 Windows running on an Xbox? Wait, that's illegal. Also it's fake, there's a laptop down there. But what's not fake is this. It looks like any other PC motherboard, but if we look closely, we find, ah, an AMD A9-9820, the very same SoC found in the Xbox One S. And supposedly this thing actually can run Windows. So how does that work? And is it any good? Well, as you'd expect from any product called the Funhaus A9-A9820, there are some surprises, but I don't wanna spoil them now, do I? Not like I spoil you guys with segues to sponsors like GlassWire. GlassWire is the tool that shows you which apps are slowing down your connection in real time. Get 25% off today using offer code Linus at the link down below. Where do I even start? This thing is so weird. First things first, we've got our CPU, but actually it's the CPU, GPU, and more. Like it's more of an SoC, except that the board does have some kind of Southbridge chipset that probably handles things like these SATA ports, for example. This is also an AMD chip down there. It's got DDR3 memory, four slots, probably dual channel, I would guess, but we'll find out soon enough. But then it's got an M.2, so it has like modern features, but also super out of date features. And I mean, there's almost no PCI express connectivity. We've got whatever's linking it to this chipset down here, four lanes for M.2. I mean, presumably, we don't even know for sure there's actually four lanes there. And then another one lane for this puppy. And I would assume that this much USB and ethernet is probably handled directly off of the SoC or off of this chipset over here. So just four USB twos, two USB threes, and gigabit LAN. I was about to say, I love that the memory slots are on either side of the CPU, like an HDDT platform, but you know what I think it is? It's probably because this SoC was designed with the idea of RAM being soldered to the board around it. So in order to have the traces make sense, you have to have them on either side like that. Oh man, this thing is so weird. Oh, that's weird. It looks like the board is actually designed upside down. So whatever the intended use of this was, it would have been in like an inverted case. You can actually see everything from the front panel to even just the silkscreen text on the PCB is all this way up. Okay, so it's LGA 11.5X slash 1200, except for one small problem. It's nowhere near making contact with the chip. Even Noctua's mounting mechanism won't save us. We're not. Are we mounting it with zip ties? Zip ties and downforce. Before we do that though, there are a few more weird things. There's a ton of what appear to be probe points in the VRM. So where you would take a multimeter and probe voltages. There are two M.2 selector jumpers, curiously silkscreened the other way around. This may be because of a different revision of the board that had two M.2's. Anthony did find a reference on a Turkish website to a board like that. And then finally there's DP in. No idea what that could be for. And well, there's just, there's only one of them. So. So which cooler are we using this one? We're gonna use that one. Oh my God. It's pretty easy to like strap down. Yeah, that just makes me extremely uncomfortable. We only have one of these things. Oh, I don't like it, sir. I had no alternative. You know, this actually is not that bad. You're right. No, it's pretty solid once you get it on there. The funniest part of this is that our viewers are basically used to it by now. The comment section is just gonna be like, yeah, and? There's gonna be like one guy is like, what the hell? They just zip tied it to the motherboard and there's gonna be like a whole bunch of replies. You must be new here. Yeah. Pop this puppy on here. Got kind of an MATX hole pattern. Pretty standard. 24 pin power connector. Got your four pin CPU connector, or I should say SOC connector. Put on some RAM. So do we know which slots would make it dual channel? No. Is it even dual channel? I don't know. Sweet. We are so close to the point where this is pretty much all there is to building a computer. You just buy a motherboard with whatever CPU you're gonna use pre-soldered onto it, throw in some RAM storage. Cooler will probably just be included in your kit. And then that's it. Built a computer. Good job, me. Okay. I think I've got the front panel plugged in right. Moment of truth. You guys ready? You know what would have worked? We could have liquid cooled it. Speaking of which, water cooled PlayStation 5 is coming. Get subscribed so you don't miss it. Well, if you wanna make it a little bit more exotic, we can always do this, just what I did on the bench to make sure that the mounting pressure was correct. Wait. Oh, hold on. Ah. Ha ha ha. Lttstore.com. Oh my God, that's a lot of mounting pressure. It's pretty full. Should be fine. Don't knock it. Till you tried it. Oh, there you go. Hey, wow. Just like that? Just like that. And was installing Windows on it just like simple? Yeah, it just ran. Really? Yep. But that's so weird. Primary video adapter, integrated graphics. Well, I mean, it supports external graphics, which is weird. And look at this. You can actually bifurcate the internal PCI express link between the CPU and the GPU on the SoC into two 8X links. Oh, you know what? That's probably for the other board that has two M.2s. Oh, maybe. Could be. It's to share lanes or something. I don't know, I'm just guessing. Possibly. RX 8120, A9-9820. Wait, what? What's RX 8120? RX 8120, for as best as I can tell, is the same clock speeds as the Xbox One S. Oh, so we wanna run it at the higher one then. The A9-9820 is a higher clock speed. It's like 2.35 versus 1.75. That's crazy. Okay, what else should I be looking at here? Is there anything else significant? High-end monitor. This guy's subsystem settings literally doesn't do anything. Yeah, there's literally nothing. Is the temperature monitor there? Oh, okay. Wait, what does plus eight degrees Celsius mean? Do they mean like plus eight degrees over what it's supposed to be or like do they think it's actually eight degrees in here? 10 RPM, whatever that means. That's not right. There's only one fan on this thing. There isn't two fan. There's a fan header for a different fan. Okay, sure. It's 10 RPMs of like, I don't even care. I'm done. Background radiation. No, I'm done, I'm out. I'm out. We're going to the windows. Some other weird stuff. The AMD chipset has features exposed for which there's no hardware like firewire, SD card, and an IDE controller