms? Will Intel ever talk to me again? The OBSBOT tiny 4K gives you
a smoother webcam experience with AI powered auto framing, gesture controls, and 4K recording. Learn more at the end of this video or at the link in the video description. (upbeat music) This cost me 4500 Chinese Yuan, which is about a 100 dollars
more than a retail chip, but I'm hands-on with what is supposedly the core i9 12900K or at
least some variation of it. Now I've talked about
this in detail before, but when you buy anything
other than a retail chip in a sealed box, you're
risking a number of things. It could have been tampered with, Maybe IHS swapped with another lesser CPU. It could be faulty. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Or it could be an early engineering sample with entirely different
performance characteristics. I believe that this one falls
into that latter category. Let's have a closer look at this thing. So you can see it's not square. Like Intel's old CPUs. It says LGA 1700. So it has 1700 contact pads on the bottom. We can surmise that
many of these extra pads are for additional connectivity or additional power delivery. Theoretically, this is a top spec chip. So it's gonna have 8 performance cores, 8 energy efficient cores, and a total of 24 threads. Since the performance course will have SMT or hyper-threading and the efficient cores will not. Frankly it looks exactly
like our retail sample other than the fact that
it says Intel confidential at the top. So, where did it come from? Here's the thing, for any new release, Intel works with platform
partners like ASUS and MSI to ensure that when
the new CPU's launched, there are accompanying motherboards and with partners like Crucial or G.Skill to ensure that there are
shiny new DDR5 memory kits on the shelf right next to them. In order for that to happen, these partners need early
access to processors. Like, before the specs are even finalized to test their hardware. Hundreds, thousands of chips can go out as part of the sampling process. And inevitably some of them
end up falling off a test bench into a technician's pocket
and onto the open market. Once the retail chips launch, these engineering samples
turn from pretty hot to pretty not. Because no one in their right
mind would pay full price for a potentially broken CPU when they can have a perfect one. But that hasn't happened yet, has it? Now, Anthony and I already did a video outlining the main deets
for the Z690 platform. But here's what you guys need to know. You can expect 16 lanes
of PCI Express Gen 5 for your GPU or other
high-performance add in carts 4 lanes of PCI Express Gen 4, which is also coming directly off the CPU for a high-speed NBME storage device and a DMI 4.0 connection to
the south bridge or IO hub or whatever the heck they're
calling it at this point. It's about equivalent
to two Gen 4 by 4 links, which is double last Gen for
lots of high-speed storage and network connectivity. For power users and workstation users, I do hope to see the X699 ATDT platform that leaked come to fruition
sooner rather than later. But this is a great start and more than enough for most gamers. The memory slots can be DDR5 or DDR4 with support for speeds of
up to 4800 mega transfers per second, or 3200. Not at the same time,
it's one or the other. And any higher speeds are going to require the integrated memory
controller on the CPU to be overclocked. And that is one of the things
that I'm expecting to be kind of crap about my engineering sample. You see, there are different
kinds of engineering samples. ES1 is typically gonna be pretty early, often running at very low clock speeds while they dial in the
manufacturing process. QS or qualifying sample is at
the other end of the spectrum and can have issues, but it tends to be
basically retail silicon with a different stamp
on the heat spreader. ES2 which is what I have, in theory, that lies somewhere in between. So on paper, this should be pretty close
to full functionality, but often with higher power
consumption, lower clock speeds, turd level memory compatibility, especially when you're moving
to a new type of memory, DDR 5, that kind of thing. Oh, thermal compound. I'm gonna need that. What a gaming beast this
thing is supposed to be. We don't want any bottlenecks. So we're going RTX 3090, very
last gen technology, okay. PCIe Gen 4. I'm kidding, obviously. I feel like I need to say that very fast. Unfortunately, I'd have an
LTT store desk pad over here, and I'm not even showing
off our best feature that you can get it in any size you want and it won't have to hang off the thing. lttstore.com. We have all different sizes. Don't do this. Don't be this guy. Moment of truth Andy. (switch clicks) (CPU whirring) That's a good sign. Where's the remote? Now the thing about unreleased hardware is that you can't exactly
just look up error codes and see what problems
other people have had and how they've solved them. This motherboard has a button
called the retry button. Should we try it? Man, if I just got ripped off, I'm gonna be pretty, not stoked. Hi - Hi - It's not posting. - Have you tried clearing the CMOS? - Well, I couldn't find the pins. - Is there...
- There's a button on the IO. I really hope I didn't
just get completely, I mean, I expected to
get ripped off a little. I was paying a 100 dollars
over retail for an ES CPU. You know, I do it for you, right? - [Anthony] Can I have it, after that? - No, no, not you. I was playing at the camera. (Anthony laughing) If this doesn't work, I'm
mostly out of options here. I'm plugged directly into the onboard. I actually don't know. This might be at 12900 KF. In which case it won't
have any onboard video. So everything is fine, except
for that it isn't working. This is why Dr. Su will
always beat Pat Gelsinger in a fight. I wonder if Intel's done
something to brick compatibility with ES chips in retail BIOSs'. (CPU whirring) I've never heard of
them doing that before, but I also haven't played
around with ES chips for any of the most recent platforms. So I'm gonna try another PCIe slot. Maybe there's a problem with
the Gen 5 slots or something I don't know. Should've bought two, that's the solution. - After going through
four more motherboards from two different vendors,
we've figured it out. The POST codes seem to indicate
that the CPU is working, but we can't get a display out because at some point in
the validation process, motherboard manufacturers
switched over qualifying samples or retail chips and Intel issued a
management engine update that seems to break
compatibility with ES 2 chips. Since they are engineering samples that ultimately are supposed
to be returned to Intel or discarded, Intel is obviously not going
to burn engineering resources, fixing compatibility with them. So Linus bought a paperweight. I guess I'll call Linus
and break it to him. - Hey.
- Hey, so I got some bad news for you. You just bought a $700 paperweight. - Oh. Okay. - Yeah. Like it powers on, but it's like some version
thing with the BIOS. It's like just not gonna work. - I wish it was at least heavier 'cause it's not a very good paperweight. - Well, I mean, you could weigh down one
sheet of paper probably, maybe up slightly. - Thank you very much for that. Okay, thanks for finishing the testing. - Yep. - Bye. - Bye. - To be honest, while I was hoping to run
some performance tests ahead of the official release, these kinds of compatibility
issues are not that uncommon with engineering sample chips. And we've even seen
examples before of sellers who list not only their
engineering sample for sale, but also specific boards
and BIOS revisions that they have validated to work. And maybe something like that is going to emerge in the future for these ES2 Alder Lake samples, but as I outlined before, whenever you're buying
something like this, your best case scenario
is crappier performance and, or weird bugs. And your worst case scenario is getting absolutely
hosed by a shady seller. No offense, no offense to the seller. It's just that by definition, anyone dealing in ES
chips is a little shady. Unlike our sponsor. Thanks OBSBOT for sponsoring this video. Following up the popular OBSBOT tiny, OBSBOT has released
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chips that we bought for our six workstations, one CPU project after I accidentally dropped
one of the official ones that Intel gave me,
rendering it inoperable. Those ones, we locked
out and they did work. They just offered poorer
performance because the clock speed wasn't as high.
