 Trade shows like Computex can be a complete sea of random companies you've never heard of, but every once in a while the random gets so random that I sit up and pay attention. So this is GHT. I don't know exactly what they do, but they've got weird GeForce graphics cards with sort of... It looks like they kind of came up with their own way of doing the Nvidia logo, and they're kind of older ones, like they've got a GTX 650 Ti on display here, and then they've got a poster back there. Let's go have a look at this. One of the biggest selling points in their booth is apparently this X79 motherboard, but that's weird because Intel hasn't made any chips for the X79 platform in quite literally years. So what's the deal behind this? I would like to find out. So what can you tell me about this motherboard? Yes, this motherboard can work for the game. And there's the memory slot. Yeah. Is it dual or quad channel? Four channel. Four channel, okay. So where do you get X79 chipsets? Yes, chipsets. And the CPU. Yeah, but where do you get them? Does Intel still make these? Intel, yes. They still make them? Yeah. Really? And then so where do you sell a motherboard like this? I sell to where? Yeah. I will sell to South America. South America? Yeah. Anywhere else? Asia or South. South America and Asia. So how do they buy a CPU for it? Because Intel doesn't make these CPUs anymore. We collected the CPU, you know, take the hand. Yeah. Interesting. So if I'm in North America, can I buy this? If you want, you can buy. Oh, but like I can buy this one? Yeah, you can. If you want, you can buy. So how much is it? This one is about 95. Okay. What currency is that? currency? Yeah. US dollars. US dollars. Okay. I don't have any US dollars. I have NTD. So how much NTD? NTD, I need to calculate. Okay. All right. Thank you. So according to the rep here, they're getting genuine X79 chipsets from Intel. But as for the CPUs, well, we know Intel doesn't make those anymore. So apparently they collect the used ones and then they bundle them together for customers in South America and Asia. Now, they don't currently have any sales channel in North America where I could obtain something like this, but they said the pricing is about 95 US dollars. And apparently if I can cough up the money right now, I can buy it and take it home with me to test. Oh, I even get an IO shield. Yes, please. Hey, deluxe. I'm sorry. Nice. Cable. SATA cable. All right. Not bad. Okay. There you go. I am the proud owner of this random motherboard. So I don't have any of the parts that I would need to test it here with me, but that's okay. I'm going to throw this in my bag, take it home and see how this whole thing shakes out. All right. It's been a while. We're back in the studio. I've got my test bench prepared here and we're ready to find out if our weird X79 motherboard made the trip back to the studio in one piece. But before we even do that, I've got a couple more interesting things to share with you. So I did reach out to Intel about the current availability of X79 legacy chipsets. And their reply was, we have no idea what they're talking about. No, we don't still make those. So that's cool. And then number two is that I did notice that this motherboard had an M.2 slot. And that felt a little weird to me at the time, but it wasn't until I Googled it. And I found this link to our forum that says, NVMe support is not included in the BIOS of X79 boards. Blah, blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera. Basically not a thing. So naturally, in addition to RAM, CPU, graphics card, all this good stuff, let's see if it works with this thing. First order of business for me, naturally, has to be to pop this chipset heatsink off and have a look at what's down. Oh, interesting. So they've got a couple of custom plastic shims on here to keep the heatsink from wobbling and accidentally cracking the die. And then they've actually got some writing in pencil on the chip that also appears to be fairly scuffed up. So it looks like my first theory that they're pulling these chips off of dead and or recycled boards and repurposing them does appear to hold some water, especially in light of that information from Intel. So I don't know why they wouldn't just be upfront about that, but hey, one thing that is potentially new is the socket. I can't think of a reason why Foxconn wouldn't still be able to provide LGA 2011 sockets. With that said, I also don't know for certain that it's new. That's not something we'll be able to evaluate though, because we do know that this is a demo unit board. I went with a 4960X, so that's the top-end chip for this platform. It's a six-core processor. I think it peaks at four gigahertz boost. So not too impressive by today's standards, but certainly still a very capable machine, which is exactly where the use case for a motherboard like this really comes from, because there's still all these very usable chips. But because the motherboards die faster than the CPUs do, there's no boards to put them in. I don't get it. I'm just so weirded out right now. All right, let's go ahead