 But that might've even been like one frame per second. In this box is a graphics card. A graphics card that goes into an M.2 slot. Over the years, we have covered a lot of weird, obscure, and downright puzzling computer hardware. And it's pretty safe to say this is no exception. Now, I'm sure that ASRock Rack here didn't intend for this to be used for gaming. But I'm equally sure that we're going to do it anyway. Or die trying. Just like I'd die if I didn't tell you about our sponsor. War Thunder is an online military vehicle combat game that's free to play and lots of fun. Try it for free down below and get some special bonus items just for signing up. Now on the surface, you might look at these two and go, what could they possibly have in common? They look nothing alike. But if we dig a little deeper, they're not so dissimilar after all. This is an RTX 2080 Ti. And its core ingredients are a GPU, memory, power delivery, a PCI express interface with your computer, and of course, output. So you can connect a monitor like HDMI and DisplayPort. As for the ASRock Rack M.2 to VGA, well, there's your GPU, a Silicon motion SM750. It's apparently got the memory built in on package a whopping 16 megabytes of DDR1. There's your power delivery right there. There's your PCI express interface. So M.2 might look a lot wimpier than this gigantic connection over here, but actually this is capable of a four by link, whereas that's a 16, although this one runs at one by, so a little less bandwidth. And finally, this right here happens to be exactly the 15 pins you need for a good old fashioned VGA monitor connection. That's right, we're going analog, baby. Let's go ahead and find our M.2 slot. Now, the confusing thing about this product is that everyone seems to be confused about this product. It's listed on Silicon motions website as being for gaming machines, but then it's got a 300 megahertz clock with no dedicated 3D engine. So I'm looking at this thing going like, what are you? Looking at the accessory package, this is curious. There's actually a second VGA header to back panel adapter here, but the only difference seems to be that it has a different height PCI bracket. That is an extremely inefficient way to do that. They could just include a second bracket and you can swap it yourself like, oh, I don't know. Every other card that includes that. Also, I missed this before. Yet another thing that is analogous to our graphics card. You got your power input. Boom, look at this. It might be a little wimpy 12 volt one, but you got your little power input over here. Power in, let's go gaming power. This is one of those times when I really just have no idea what to expect. Like, is this just gonna fire up or what? One thing I do know for sure is how refreshing this water is, lttstore.com. Hello, hello. Oh, wake up. The more you hit it, the more likely it is to start working. One other idea, we could plug in the other end of that power connector. Hello, hello. Hey, there you go. We'll never know which was the solution. Hitting it or plugging in the power adapter. Really straightforward. I mean, how does this thing even show up? Okay, Microsoft basic display adapter driver just immediately works. Okay, it's a little chug-a-lug-a-ly. I don't know whether to blame the VGA adapter of the display, but it's been a while since I've seen a computer monitor that refreshes so slowly that you can see the window kind of jellowing about with your naked eye. You see that? Maybe it'll help if we install the drivers. I forgot how crappy VGA look. Oh, oh, that's actually a lot sharper. Okay, silicon motion K-Dodd-Samp. K-Dodd-Samp. Oh my God, this driver's from 2017. I think it's not quite as jellowy either. No, it's still pretty jellowy. I lied, it's bad. You see that? Minimizing a window. You can watch the animation. So that's neat. Why don't we start with just watching a YouTube video? Hmm, defaulted to 480p. On our connection speed, that is not a good sign. Let's see if it can even handle 1080. This is 1080, but can you tell that this looks like absolute dog-sh-t? There it is. Look at this. Our poor Ryzen 3 3300X is at like 35, 40% usage watching this video. There's clearly no GPU acceleration whatsoever. And this looks horrible. Wait, I completely forgot about this because I haven't dealt with it in so many years. It's probably that the color depth in Windows is set so low that it can't display this properly. I mean, I still remember back in the day downloading certain types of pictures and having them not look very good and be very, you know, color bandy. And let me just say that you kids today, you've got it pretty good. Oh my God. It defaulted to 64 Hertz on the monitor. What kind of number is that? I'm a little weirded out here because it says we're at eight bit color, which should be lots for a YouTube video to play back properly. But it also says that we're running at a refresh rate of one Hertz. And then if we go into the display adapter properties, it says we're running at 64 Hertz. What is it? Is it one or 64? I don't even know how to change this setting anymore. Supposedly we are running at 32 bit color depth. True color. You can especially see it in dark objects like Dennis's clothes here. Oh my God. See that? This is what I'm talking about. All right, then if it's not good for watching YouTube videos, maybe it's