 When Intel released their 8th generation core series processors, they said something that many in the tech community were skeptical of. They said that their 8th generation processors could not work on older LGA 1151 motherboards, even though the socket was the same and architecturally, the 8th gen is not very different from the 7th and the 6th gen. Did Intel lie? Well, we have no way of knowing for sure, but what we do have is a weird Chinese motherboard from brand... What is this? Onda? Or something? Orda? Whatever this is. That not only claims to work with 6th, 7th, and 8th gen CPUs, but do it with DDR3? This is going to be a good one. And it's brought to you by... Who was it again? Elgato Stream Deck. The Elgato Stream Deck. The Stream Deck is the compact hyper-configurable keypad that allows you to do all kinds of things. I mean, really, it works for anything, like streaming, video editing. The sky's kind of the limit. Check it out and get yours at the link in the video description. Now hold on just a gosh darn moment here. So this is an H310C chipset. Basically the cheapest thing that you can solder to a motherboard to give it support for an Intel processor. And is that technically 8th gen compatible? So have they gone backwards compatible? Or have they taken an older one and made it 8th gen compatible here? It's backwards compatible. It's not supposed to be backwards compatible. But in this case, what they did is they took the H310 chipset, which is 8th gen, and they decided to just remove any of the limits. So you can run Kaby-like, you can run Sky-like, you can run Coffee-like. And with DDR3. And those of you who know what that means, those CPUs all have integrated DDR4 memory controllers. Now to be clear, Anthony's not saying that this motherboard has no limits. We can tell by looking at it, it most assuredly has limits. This is far from a high-end board. I mean, do we have a full-sized ATX or even just a normal MATX board to compare this to? Okay, here we go. So for perspective, this is a standard full-sized ATX board. This is an MATX board, so that's anywhere from one to four expansion slots. And this is the Onda. We get one PCI Express 16x slot, one 1x slot, we get USB 3. I mean, that's better than a kick in the teeth. Three SATA ports, because like, I guess that was the only spare room they could find to put them. An 8-pin power connector, which surprises me on a board like this. And then pretty limited I.O. PS2, wow, two PS2 ports, VGA out, HDMI, 4 USB, gigabit ethernet, and regular old 5.1 audio. Packaging is pretty bare bones too. You get kind of a quick start guide, Chinese only, an I.O. shield, and a SATA cable. The funny thing is that I.O. shield, if you look at it, the ethernet port is optional. Maybe they did that for grounding purposes, so you bend this up to make sure it makes contact with the back of the board. What do we do? See what it can do? Yeah, basically, the reason I have this down here, it's got an 8700K in it right now. Okay. I'm a little bit weary of putting an 8700K into that, but yeah, let's fire up Cinebench, see what it looks like, and then we'll finally put the 8700K into that and see what it's like with DDR3, if it even works. We'll be answering the question once and for all that nobody ever had, how well would an 8700K perform if it was limited to DDR3? So we're using CSGO as a benchmark because it's easily CPU bottlenecked, which is going to tell us then, with all the other hardware being the same, if our CPU has its performance hindered in some way, either by the motherboard or by our memory. Check this shiz out. There's four jumpers here, so you can select either SATA or PCIe. Wait, it does support PCIe? No, I don't think so. I think these just allocate the lanes or something. Uh, 447.23. And for our final trick here, we're going to run the V-Ray benchmark. Then it's time to actually install hardware on this thing. It's kind of terrifying. Alright, we're done. So let's go ahead and, uh, whoo! Let's do this thing! So a lot of you probably don't realize this, but there's a very good reason that Intel's 8th generation CPUs still have support for DDR3, and that's mobile. A lot of laptops actually still ship with LPDDR3, because the low-power DDR4, at least this is my understanding, just, did it ever get up to snuff? I kind of feel like no. Like, DDR4 itself is pretty low-power, so there's that. If that's the case, though, then we need to make sure that we don't enable XMP on this. Ah! Why are these on so tight? Did you wrench them in? I used the screwdriver. I never actually did inspect that board for bent pins, but it looks like it's fine from here. Yeah, looks fine to me. That looks hilarious. Yeah, there's enough mounting holes. It's all good. Sure. Here comes our CPU cooler. Aw, man, do they not have a right angle? They don't. Feels like the mothership descending on the unsuspecting populace. Wow, do they even have... Oh, yeah, we've got one fan header. Ah, ah, ah. Two fan header. Ah, ah, ah. And that's about it. Dang. There we go. All right, you ready? Sure. Now we're gonna have to jump that thing. HDMI... Okay, so, so far it's not posting. Did we expect this? Have we tried this? No, this is the first time this board has been booted. Is it possible it's outputting to the onboard? Because it doesn't have a good auto-selection. You plugged into the wrong HDMI cable. Come on, baby. Hey! Well, we didn't even get it to... Oh... Oh. AMD Ryzen Master Driver.assist. There's our problem. Oh. Yeah, okay, we can get into safe mode and kill that. Our 8700K is there. NVMe configuration. Dang! Wow, it does have NVMe. 8 gigs DDR3 suckas. And we could even set it to something else if we wanted, but we're gonna leave it default for now. Okay, so let's go ahead and save our configuration exit. Let's get that M.2 drive in there. Oh, yeah. Oh, wait. That would... How difficult is it to extract from this? Just two screws. Let's do it. Oh, yeah, you know I like to do it. All right. Minor glitch. Oh, it would help if we plugged the GPU in. Now I'm not the only one. One thing