 Every once in a while we come across something that is so bizarre that whether it's a good value or not, we kind of just have to buy it. And that's exactly what happened on Taobao.com. This, my friends, is a Core i7 4720HQ. What?! A 4720HQ is a solder-only processor for laptops. I mean, it's a few generations old, but it actually performs pretty decent. But this is what's weird about it. It's a 4720HQ, and it looks like they have jerry-rigged, like, a heat spreader and a substrate for it so that you could install it in a desktop motherboard. So at translated to 123 Canadian rubles, is it a good deal? Well, we got it. So I guess we're gonna find out. Today's video is brought to you by Origin PC. Origin BC builds custom desktops and high-performance laptops with free lifetime 24x7 tech support, and they only use high-end components like Samsung's 970 EVO Pro M.2 SSD. Visit Origin PC today at the link below for a special promotion. So step number one, I guess, is inspect the goods, because when you order from, like, weird random Chinese sites, and like, how long does this thing take to come? Just over a week? Dang, that's not bad. But when you order from these kinds of sites, you kind of never know what kind of experience you're gonna have. So the first thing that stands out to me is that this heat spreader is clearly custom milled by whoever is finding these CPUs wherever the heck they're finding them. Here, I'm gonna flip them over, and this is where stuff gets really crazy. So this is a 4790K, and this is a 4720HQ, so desktop chip, mobile chip. So you can actually, that's great, you can see the comparison between the thickness of them. But this is nuts! You can actually see the ball grid array soldering job between the original CPU and then this, like, aftermarket substrate here. And then you can also see that not all the contact pads seem to be actually mapped to anything, like some of them look blank, like they don't have a trace running to them, which is especially weird, because the mobile versions of these fourth generation processors actually had more pins on the bottom of them than the desktop ones. So how do you map more to less? How do you find a board that it'll work in? You guess. Now, to be clear, the manufacturer does list the compatible chipsets. So anything Z87, Z97, and then the more mainstream versions of that couple of generations theoretically should work. But CPU compatibility from board to board is not always as cut and dried as that. So we just kind of grabbed the best bet Z87 board we had lying around in. Oh boy, we are running up against our first hiccup here. So on a typical Intel LG 11 5X CPU, you've got these little tabs here. These are for these to push the CPU down into the socket and make sure these pads are making good contact with the pins. Well, it's too thick because you've effectively got like two substrates worth here. So we got to kind of, my goodness, it doesn't even come back up now. We're going to brick this thing for sure. Oh crap, it's coming out of the socket. Oh, if it falls back in the socket, that socket's probably dead. So we're going to go ahead and throw this little just washer in here. Use that as a spacer and then hopefully we'll be able to install it properly. All right. So that's it. Mobile CPU desktop motherboard. You guys saw it here first. That is unless you've seen this somewhere else, in which case you saw it here second or third or whatever. All right. Put my cooler back on. I like their shinier heat spreader. Be very careful that you aren't mounting your CPU with too much pressure because I'm pretty sure that's what killed that PF sense project that I was working on like three times. Too much pressure is bad for the board. So this is Z87, which means we're going to be using DDR3 memory. And we actually had really good luck with these particular G.Skill RipJaws kits over the years. Of course, we have the one board left from this generation that doesn't have stupid one board power switches. There we go. Hey. It actually detects it. Core i7 4720. Hey, I wasn't done with that. Oh, there we go. 4720 HQ 16 gigs RAM. Our SSD is working. Press F1 to run setup. Heck yeah. Wow, that was painless. 26 degree temperatures. That looks fine. Voltage zero degrees. That looks less funny. Okay. So the thing about CPU compatibility is that sometimes you can get things to work that aren't officially supported. In fact, there are people who have gotten coffee like CPUs to run in like Z270 and Z170 boards. But you might run into some unpredictable behavior. So let's go ahead and jump into advanced mode here and see what else we can dig up. I'm having fun. Like why is the cache voltage read and the core voltage doesn't? System agent voltage is fine too. These are all CPU voltages of one like one or another. Here we go. I mean everything is actually showing up like totally normally. Why do you not install Chrome? Yeah, no, it just like is very inconvenient because then we have to use Edge and then we have to just manually type. Wow, this is very important news. Worst ever dress. The worst ever. So everything has been shockingly painless so far. We fire up task manager all four cores, all eight threads are all detected. So wow, both speed step, power saving and turbo boost are working. Who was it? Like which Chinese reseller was like, you know what? We have too many 4720 HQs. Whatever shall we do with these? You know what? Let's spend a bunch of time getting them working in desktop motherboard. Who thought of that? So our next step because you would think the benefit of a mobile processor would be that it would be very power efficient and it would be very cool. So we want to find out just how cool it is. So our next step here is we're running a stress test. So we're using Intel burn test and then we're using hardware monitor in order to monitor our CPU temperatures. Now a potential benefit of using a mobile processor would be that you'd have less heat output and less power consumption. So theoretically compared to a 4770K, which was the desktop equivalent at that time, we should run much cooler. So we're going to go ahead and we're going to run this guy for a little while and then see how it's looking. But quite frankly, I am feeling pretty good so far because we've had this running already for about a minute and our maximum. Oh, it just jumped. It was sitting at about 40 degrees still. This is very respectable somewhere in the 60 to 65 degrees Celsius range and that's right on the