 Okay, so we know we haven't done any motherboard videos on this channel for a long freaking time. And as for why? Well, we've said it before. There are parts of your computer that dramatically affect performance and there are parts that if you're willing to forgo a few creature comforts, you can save a few bucks on. But how low can you go? Today we are looking at the ECS A55F-M4 1.0. The cheapest motherboard on Amazon in a standard form factor. It's only 30 bucks. And isn't it beautiful? Browse privately and securely with TunnelBear, the simple VPN app. Try TunnelBear for free at the link in the video description. Now first things first, to properly appreciate the ghetto fabulousness of this motherboard, I gotta get in character. Meet L Unit. Sort of a V. Anyway, we're gonna start by taking a look at this baby from the back. I'm talking rear I.O. man, yeah. Nobody there. Don't worry about it. Anyway, we can see it is absolutely packed with gaming features. I'm talking two PS2 ports. PS2 with support for N key rollover. Something that's still rare even on high-end USB keyboards. On that subject we have four USB 2.0 ports. That puts this on par with the ASUS Crosshair 6 and is a huge boon when you're installing Windows 7 via USB like I always do on Friday nights. Throw in a touch of gigabit ethernet and audio jacks rated at 100 decibels, signal to noise ratio, and we are ready to get our counter-strike source on. Oh and did I mention it supports both VGA and HDMI? More on that later. First, let's check out the internal connectivity or so I call it junk under the hood. Not only do we get four SATA 3 gigabit per second connections right there in the bottom right. That's 12 gigabits per second total, but we also have support for four more USB 2.0 ports via the front panel. I mean you got to be some kind of king or some s*** to afford enough USBs to plug into all that. High definition audio? Yeah, I know the definition of high, know what I'm saying? And SPDIF! We got SPDIF! Damn, whatever that means! But let's get serious again. What are those headers down there? That my friends is a serial interface like SerialKilla and a parallel interface like a parallel dimension. Highly desirable features that very few motherboards come equipped with nowadays. Possibly as a cost saving measure, but no such corners were cut on the ECS A55F-M4 1.0. This version 1.0 because they get it right the first time. Know what I'm saying? And thanks to these we can use virtually any peripheral or printer that we want. Okay Linus then, so this board has more IO than we know what to do with for a number of reasons. But what kind of balls-to-the-wall hardware can we put on here? Well feast your eyes on this baby! It supports up to the A83870 APU which unlike Ryzen needs DDR3 only to be flippin awesome and comes with integrated Radeon graphics processing that's better than some of the dedicated cards we've tested and with four cores at three billion Hertz this 1.78 billion transistor beast is unlocked primed and ready for the toughest gaming challenges we can throw at it plus it's compatible with socket AM3 coolers, so we'll be able to make use of our existing stock here. Now we got to match this beast with nothing but the best So we've got ourselves after we get it installed here Yeah, there we go. It's on there get the RAM in there Okay There we go It's fast see it's fast like that So we're putting our GTX 1080 Ti in what we got a full length PCI express slot here. We're talking 168 pins of power and Data here. That's right. So combining this with our four Lano cores and 16 gigs of RAM? Baby, there is nothing this thing can't run Technically speaking that is we aren't promising that it'll run well Compared to our Kaby Lake test bench limiting ourselves to this class of CPU is actually a lot to give up Even when overclocked Single threaded performance on this thing. Okay, we can lose the we can lose the character now is anywhere from about half to a fifth of the speed of Kaby Lake and Multi-threaded performance is as low as a sixth But we've all heard that DirectX 12 and Vulkan can actually favor weaker CPUs Regardless of the GPU thanks to their lower API overhead and the GPU Power API overhead and as we can see here Oh, well It just gets dominated Even with a 1080 Ti in CPU intensive games like Deus Ex mankind divided We get a decent bump with our overclock on DirectX 11 But not on DirectX 12 where we actually end up within our margin of error So then in all seriousness What are you actually getting with a board like this? Well, you are locking yourself into an ancient platform that only had one very Underwhelming generation of CPU support you are losing support for even Sort of new features like USB 3 and SATA 6 gigabit Never mind NVMe and USB 3.1 and you are stepping down to a level of build quality and firmware support that is frankly Unacceptable for anyone let alone enthusiasts. I mean, yes Technically you can overclock it but barely With that said is it usable? well If you take anything away from this video, it's that the advice of Don't worry about the motherboard should really be taken with the caveat that it means within a given Generation of hardware if you're buying the top of the line board for the heck of it You are doing neither the board nor your wallet any justice But in the case of this thing, well, I think it's safe to say that buying the flat-out Cheapest is another way to achieve exactly that Freshbooks cloud accounting software was custom-built for you small business owner or freelancer It's the simple way to be more productive more organized and get paid Faster you can create and send professional looking invoices in less than 30 seconds You can track your expenses you can track your hours on the jobs and then you can actually accept payment even Through the platform set up online payments with just a couple clicks and get paid up to four days faster This is a really cool feature. I don't even know how they did this but you can actually see When your client has seen your invoice too and put an end to the nonsense. Did you get it? Oh, no, sorry. I didn't i'll pay you next week. No enough of that pay now So for your unrestricted 30-day free trial go to www.freshbooks.com Tech tips and enter Linus tech tips in the how you heard about us section So thanks for watching I hope you guys enjoyed our fun little look at the cheapest motherboard on newegg.com If you disliked this video, you can hit that button But if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy Uh, maybe not this maybe we'll put some like reasonable Motherboard and cpu option down there that we actually recommend as a good value. We've got that linked in the video description And uh, so don't forget to subscribe and oh, yeah also down there We have a link to our merch store where you can buy cool t-shirts like this one No, wait, no three plus one. I think it's like one phase for ram. Wait. No, no, there's no no, no, it's four This is four phase power What you talking about willis? That's not so bad 32 nanometer cpu. Do you know how big an animator is that's fucking tiny? Man there's like there's like not even any copper in it, you know Uh, sorry, did we even slate that? Oh you're rolling. Oh good. Okay. Wonderful