and install this on my test bench. And as you guys might recall, Corsair sponsored our trip to Computex 2019, where we got this board. So we felt it was appropriate to use their Hydro X series water cooling to make sure that we are getting the utmost out of our weird motherboard. You know, we wouldn't want to have any cooling issues holding us back. So we're going to be going with their XC9 RGB CPU block, which has their pre-applied thermal compound, their RGB lighting, and of course, their skived microfin base. Really, really tight base on that one. I haven't actually installed one of these yet, but it looks like the mounting mechanism is about as simple as it can be. So this is the one that's designed for the high-end sockets. So your Threadripper and your Intel ATDT. All right, next we're going to try out their compression fittings. These were made in partnership with Bitspower, so I'm expecting them to be freaking, well, Bitspower. Awesome. So this is my first look at the accessory package for the XD5 RGB. This is their pump reservoir combo that I really approve of their approach with. So they've gone with like a really, really durable material for every part of it. And then they've gone with a genuine Lang D5 pump, just rebranding it. Sometimes you're better off building something new from scratch, but sometimes you're better off just going with something that you know is awesome. And the D5 is a really good choice there. It's really well regarded, not just for its performance, but also for its reliability. 360 degree peel. Oh my God. For their radiators, of course, they're partnered with Hardware Labs, a long time industry veteran. Fun fact, Hardware Labs was actually one of the first vendors that I ever placed an order with when I was working as a product manager at NCIX. So technically, I ordered with them before I was actually a product manager. I was still working in like the customer care area and answering support tickets about computer systems. So that's neat. I still remember when Bitspower came onto the scene. I was like, oh, so your entire company is making water cooling fittings? Good luck with that. And here we are. Partnerships with Corsair. Now my test bench GPU is decidedly last gen, so I'm not going to be water cooling my card. But I did want to address some of the comments I made about this thing in my video where I upgraded my personal rig, where I criticized some things as cost saving measures. When it turns out they were actually very expensive to do, like the molding for this piece up here. It feels like kind of a cheap plastic, but as it turns out, it's made out of like this super rugged stuff that was really, really expensive to do the work for. So there you have it. I also called their backplate flimsy, if I recall correctly, and they were like, okay, fair point. But Linus, it's PCI certified, so you can actually install it slot to slot with another card. That's something that you can't do with the thicker ones. And I was like... Now this is one key thing that I would have done differently from Corsair on this product line. I wouldn't have gone with a thin wall tubing. I like me a 3 eighths inch ID, 5 eighths inch OD tubing. But the reason that they did it this way is that if you use their dies, you end up with less of that kind of transparent border effect, and it ends up looking more like that color just kind of flowing around your system. So that's their justification. This stuff does tend to be a little bit harder to keep from kinking, but because it's nice and pliable, it's also not too bad either. Fun fact, I pioneered the concept of selling tubing as pre-cut 10 foot lengths, as far as I'm aware. I forced our suppliers back when I was at NCIX to stop selling by the foot to us, because we had no way of tracking it as a single skew, and made them create part numbers for me of 10 foot rolls, which I had determined were the right amount to plumb a basic system, and not too much overkill for a much bigger one. I do have to give Corsair credit for a first attempt. This really is very simple to do. Like there's not much to screw up, other than getting the inlet and outlet wrong on the CPU block or the pump. And as long as you consult the manual, you shouldn't have trouble with that anyway. I bet the makers of this motherboard were never expecting a Titan X to be installed on it. Let's see if it handles it okay. I'm sure Corsair has a better way for me to fill this, but... Wait, wait, wait. Gotta get that better product placement in there. Linus Tech Tips Water Bottle, lttstore.com. This board does not have a lot of fan headers on it. So yep, we're getting two fans here, kids. What have I gotten us into? You know what? I'm gonna use the SATA cable that they provided me. Nice. SATA cable. Not bad. Okay. So this motherboard actually has like jumpers for what would normally be BIOS settings on it. This one is J power one to two. One and two is always power, two and three is SO power. There it is. Why is classic start menu installed on this? Whose drive is this? So I plugged in my SATA drive thinking I'll deal with that