What is the deal with this motherboard?

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Apr 9, 2020
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So I've been finding this thing and its variants all over the place on ebay:


Some for as little as $100. I cannot identify an actual manufacturer for it, and in fact each auction seems to list a different one for what is clearly the exact same motherboard. It lacks a lot of features you would expect to find in a dual-socket workstation board, such as dual gbe and bmc. And weirdly it has PS2 ports for both keyboard and mouse.

I'm assuming the silly thing is god awful if not a complete hoax, but I'm really curious what is up with this thing.
 

Spartacus

Well-Known Member
May 27, 2019
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Austin, TX
Its a china special, they usually work pretty well but obv drivers are an issue to get and can vary from board to board.
 

paf

New Member
Sep 21, 2020
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It's a motherboard made in China, with "refurbished" parts for "gamers" with limited money and lots of time, to try what works and what does not work, and how can you get a "reasonable" computer with a low price Xeon from Aliexpress, and then overclock it ...

There are many X99 boards from China, here are some examples, and :
Which X99 LGA 2011-3 motherboard to pick? Huananzhi | JingSha | Kllisre | Alzenit | Atermiter - YouTube

Huananzhi X99-TF Motherboard Review (Easily the BEST $100 Mobo on Aliexpress!) - YouTube

It seems the buyers of those boards do not care a lot about reliability.
 
Apr 9, 2020
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refurbished from WHAT? 0.0

I'm kind of shocked you can take an old motherboard, reclaim parts from it, build a new one, and still sell it for $100 a make a profit.
 

Spartacus

Well-Known Member
May 27, 2019
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Austin, TX
You can reclaim the cpu sockets, ran slots, capacitors, VRM, pcie slots, pretty much anything soldered on the boards can be de-soldered (hopefully tested) then reused.

Thats china for ya though a little money goes a LONG way, my boss used to work there for a battery company as a US consultant.
He said there was a factory worker that stuck his hand in one of the machines mangling it for a 40k renminbi 'accident' payout, thats like $6k US.
That seems insane but apparently it was worth it to him and its not an uncommon thing, 6k$ for a limb loss, none for me thanks.
 
Apr 9, 2020
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Appalling safety standards aside, after watching a couple of those videos I'm actually really impressed. Not... in... a... "I want to buy one of these!" fashion.

Basically, they are reclaiming enough CPUs that it makes economic sense to reclaim the other components, cobble together these motherboards, and the sell them on the cheap to developing regions like South America and other parts of Asia. You can put together very competent gaming rig for less than the cost of a brand new CPU, and it'll run everything just fine(for reference, I build most of my systems out of used parts from eBay).

To me this is A. very good recycling practice, and B. a fantastic way to help more people get in to gaming affordably.

I still won't actually BUY one because they don't actually seem to support SLI and of course everything else, but it's very interesting that they're doing this.
 

Spartacus

Well-Known Member
May 27, 2019
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Austin, TX
You're a pretty big outlier, there aren't alot of folks that have a need or want for SLI nowadays.
Even the manufactures have strayed away from multigpu development.
The marketshare is just not there, iirc the last steam survey showed there was less than a million setups worldwide using crossfire/sli.
 

TLN

Active Member
Feb 26, 2016
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Hi. I have some ASUS boards for Dual Xeon if you're interested:
Z10PE-D16 WS and Z10PC-D8 with 10Gig networking on board. Former are part of TS700 server and supports SLI for sure. Latter is still brand new in box.
 
Apr 9, 2020
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Hi. I have some ASUS boards for Dual Xeon if you're interested:
Z10PE-D16 WS and Z10PC-D8 with 10Gig networking on board. Former are part of TS700 server and supports SLI for sure. Latter is still brand new in box.
As it happens I'm actually running the Z10PE-D16 WS as my main workstation. Awesome workstation board without a doubt, but I had... let's just say "some fun" finding a tower it actually fit in :p