dies. I told you it's all the way in. I do know how to mount a CQ cooler. This is the first time you're saying that. So that's pretty impressive. We're stable, which was not a given and we're running about 20 degrees cooler than a 4770K. But there's a clear trade off here. So our maximum turbo speed is only about 3.4 gigahertz compared to 3.9 on a 4770K. Plus that would be an overclockable chip. So let's see what that translates to in terms of performance then. So we decided to pair our CPU with a GTX 1060 because I mean the reality of it is if you're trying to spend $100 on a CPU off powbow.com, you weren't buying an RTX 2080 Ti. That wouldn't be a good match anyway. So we still think 1920 by 1080 we should be able to get darn near very high or even ultra details even in a AAA game like Shadow of the Tomb Raider. So let's just see that is as long as our CPU can keep up. This is really impressive. I mean other than some wicked tearing when we pen the camera around which is I mean we're not using G-Sync or FreeSync. So that kind of comes with the territory. This is running really smooth. So it did a great job with Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It actually ended up performing nearly identically to our 4770K, which means we could even go higher than a GTX 1060 graphics card and still be getting the full experience. Bearing in mind of course that we had our details cranked meaning that we are less likely to be CPU bound. Let's move on to another title. You're using a hard drive Ivan? And impressively our gaming performance story doesn't really change with Assassin's Creed Origins or GTA 5. Both of them were within 5 to 10% of the performance, which as long as we're getting a pretty good price difference means that this could make a ton of sense for someone who wants to game on the cheap. Bringing us then to our last gaming test. The one that separates the men from the boys when it comes to CPU gaming performance CSGO. Bop bop bop bow! Bop bop bop bop bow! Bop bop bop bow! Bop bop bow! Oh. Bop bop bow! Bop bop bop bow! Oh crap. So clearly it's usable and more than that, it was actually within again 10, 20 frames per second of our 4770K, which I don't know what is that like 3% or something stupid like that? Like not even much of a difference, but I guess that's kind of to be expected because our low core count turbo is a little bit higher than our all core turbo. So we're running Cinebench now and you can see we're maxing out at 3.4 gigahertz. So I'm going to be curious to see how our score here stacks up to a 4770K because even gamers occasionally do something else on their computers. 671, ooh, okay, that's not impressive. What's a 4770K? 746. So yeah, that's definitely going to be a noticeable difference if you're actually doing any 3D rendering or if you're editing video or something like that, but probably not the end of the world. I guess the real question here becomes one of value. So here's the deal. We ran all our numbers through again this time with an 8700K. So remember this is more like a 370 US dollar CPU and obviously there is a performance improvement, but if you're looking at it from a pure bang for the buck perspective, these fourth-gen CPUs hold up incredibly well in modern games. So the question really becomes do you grab a used 4770 or 4790K on eBay like a legitimate processor that was actually designed to go in the motherboard or do you go the Taobao route? Now one of these is going to cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of around 200 US dollars. So you factor in another 50 bucks for your motherboard, another 80 bucks assuming that you want 16 gigs of DDR3 memory of some sort and you're looking at, what's that add up to? 50 plus 200 plus 80 and stuff, 330 dollars. Which means if you could save a considerable amount here, you'd be sitting pretty peachy keen. And on the surface of things anyway, that is exactly what our Taobao CPU manages to achieve because based on the pricing on the website, you could save almost half the price of the CPU. I mean, of course you still need the motherboard and you still need the RAM and all that, but saving even 80 dollars on a budget gaming rig is a lot more money to put into. I mean, you can do a lot of things with 80 bucks. You could get a better graphics card. You could get a solid-state drive. Like it makes a huge difference. You could get a ball-in cooler, for example. The issue for us is that it just didn't end up actually working out that way. So after we placed our order, the Taobao seller contacted us and wanted another, what was it, 35 or 45? 45 US dollars for taxes and customs clearance into Canada. A situation that you might run into. So now we're sitting up within about, you know, 30 dollars. Then when the package arrived, we ended up having to pay another 15 bucks at the door. So the issue here is that by the time we actually get this thing to our doorstep, it's kind of ghetto. You can't use a stock cooler, meaning you got to factor that into your price, and you've paid almost as much for it as a normal CPU. Meaning that it's really cool, and I'm glad we bought one for the Tech Museum here at Linus Media Group, but I probably wouldn't recommend it. T-Force's Excalibur Special Edition DDR4 RAM features a unique totem pattern design, ultra-wide 120-degree panel lighting, speeds of 3600 to 4000 MHz, and support for a variety of RGB software like R-Async, RGB Fusion, and more. It's compatible with XMP 2.0 one-step overclocking, and they've worked with motherboard manufacturers to get their sticks QVL approved. Check out the link below to learn more. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked this video, then you can hit that button, but if you liked it because it's just cool, then you can hit the like button. Get subscribed. Wait, did I tell them to hit the like button if they disliked it? Whatever. Everyone hit the like button. You can get subscribed. You can check out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video description, or while you're down there, you can check out our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, and our community forum, which is definitely worth a join. This shirt's not, but they're like this, in the sense that they are Linus Tech Tipsy. No, like really though, like it's got this sh**ty mounting hardware and stuff, and it's like in the way. Can we throw it away? No, no, you just, you only use this. Okay, okay. Can we throw it away anyway though? Why? Because it's stupid.