of all things. There's menus for surround view and power express, which are typically mobile features and not to mention HCF underscore DGPU sounds a lot like hybrid crossfire. And it's even got infrared support. This is crazy. So you found all the drivers for this? Like what is a Radeon RX 350 series? Yeah, it's like a cryptos chipset. That's what they call it anyway. I actually found it on the forum, the mad hacks or and shrimp prime. They went and found a driver on a Japanese blog about this and the blogger in turn got it from some strange file repository called DJProduct.com. And I have no idea how they figured that one out because it's literally just a file dump. Huh. NVMe performance looked low. And as it turns out, the four lanes are actually split, two X for the NVMe slot and then one and one and they're coming off the chipset. So that would explain why it's kind of junk and networking performance is also junk. Only 500 to 600 megabit per second, which is like half of what we'd expect from a gigabit connection. It seems like this thing really does not respond well to being loaded up heavily. And apparently transferring files over the network counts as loaded up heavily. Look at this, changing the mode of the CPU actually changes what it's reported as in task manager. Crazy. All right, here we go. CPU multi-core. Woo. Cinebench R23. Is this gonna work? It should. Oh God, there it goes. Finally. Yeah, it's going. We'll be right back. Oh wow. Holy bananas. 1896. So that puts us at about half of the performance of a quad core mobile chip today. And I don't mean like a gaming laptop. I mean like a thin light. Oh my God. I don't know if I want to run any more benchmarks on camera. What was the single core score? I got 235, but then again, I got 1744 multi-threaded. Okay, so it's kind of all over the place. It's kind of all over the place. Got it. How about a game? Okay. Wait, HDMI tops out at 1080p60? Yes. So that's HDMI 1.2, but then it supports FreeSync in the Radeon software and it works? It does work. Okay, what is going on here? What is this thing? I don't think that monitor is FreeSync. No, no, it's not. But like, what? The Radeon software, I can't even believe the Radeon software runs. Yeah. Like I would have thought it would just be like, kind of like a random crappy, just like, yeah, the driver, but no control panel. You would think so. Yeah. Good old Counter-Strike. I was going to start with Doom Eternal, but I have now decided to start with Counter-Strike. I've lowered my expectations. While we wait for this to load, can we take a moment to appreciate that games run as well as they do on the dog-sh** Jaguar cores in the Xbox One S, One X, and one? It's been like five minutes there. Linus, is Windows still okay? Yeah, Windows is still okay. I don't think this is going to launch, sir. Okay, Rocket League. Oh my God, this is working. Oh my God, it's running at 15 frames per second. All right, we're playing an unranked casual match. 3v3, good luck, team. You're online? I'm going online. I'm going on the line. Should have voice chat, be like, hey guys, I'm playing on my Xbox. No, that's actually running better than I thought it would. So 14 FPS. The minimums are pretty savage. Is the game actually running a little bit slow motion here? I think I might. Yeah, I think you just got kicked. Dang it, they were going to win it. At the end of the day, it's pretty obvious then why AMD never officially released this SoC outside of the Xbox, because far more goes into a console than simply the hardware alone. Which leads us to the question of the day. What is this thing? On the surface, the fact that there are seemingly so many of these make it appear to be overstock, or in our system's case, B-stock from Xbox One S production. But the true story could go a bit deeper. As of shooting this video, AMD hasn't commented on this. And I doubt that they ever will. But considering that almost everything about it is beta, the driver is from 2017, and the motherboard says AMD BL2, we think it probably first came to life as an attempt to reuse engineering work that had already been done, probably at least partially on Microsoft's dime, to build affordable commodity PCs for emerging markets. And at the time, it probably looked like a decent stopgap solution to the poor performance of their excavator-based APUs and Ryzen delays. It's important to remember that Zen hadn't even been officially announced yet when the development on this would have started, and AMD was in pretty hot water at that time. Whatever the intended purpose though, it was obviously put on ice once it became clear that it wasn't competitive, and Ryzen APUs showed up on the horizon. Another idea we kicked around is that it could have been produced as a collaboration with a Chinese game console manufacturer, kind of like the Subor Z+, which also happened to contain a semi-custom AMD SoC. Retail availability of Chuwi's AeroBox, which is also based on this SoC, seems to suggest that the true answer is some combination of all of the above. But like I said, we'll never know for sure. It's always fun to ask what might've been, but sometimes, as in the case of the A99820, what might've been was far worse than what we ended up getting, but at least we got a cool story out of it. So, hey, thanks AMD, and thanks Chinese board manufacturers for unearthing these freaking things and soldering them to board so we can enjoy them, and you cannot buy them. You know what else you cannot buy? Your time back if you waste it. FreshBooks is the easy-to-use accounting software designed specifically with you in mind, the small business owner. With FreshBooks, you've got everything you need to manage your books with, invoices, expenses, time tracking, and more built-in, and it's designed to be easy to use with built-in automation, so you spend less time invoicing, expensing, and tracking projects, and more time doing what matters most, which is growing your business. Whether you're a tradesperson, creative agency, or a YouTuber, you can choose a plan that's right for you. They've got award-winning Toronto-based support that's always ready to help if you need it, and you can try it out for free for 30 days today, no credit card required, at freshbooks.com slash Linus. If you guys enjoyed this video, go check out our video on another interesting story out of China, the... Ahem. Zhao Shen Kai Shan? CPU? I honestly cannot remember how to pronounce it, but it's very interesting. X86 even, and not AMD or Intel.