first, and then I'll try the NVMe one later and check this out. It booted up right to my NVMe SSD. No configuration, no hassle, nothing. We're running NVMe on X79. To put this in perspective, not only does a fully featured X79 board like this X79 deluxe from ASUS not have an M.2 slot on it. See that? You can't even just like put a PCI express to M.2 riser card in it because to my knowledge, none of the motherboard manufacturers like the mainstream ones implemented the support for booting from it. Not necessarily because the chipset couldn't do it. It's just PCI express. Just because they were legacy products and not supported. So the fact that this thing exists kind of blows my mind. Before we go any further priorities, gotta get our RGB lighting hooked up. Now, obviously I'm not doing the greatest job of cable management here right now, but I think you guys get the point. So we can daisy chain this onto here. Okay. And, hey! Now it's time for the moment you've been waiting for. We're gonna do a quick Cinebench R8. Cinebench R15 run and see if this thing's actually even freaking stable if it turbos up correctly. Now our score's a little on the low side, but something I noticed when I was checking out our turbo speeds is that our memory is only running at 1333 megahertz. So maybe we can go into the BIOS, do a little bit of tuning. Whoa! That is a retro looking BIOS right there if I've ever seen one. North bridge configuration. Modern motherboards, and by modern I even mean this one, do not have north bridges, but I see what they mean here. The north bridge used to be the link between the memory and the CPU. So this has all the memory settings in it. I see where they're going with it. All right, so we can load up an XMP profile. So that's cool. Well, okay then. So there are a lot of settings in here, but whether or not they do anything appears to be a different story. There's no way that's accurate. So wherever their probe is is somewhere in the middle of nowhere. All right, it's starting to show its weakness a little bit. Our XMP profile does not appear to have in fact done anything. I mean, this is an extreme edition processor. Overclocking it should be as simple as changing the multiplier. But now that I think about it, I didn't see any voltage adjustments in there. You know, we take for granted that an X79 motherboard should be very expensive, but part of the reason that they're so expensive is because they have this much more robust VRM solution that's designed to deliver tons and tons of current within like a very, very narrow margin. If anyone was crazy enough to build a super basic $100 board for, you know, CPUs that start at four or $500 for the lineup, I guess this is kind of what it would look like. No memory overclock. I'll give it this. It has really good failed boot condition recovery. All these buttons you can tweak, and then when they don't work, it's like, hey, didn't work. It's fine, we didn't expect that to work anyway. Put it back to default. Hey, it turbos up to 3.9 in a lighter load. So yeah, we're getting close to that max four gigahertz turbo. Okay, honestly though, that's everything I needed to know. That's a pretty smooth gaming experience. Okay, so with some quick craigslisting, we've got 20 bucks for four gigs so that you could do 16 gigs times four sticks for 80 bucks. So somewhere between 60 and 80 bucks gets you either quad channel 16 gigs or dual channel 16 gigs. All right, so you can get a 3960X for 100 US dollars. And then this board is like 100 bucks. So we're talking less than the price of a brand new CPU, potentially for a board, RAM, and CPU, if you're willing to do some bargain hunting. Okay, so we've got ourselves a pretty cool budget little gaming platform here, but I can't take credit for this idea. It was actually David, my cameraman today, who came up with this. There's one more thing that we can try out. Could it possibly support SLI? Yeah, no. Okay, well that answers that question, David. You know what? It was a good idea. So there it is guys. Yeah, it wasn't a perfect experience, but I mean, that's the ASX mankind divided running on very high 2560 by 1440, and looking pretty freaking on point. So as far as budget gaming systems go, if you can get your hands on one of these, my understanding is you can find listings for it on sites like AliExpress under different brands. Presumably they are rebadging it. Then, hey, it looks like honestly not a terrible option. We didn't have any compatibility issues. It boots up fast and the NVMe M.2 drive worked exactly as expected. On another note, massive thanks to Corsair for sponsoring this video as well as our coverage of Computex 2019 in general. Their Hydro-X lineup of water cooling is super simple to use, looks absolutely fantastic, and we had no performance complaints about it during this video whatsoever. So you can check that out at the link in the video description. Also down there is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and oh yeah, soon to be this one. This one's really cool. As well as our community forum, which you guys should totally join.