And we're on a roll! Another one, this time about my new computer, the latest in a very short line of current computer hardware that I've bought. Given AMD's ongoing 'blitzkrieg' of favourable opinion in the computer press, I was sorely tempted, almost swayed, towards a Ryzen-based solution, but eventually ended up with an Intel setup.
I came across Erying motherboards on AliExpress many months ago and was intrigued by the notion of low power, high spec laptop CPU's - many being pulled straight from laptop motherboards, so essentially, 'e-waste' - being reacquired and given a new lease of life, in desktop PC motherboards. Since most laptop CPU's are now soldered straight to the PCB, it ends up a case of, 'til death do we part', as there is no way of upgrading the CPU. And that's just the first 'caveat', of many!
While Erying, the company behind my purchase, do supply boards with current Intel CPU offerings, these will almost double the final price of the motherboard being bought. The much cheaper solution, and the route I chose, is to opt for their 'Engineering-sample' (ES) CPU's. As the name implies, Intel & AMD, and probably any CPU manufacturer, provide sample chips to board makers etc. on the run-up to the final design being settled upon. And from what I can see, there are a lot of these cheap ES chips about.
Oddly enough, despite being classed as a 'work-in-progress', there seemed to be practically no one having issues with them in operation. And thus far, that has been my experience as well! But there is more than ES chips to contend with, at least with the board that I bought, so yeah, another caveat.
Erying have a selection of boards where they have removed the main PCIe connector entirely, apparently because there were major issues (read, complaints) when a graphics card was fitted. My purchase falls into this category. Thankfully, all of Intel's laptop CPUs have integrated graphics, which is also not too shabby, but still not up to playing top-rated games. Luckily, a game-player I'm not, so that's a moot point, but it would still have been nice to have had the option of a graphics card, for the likes of accelerated hardware-encoding of movies etc. Alas, that will remain a pipe dream. One plus, discovered recently, is that my ES CPU's integrated graphics, which was listed as having just 80EUs (Execution units), has in fact 96EUs, so there's that. The actual CPU, though an ES, is based on the 13th Generation, i7-1360P laptop CPU, featuring 12 cores - 4 Primary, 8 Efficiency cores, 16 threads in total.
That is just the motherboard, which cost €142. I needed to buy 500GB of M.2 NVME storage, and 32GB of DDR5 memory, the combination costing €164. I also bought a 550W power supply, that turned out to be not needed as the old Corsair 450W that I had, proved sufficient. Another purchase, not strictly needed - as much cheaper options are available on AliExpress - but I felt like treating myself, was a snazzy LED keyboard, having USB, Bluetooth, & 2.7G connections. This cost €79. Then there is the Erying 4-pipe radiator/fan combo, costing €28, and the AC9560 network card, costing €16. Lastly, a mouse, which similarly, has both Bluetooth & 2.7G wireless connections. This, and the accompanying mouse-mat, cost another €16. All housed in a case that had been lying about, gathering dust for years, complete with DVD recorder.
The final caveat with this build has gotta be the BIOS. This appears to be a hacked version from American Megatrends, and as a result, many options don't seem to work correctly, or not at all. Add to this, Erying is upfront in saying not to expect BIOS updates, like EVER!!! While I think of it, another real annoyance was the discovery that the motherboard comes without a PS2 mouse/keyboard connector, but that was on me.
But how does it run, I hear you ask! Very well, as it happens! It highlights just how slow the old Dell laptop (XPS M1210) runs with current OS's. Having 1080p HEVC videos run silky smooth with barely 5% embedded graphics utilisation, was a real novelty for a while. Even better was finding that the CPU supports HEVC (H265) hardware encoding! Needless to say, AVC (H264) hardware encoding is also supported. My excitement was tempered somewhat by the realisation that AV1 hardware encoding is not supported, even though Handbrake, the video transcoding app I use, will allow AV1-generated videos utilising the CPU. It turns out from my experimenting, that large (2-3Gig) video downloads, transcoded with a constant video bit-rate of just 350K, will produce excellent quality, feature-length films of between 300-600Megs - one-third to one-quarter of the original in size!!! While H265 & AV1 encodes end up with a similar file-size, I find that AV1 encodes at this low bit-rate, have practically no unwanted artifacts - in foggy/smoky scenes, for example - whereas they are intrusively obvious in HEVC encodes.
The latest Linux distros, Mint 22 in this instance, also run silky smooth. The only 'penguin in the ointment' I've discovered relates to the new keyboard & mouse - the BT connection option simply does not work with either, whereas it works perfectly with Windows 10! I've tried posting for help online, to no avail so far.
They say, 'there's no such thing as a free lunch', and this is partly borne out here as well. Idling, the computer consumes about 30W - my laptop uses 25W. 100% CPU utilisation sees the power consumed rocket to about 110W - flat out, the laptop's 2-core, 2 threads, consume 55W.
In conclusion, caveats aside. I'm happy with my purchase. The BIOS is really poor though. Having obvious stuff like the CPU's fan running flat out 100% of the time, despite the BIOS having a comprehensive (non-working!) fan-configuration option sums it up. Were I to have a glass-half-full moment, I would of course point to the Erying fan being rather quite in general.