I'll give this board is that it gets into the BIOS real quick. No NVMe device found. Okay, but what we don't know is if changing those jumpers... We'll fix it. How much was this motherboard anyway? It was like $55. So it wasn't even that cheap? No. Well, that sucks. Yeah, that's $55. You're not getting back. Thanks, Anthony. I had not realized that yet until this moment. I mean, it's past the return date. We've been hanging on to this board for... Yes, thank you, Anthony. Okay, so I've changed them all over to PCIe just to see what happens. Does that actually take four individual PCIe lanes and allocate them to SATA? Is that what we just did? I don't get it. We just booted to our SATA drive when I just theoretically disabled every SATA port on the board. It could be that you were just individually splicing the lanes over. That doesn't make sense to me. Hey! Dang! This thing's pretty cool if it wasn't $50. Well... All right, let's get it booted. Okay. So this is it. We are looking at a desktop. 8th gen CPU, DDR3. We need a driver for our network controller here. Boom. Oh, that didn't take much. This is nuts. It's nuts, I tell you. Yeah, why don't you just fire up CPU-Z or Task Manager? We're turboing. So the CPU is behaving as it normally would. Six cores, 12 threads. Oh, we got our driver. We are ready to run benchmarks. That was quick. Yeah. Cinebench. Now, do you have an older chip for us to try in this thing? Yeah, that's a 7700K right there. Heck yeah. All right, cool. Which theoretically should not work in a 3 Series chipset. Theoretically. Oh, that's... Ouch. You know, it's funny because back in the DDR3 days, we did some testing and determined that the memory speed of your DDR3 didn't make that much of a difference, but like, I guess CPUs have gotten faster? I mean, to be fair, it's probably running at 1066. It's running at 1333. Yes. CSGO time. What's CSGO? How's your focus motor there? How's your control of it? Boom, what if I was in here? Boom, what if I was out here? Sorry, I'm just not being very helpful right now, actually. Ah, you can cut. Wow, that is something. What did we get? 345.12. I feel like we have to go in, try to run the RAM at stock speed at least. Give it, sort of enter it and go and see what happens, and then run these again because we can't, I mean, we can't accept that. What do you want to run it at? What do you think is fair? 1600 or 1866 would have been... 1866 then? Yeah. Will it post? Looks like it. Yeah. Wow. Hey, there we go. Okay. All right. Let's do a Cinebench. Yeah, let's Cinebench it. I want the local result, you worthless piece of garbage. And the stupid thing is it's not even like it's filtering out EXCs or something. It's like there's all these files that have the word Cinebench in them. See, now it comes up. Windows is good. Wow. That did not improve much. No. 1258. What was our last run? 1254. I'm not even going to bother running the rest of the benchmarks. Clearly that didn't help. So the only thing we have to do now is to put the 7700K in and see if that actually works. The only thing left to do now is to find out if Intel lied. That's what you're trying to say. All right. CPU me. Out comes the 8700K. So this is the officially supported chip. And in goes a 7700K. Who can we trust? Intel or the weird Chinese motherboard manufacturer we've never heard of? Oh. All right. Let's reset it then. There it goes. Okay. So check this out. 7700K. Yeah, it went back to 1333. You're right. DDR3 memory and H310 chipset. So was it possible then for Intel to give backwards compatibility to their 300 series motherboards? The empirical evidence would suggest that yes. Yes, in fact, they could have done that. But as for whether they could have made the older ones forwards compatible, well, there's a lot of conflicting evidence there. There are people who have gotten 100 and 200 series chipsets working with eighth gen chips like this one. But we have no way of knowing what the longevity of the motherboard and or the CPU would have been. So we don't know even if it could have worked, whether it would have passed Intel's quality control standards. In the meantime, you said there was a special surprise for me in this video. Yes. As it turns out, they released a BIOS update. And that BIOS update adds another number to the list of supported CPUs. And that number is nine. We can go all the way to eight cores on this thing. Do we really want to put our 9900K in here? Either it'll work and it'll be amazing or there'll be a fire. So this is it. Moment of truth. The latest BIOS is on. So you mentioned different revisions of this motherboard. Yeah, there is a 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. This is the 1.0. I probably spoke a little bit too soon on that one. The 3.0 does support the eighth gen or ninth gen. Well, either way, I'm impressed. Onda made the first motherboard that I've seen in over 10 years that supports more than two generations of Intel chips. And even though I don't think it's an amazing deal, especially because you're giving up so much of your performance on the newer processors thanks to its DDR3 limitation, it's a cool piece of tech. And you should watch this video about it. JK, you already did. Ha ha. Speaking of watching the whole video, this message from our sponsor, Thermaltake. The Thermaltake A500 aluminum mid-tower has a minimalistic design with brushed aluminum for a clean uninterrupted look. It's got hinged tempered glass panels on both sides. It fits radiators up to 420 millimeters on the front. And it's got up to four, two and a half or three and a half inch hard drive mounts on the left side panel or on top of the power supply cover. It's got a USB type C port and you can get it for yourself at the link in the video description. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, you can hit that button. But if you liked it, hit like, get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below. While you're down there, you can also check out our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which is totally worth joining.