Testing out Mystery Chinese CPUs

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 die 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 plates normal to 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 Corsairs hydro x-series of custom water cooling components has great performance RGB etc etc you're gonna find out a lot more about it as the video progresses because we're gonna be using a hydro ax 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 on to 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 don't wait okay so note this is actually a super thick PCB that the ball grid array CPU is soldered on to and then there's gonna have to be passed through traces in 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. su 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 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 dyes 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 we've got a core i7 78 20 HK that should actually be an overclockable chip I'm gonna want to try that one for sure next up we've got a whatever this is and whatever this is so these are apparently a QL 2x and a QL 3 X so these are engineering samples that never got formal names so one of them runs at 2.4 gigahertz base 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 four point two to four point six gigahertz and stay there so these are unlocked chips and you can get them for as little as eighty ten ninety 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 tip 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 an engineering sample so this this whole thing we're doing is SuperDuper condoned by Intel I'm sure and 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 gonna notice that I put a very very small amount of thermal compound on here that's because the die is very very small we don't need to cover a whole lot of surface area now mr. su claims that with this mounting shim here you can actually install just a normal freaking intel star cooler so I think that's the first thing we're gonna try I'm gonna be really interested to see what the BIOS reports about this thing we're ready for the magic moment our RGB ROM is lit up we basically have all of a functionality we need now let's see if we can get into the BIOS here F to 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 sixty seven hundred HQ why would that be unlocked that shouldn't be unlocked okay so why don't we throw one of our at low 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 loan 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 turbo into 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 course at the single core boost frequency because even if Intel did allow this kind of behavior 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 now 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 Shin that came pre-installed seems to be like a pre-production one or something because it looks like it actually has some some sanding marks on the top like they were trying to dial in the light just right so we're gonna do away with that one we're gonna use one of the one of the finished samples here what CPU don't want to go for Alex 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 not one okay we're going with this one no just if it sits a little looser I think then a real CPU I mean I shouldn't say it's not a real CPU it is a real CPU it's a it's a little looser than one that you're supposed to put it oh wow that's interesting ok 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 gonna have to hold that on while I install the CPU so it's a little janky er that's ok back in my starving student days I would have easily put up with this much jig to save like a hundred bucks or whatever just a little bit of thermal compound yeah you really don't need a lot on these paradise 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 yeah 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 LT t-shirts also a thermal paste wipe LTT store comm to be clear I'm not actually recommending rubbing a shirt all over a CPU is just my cameraman wants to go home on time okay Pass has been reset beautiful all right let's have a look at what we got here so this little puppy runs at three point four right out of the box so what does that make it they're 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 qx2 engineering sample because that one's apparently good for four point five to four point six gigahertz all that in 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 gen3 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 how Obama I think this is the slower one of the two engineering samples 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 Hey all right 4.2 digger Hertz let's go ahead and do a quick 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 yeah so that's engineering sample CPUs for you all right so we're pretty close to water cooling the 7820 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 me didn't get a good man so oh boy Wow oh wow the reset button isn't working Wow hey what it's off hey well it's off so what we're gonna do then is we're gonna move on to our proper like real CPU our 7820 HK 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 chipsets including h3 10 z3 90 that would be compatible with seventh 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 astray [Music] hey nice system experience to boot failure glad blah blah load up to - defaults alright so we've got our seven eight twenty HK all our ram is detected everything is looking perfectly normal now we're on a - 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 just boot Mac's link speed okay so we're already at gen - I don't know why don't we try gen 3 then who knows I don't have something to do with our MDOT - storage just just try stuff hey we're in alright so now we're looking good let's make sure this BMW render runs a stock speed then we can overclock this puppy oh you'd be blending slow what is this what is this speed yeah screw it let's overclock it so challenge number one we're hitting right off the bat here is that our xe7 water block has pre applied thermal compound in a what a much larger patch then we're gonna need for our processor so we're gonna 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 pop 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 we're going for performance not looks here let's see if I got the plumbing the right way around mmm that's what a non-lubricated pump bearing sounds like for the uninitiated gets that air bubble out of there what are you doing 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's like a 45 watt CPU should we turn it around no we should probably turn it around we should probably turn it around it's going through the CPU block backwards do you think it's gonna make any difference a couple degrees you know what no we're doing it we're turning it around we didn't think this through okay so here's the plan yeah you pull and pinch I'll plug okay but what about this hole that's 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 oh so apparently this chip will do about 4.6 gigahertz 1.3 volts all course let's see if it'll do it underwater Wow sure didn't so we're stable in window 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 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 a hundred percent sure how to solve this problem maybe we could see if it's down to manufacturing tolerances and try 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 fence up it's quite a lot of pressure of course there'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 gonna try and do is use the one that came pre-installed on the board okay so I'm just gonna 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 hmm 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 it's fire up a blender render loop and it's gone let's try that again [Music] it's back no it's gone blenders just gone but we're gonna if we're gonna drop the frequency a little BRB tornado let's see if our rendering program manages to stick around with us and it's gone we're gonna dial back the frequency okay 4.5 gigahertz let's try that again hey that's more promising Wow hottest core 47 degrees coolest quart 25 degrees that's the thing about having a bairdi 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 gonna be rendering all day and we had 150 dollars to spend we would just go for 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 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 a hundred and fifty bucks which means for less than that we could pick up at 6700 K or something like that on eBay for even less or we are really rolling the dice as we experienced with those named 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 you know what I would daily drive though the master op expired I Namek DT 177 X go headphones are made by the renowned German manufacturer Bayer dynamic they feature a closed back design their latest generation of 45 millimeter Tesla drivers a wide frequency range and weighty controlled bass these are a favorite for recording studios and they're easy to drive from portable sources without an external amp they feature a durable design with aluminum ear cups a spring steel headband and metal yokes and hinges and you can check out the link below to get yours on drop comm today so thanks for watching 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 for a very potent gaming machine without spending a lot of money and it's gone

Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 3,785,755

Rating: 4.8848586 out of 5

Keywords: LGA, BGA, laptop cpus

Id: uWtU8pGspj0

Length: 23min 7sec (1387 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 20 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/zyck_titan]

TL;DW:

Linus messes around with a grab bag of laptop CPUs modified to fit into a normal Z170 desktop socket. Lastly, they grab an overclockable 'Mystery' CPU and overclock it with a custom watercooling setup.

[u/XTacDK]

Perhaps this could be a fun thing to try with a passive HTPC system?

[u/zyck_titan]

Good idea for most people?

Probably not, but I think it's kind of cool to see what can be done with these very efficient and low power CPUs.

[u/weirdkindofawesome]

That's interesting. I would love to know how they do it and what's required because there's probably a bunch of laptops out there with different failed mobos that have CPUs still working.