The Polymega N64 Performance SUCKS... So I UPGRADED The CPU To An Intel Core i7

back in December of 2020 I reviewed the poly Mega it's been a while holy crap time flies man but they gave me a beta unit for purpose review at that time and I did a handful of videos testing things tearing it down and doing some live streams and all that now it's been a while but I want to revisit this console so I do have a newer manufactured polyga and back then I didn't have access to any of the modules but now I do have all of the modules that they've put out and after having played a bunch of stuff with these modules uh overall I've been kind of satisfied with what they do but at the end of the day this is an expensive device back when I first reviewed it I thought it was neat but my thoughts have not changed it's really expensive for what it is I think when they put out their remix device that they said was supposed to be $150 we don't know if that's going to change that may be pretty cool make your own poly Mega type of deal I'm looking forward to seeing what they do with that but for the people who've been interested in this thing I know they've sold thousands of them so there is interest out there but the price keeps going up and up and up so yeah I think it's an expensive device and I think it's neat but with some of the performance issues that I've been coming across I've really been disappointed mainly Nintendo 64 and Super Nintendo surprisingly enough Super Nintendo I guess they messed things up with a a newer update they put out and I get some graphics glitches on every single game that I play sporadically doesn't pop up like all the time but it pops up occasionally and it's freaking annoying super Nintendo's easy to emulate Nintendo 64 on the other hand can be a little tricky we've seen with a lot of lower-end cheap devices it can be difficult to emulate properly but with a device like this that's freaking hundreds and hundreds of dollars then you have to buy the module for Nintendo 64 I was expecting performance to be a hell of a lot better but no I'm getting audio dropouts quick little stutters at certain points some games I I I do have to mention some games if you exit them and then go back in it kind of fixes itself but I've still found pretty much every N64 game I play will have like an audio drop out randomly some games worse than others and like I said sometimes exiting going back in will kind of fix it but it's still present some games are really bad pilot wings for example was ridiculous I exited you know went back cleared up a little bit but was still there you know to a smaller degree uninstalled the game reinstalled it same damn thing uh Zelda Majora's Mask same thing it's it's a mess it's a difficult console to emulate properly but like why put out a product like this and you know have Nintendo 64 compatibility if it if it's not 100% or as close to 100% as possible I've had really no issues with the CD base games I've heard some people having some issues maybe with the certain firmware but while I think this is a really cool system and is useful for some people though it is extremely expensive for what it is I really feel they need to get their act together on the software side of things making sure we don't have these emulator issues making sure everything's squared away I mean we don't we can't even use save files off of cartridges just kind of dumb to me that should have been like a day one thing you pop in a cartridge that you have a save file on you should be able to back up reput it on the cartridge play it on the poly Mega your save file but you know beside all that Nintendo 64 is what I'm really annoyed with as far as the performance goes and with them being backed by Atari first I'm glad to see that it seems like they're getting their together as far as getting these things shipped out and that's obviously it seems thanks to Atari you know jumping into it with them uh buying a part of the company whatever they did right so there's some money there there's some a company who's had a experience doing this kind of stuff but they really need to have a dedicated team to the software where they're not putting out firmware that breaks things they're you know really testing the crap out of stuff getting the performance to be as good as it possibly can be I don't know what the issue is with Nintendo 64 I'm not even 100% what CPU is in this system at the moment I think they may have upgraded it at some point uh so I'm not even sure what's in the polyga I have right here but what I do understand and know is that you can upgrade the system not not I'm not talking about the SSD that's obvious like you could put a SSD in there and save your games to it what I'm talking about is the CPU so I have a couple compatible CPUs right here um and I'm going to pop one of these in here so I have a i7 8700t and then a i3 8100t so the compatible uh CPUs they got to be socket LGA 1151 with a TDP of 35 watts and I've seen a couple people do this and articles and stuff like that some mumblings out there what I want to do today is take this thing apart see what uh CPU is actually in it this is a newer released model that um has the copyright 2023 on it um and just swap one of these in and check out the performance see if that fixes anything so let's get into it okay so I'm going to blast through this process real quick as it's very simple and easy to do uh you are going to need a few tools not too much here you're just going to need a torque screwdriver a T8 and a T15 uh and some thermal grease to replace you know with the new CPU you put in if you're going to do this process as well I'll put links down below for everything I used but yeah we're going to take the rubber feed off of the bottom and there is like double-sided tape on those uh maybe you might want to replace that but I think if you have only taken it off once it should be fine to reuse it but you're going to take the seven screws out uh the three on the side uh on the left and right so there's six total that's going to be T15 torqux 15 and then the one and the Middle top is a T8 so once you get all those out you're going to gently you know open up the case but you have to be careful because there are a couple wires that may be a little tight and you might pop them off so be very careful doing that and then you're going to want to get the heat sink fan uh off of the CPU so just screwdriver push down unscrew them until the uh you know screws come out a bit and then uh take that off carefully I cleaned up the original thermal grease that was on the fan the heat sink uh and the the CPU so got that all cleaned up and then unlatched the original CPU that was in there and I did find it is a Intel Celeron g4900t so I'm not sure if there's any different CPUs in these things I've heard a few people mention that it's been changed but I I don't know I have no idea I just know putting in a better processor you may get some better performance uh it's going to be incremental uh due to just the way things work here so you don't have to go crazy like the I3 would be fine I think but I did put in the i7 reapplied some thermal grease put everything back together now we're going to test this system out okay so now that everything's back together I am happy to report that my poly Mega still works I'm not going to lie I was a little concerned just slightly but other people have done this as well and there hasn't been an issue so yeah we're good here now what I was hoping for was performance improvements now I've noticed a few things I'm going to quickly talk about that so one in the actual like UI I noticed things seem smoother like I'm not saying it was bad before but things just load up boom boom boom boom real quick a lot faster than it seemed before but that that's kind of a minor Improvement in my eyes but I noticed it okay now the other thing which was kind of weird cuz I thought it was like a firmware issue maybe it was a CPU issue I don't know but Super Nintendo I couldn't show this in footage uh originally because it just every I've been trying to record this for like past few weeks uh I would get like a little rectangle of white noise that would just randomly be like mostly in the middle bottom of a Super Nintendo game on screen it would flash like real quick boom and sometimes it would flash multiple times so every time I tried recording it I I don't know it just wouldn't show in my footage but it was there you got to trust me it was there and it was annoying as all hell but I played a bunch of Super Nintendo games uh after this upgrade and it's not there anymore it doesn't happen I'm not having issues so I don't know what was up with that but the main reason I wanted to do this was because Nintendo 64 just seemed like the little processor they had in here couldn't handle it or maybe their emulation isn't great I don't freaking know but I am definitely happy to report all these games Nintendo 64 like I said some were worse than others but I would get like audio quick audio dropouts Sometimes some stutters uh in the game play I'm happy to report after this i7 you know CPU upgrade I no longer have any of that so I want to leave you with some of the comparison footage so you could see for yourself do appreciate you guys check it out [Music] [Applause] go [Music]

Channel: Madlittlepixel

Views: 39,686

Keywords: polymega n64, polymega n64 module, polymega n64 review, polymega nintendo 64, retro gaming, video games, nintendo 64, em05 ultra element module, n64 clone console, madlittlepixel, polymega cpu upgrade, polymega hack

Id: NartTDzKdUg

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 27 2024