- Windows running on an X-Box.
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 closelier, we find, aah!
An AMD A9-9820, the very same SOC found in the X-Box 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 Funhouse 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.
(upbeat music)
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 SETA 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but also super out of date features.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 find 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 for USB2s, two USB3s and gigabit LAN.
I was about to say, I love that the memory slots are
on either side of the CPU, like an HEDT 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 silk screen text
on the PCB is all this way up.
Okay, so it's LGA115X/1200 except for one small problem,
(chuckles) it's nowhere near making contact with the chip.
Even Noctua's mounting mechanism won't save us,
or not, are we mounting it with zip ties?
- Zip ties and down force.
- Before we do that though,
there are a few more weird things.
There's a ton of what appeared 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 silk screened the other way around,
this may be because of a different revision of the board
that had two M.2s, Anthony did find a reference
on a Turkish website to a board like that.
And then finally, there's DPN.
No idea what that could be for.
And well, there's just, there's only one of them, so.
- [Anthony] Yikes.
- so which cooler are we using, this one?
- [Anthony] We're gonna use that one.
- Oh my God.
- [Anthony] 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, I don't like it sir.
- [Anthony] I had no alternative.
- [Linus] You know, this actually is not that bad,
you're right.
- [Anthony] 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 comments section is just gonna be like, "Yeah, and?"
- [Man] There's gonna be like one guy is like,
"What the hell?
They just, they just zip tied it to the motherboard?"
And there's gonna be like a whole bunch of replies like...
- You must be new here.
- [Anthony] Yeah. (laughs)
- Pop this puppy on here,
got kind of an M-ATX 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?
- [Anthony] No.
- Is it even dual channel?
- [Anthony] 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, that builds 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've worked,
we could've 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, no, hold on,
(chuckles) lttstore.com, oh my God,
that's a lot of mounting pressure, it's pretty full.
It should be fine.
- [Anthony] Don't knock it.
- Till you tried it.
- Oh, there you go.
- Hey, wow, just like that?
- [Anthony] Just like that.
- And was installing Windows on it, just like simple.
- [Anthony] Yeah, it just ran.
- Really? - Yep.
- But it, 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.
- [Anthony] Oh, maybe.
- Could be, to share lanes or something.
I don't know, I'm just guessing.
- [Anthony] Possibly.
- RX-8120, A9-9820, wait, what?
What's RX-8120?
- [Anthony] 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?
- [Anthony] Then 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?
PCI subsistence settings literally doesn't do anything.
- [Anthony] Yeah, there's literally nothing.
Is the temperature monitor there?
- Oh, okay.
Wait, what does plus eight degrees Celsius mean?
Wait, does it 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 two, there's only one fan on this thing.
There isn't two fan.
- [Anthony] There's a fan header for a different fan.
- Yeah, okay, true.
- [Anthony] Maybe it's 10 RPMs of like...
- I don't even care, I'm done.
- [Anthony] I don't know, background radiation.
- No, I'm done, I'm out, I'm out.
We're going to the, we're going to the window,
we're going to 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 PowerXpress,
which are typically mobile features.
And not to mention HCF_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 madhaxor
and shrimprine, 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,
'cause it's literally just a file dump.
- Huh?
NBME performance looks low and as it turns out,
the four lanes are actually split,
2x for the NBME 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 500-600 megabit per second, which is like 1/2
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, whew!
Cinebench R23, is this gonna work?
- [Anthony] 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 1/2 of the performance
of a quad core mobile chip today.
And I don't mean like a gaming laptop,
I mean like thin light, oh my God,
I don't know if I wanna run any more benchmarks on camera.
What was the single course score?
- [Anthony] I got 235, but then again,
I got 1744 multi-threaded, so.
- Okay, so it's kind of all over the place then.
- [Anthony} It's kind of all over the place.
- Got it, how about a game?
- [Anthony] Okay.
- Wait HDMI tops out at 1080p 60?
So that's HDMI 1.2, but then it supports free sync
in the Radeon software and it works.
- [Anthony] It does work.
- Okay, what is going on here?
What is this thing?
- [Anthony] I don't think that monitor is free sync.
- No, no, it's not, but like what?
The Radeon soft, I can't even believe
the Radeon software runs.
- [Anthony] Yeah.
- Like I would've thought it would just be like
kind of like a random crappy, just like, yeah,
the driver, but no, no control panel.
- [Anthony] You would think so, yeah.
Good old Counter-Strike.
- I was gonna start with Doom Eternal,
but I have now decided to start with Counter-Strike,
I have 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 (beeps)
Jaguar cores in the Xbox One S, One X and One.
- [Anthony] It's been like five minutes there,
Linus is Windows still okay?
- Yeah, Windows is still okay.
I don't think this is gonna 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.
- [Anthony] You're going online?
- I'm going online.
I'm going on the line.
- [Anthony] Should that voice chat be like,
"Hey guys, I'm playing on my X-Box."
No, it's actually running better than I thought I would.
- It's 14 FPS, the minimums are pretty Savage.
Is the game actually running a little bit slow motion here?
I think I might.
- [Anthony] Yeah, I think you just got kicked.
- Dang it, I was, we were gonna win it.
At the end of the day, it's pretty obvious then
why AMD never officially released this SOC
outside of the X-Box,
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 systems case, B-stock from X-Box 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 drivers 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 stop-gap 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 A9-9820,
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 can not buy them.
You know what else you can not 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 trades person, 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/linus.
If you guys enjoyed this video,
go check out our video on another interesting story
out of China, the (coughs) Zhaoxin KaiXian CPU.
I honestly, I cannot remember how to pronounce it,
but it's very interesting,
x86 even, and not AMD or Intel.