good for gaming. Why don't we kick things off with some good old fashioned Doom Eternal? I mean, Steve from Gamers Next is always saying like it can run on a toaster. And, hmm. Well, this toaster is only good for toast. That's definitely one and a half watt warm. Okay, maybe Doom Eternal was a bit of a stretch. But what about Black Mesa? Ooh. City Skylines maybe? Did you see that? You see that failed to install error? And then it's like, oh, by the way, you're playing the game. We don't got no MSI afterburner for this boy. Okay, now hold on a second. Is this game running? Holy bananas. It is actually rendering. I would describe the performance more in terms of seconds per frame, rather than frames per second. I'm gonna pan the camera. Let's give it a second here. Okay, I tried to scroll back. Oh, oh, oh, look at it go. That might've even been like one frame per second. Hmm, no, that was more like two seconds per frame right there. This is crazy. What I wanna know is if it's rendering on CPU or something. See, you can see it's still registering that I'm moving the mouse around, but it's not getting the clicks. Change the resolution, 640 by 480. Let's see how many seconds per frame we can get here, or how few. Oh my God, looks awful. You know what though? It's way more responsive. Oh! Oh! I'ma build some roads, ladies and gentlemen. Like what? I'ma pave some streets. I got a bridge, yo. Now I wouldn't describe this as a great gaming experience, but it's running. It's gaming. I'm a gamer now, boys. Not that I have much hope, but I do wanna try a game that's a little more reliant on a higher frame rate than a city builder by our Rocket League. That is multiple frames every second. Oh my God, it's running. Look at this, you guys. Look at this. The only GPU in this computer is this one right here. That's it. No movie magic. Wow. Oh. And I'm still counting it. But can it run Half-Life 2? You wanna play some Half-Life 2? Holy banane's. That's freaking crazy. Wow. We are actually getting darn near the same FPS the PlayStation 4 gets in Cyberpunk. Whoa, hold on a second. We've gotta pump the brakes here. After doing a little bit more digging, it's become apparent that what is in fact happening here is we're using a feature that has been around since Windows 7 called Warp. Warp allows any DirectX title to actually offload the rendering to the CPU, so effectively enabling software rendering without us even knowing about it whenever there isn't a 3D accelerator present. So as it turns out, all the games that ran on this were running directly off of our processor rather than the GPU. This also explains why games that don't use DirectX, like Doom Eternal, for example, which uses Vulkan, simply didn't open at all. You learn something every day, don't you? As for what you would actually use a product like this for. The fact that it's under ASRock's ASRock Rack brand, that would indicate it's intended mostly for server use. So maybe you've got a server that has no onboard graphics or defective onboard graphics, or actually another great example is if you were trying to diagnose a broken PCI Express slot, that would rule out the CPU's PCIe controller, maybe for mining. So let's say you wanted all of your GPUs completely focused on computing or whatever else, or your application runs into bugs if you try to have it outputting to a 2D display and also running compute. Well, something like this acts as a basic 2D display and doesn't take up one of your PCI Express slots. So it has a purpose and it actually worked way better than I expected, but it's still definitely a niche item. As for the cost, we actually don't know exactly what it is, but if the competition's anything to go by, we'd expect somewhere in the range of like 65 to $75, which if you've got a use for it, seems pretty reasonable, especially given that, well, it really does actually work and it doesn't even run warm. I could hold my finger here all day. In fact, my hands are kind of cold. I could warm them up. Just like I'm warming up to the idea of telling you about our sponsor. War Thunder is a free to play online military vehicle combat game that's available on Windows, Mac, Linux, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X with cross play. There's more than 34 million players from all over the world and it features an incredible arsenal of more than 1,700 historically accurate playable tanks, aircrafts, and ships from the 1930s to the 1990s. You can participate in massive combined arms battles on over 80 major battlefields from World War II to the end of the Cold War. And it's always being developed, ladies and gentlemen. There's free major updates every couple of months that add even more content, including vehicles, maps, and new gameplay features. So head to the link below to try War Thunder for free and you'll get a bonus premium vehicle just for signing up. If you guys enjoyed this video, you might also enjoy my investigation into a RAM slot to SSD adapter. Yes, my friends. What? Oh, we actually thought of one more use for it while we were packing up. Remember two gamers, one CPU and couples PC and stuff like that. This would be absolutely perfect for allowing us to just reassign using Unraid our gaming GPUs to our virtual machines and then just use this for our basic output. It doesn't even take up a PCI Express slot. Freaking cool.