Anyone tried the AliExpress 11800h/11900h/11980hk CPU+mobo combos yet?

[toasty99]

Was on Aliexpress and found out they have a 11980hk ES strapped to a motherboard for $158. Of course I bought it for that price. Curious if anyone else has gotten a hold of one of these yet? I've seen a few reviews on the 11800h version of this and a few non-English reviews of the 11980hk. 

 

Really seems like an interesting AliExpress product even with the issues that come into play with this. I mean for $158 for CPU+motherboard it's basically only competing with a Ryzen 5500/i3 12100f price wise. 

 

[Kaas0001]

Is it  even worth trying it? Although, if you have money tospend, why not?

But AliExpress to me always seems iffy, have looked a couple of times, but  im not convinced yet

[jaslion]

Its also not fair to comapre it to new solutions as these are used products put togheter and you dont have any warranty.

 

For 160 used a 3700 is an easy find + board

[toasty99]

41 minutes ago, CheeseOnion said:

Is it  even worth trying it? Although, if you have money tospend, why not?

But AliExpress to me always seems iffy, have looked a couple of times, but  im not convinced yet

Well my reasons were:

It's Intel 10nm tiger lake and that never got a desktop release. It should be better than an 11900k in gaming if it can clock well, since it has 24mb of cache vs 16mb for the 11900k plus is on a newer architecture. It also has AVX-512 support. Intel's early 12th gen chips had avx-512 support but that was later disabled. In theory, this should be only behind Ryzen 7000 series for PS3 emulation. Of course that's assuming it overclocks well, which I do not know yet.

 

So, I'm thinking the best case scenario for this chip is that it's around a Ryzen 5800x in performance but with Avx-512 support and worst case is somewhere around a Ryzen 5500 in games. 

 

There's a reddit post of someone taking a Legion 7i laptop with liquid metal and getting 4.9ghz all core for a Cinebench r23 score of 16279. Of course this is an ES and a dodgy motherboard but I'm thinking I'll put a 360mm AIO on it, so maybe? lol

[Kaas0001]

But its still AliExpress though

[porina]

Sounds like a fun thing to paly with. A few years ago I might have picked up something like that but have to watch my spending now.

 

Be interesting to see how it goes. Tiger Lake at least resolved the clock limit that held back Ice Lake. Would be interesting to see if you can get much past 5 GHz which is the single core turbo of the final part.

[toasty99]

Ok, so it finally arrived in the mail and I've got some thoughts. It does work, but it's definitely AliExpress quality. The copper "IHS" has a literal fingerprint smeared into it that won't come off from whoever made it, and the thermal performance of this is awful. I've got a 360mm AIO strapped to it, at 80w of power consumption I'm getting 100C. I tried a generic OEM level fan on it too, that could do about 75w so honestly your cooling solution won't matter much here because the problem is the awful IHS. I did even take off the IHS and used artic Mx-4 under it on the die manually spread. 

 

XMP kinda works? To be fair it said a max speed of 3200mhz in the listing when I bought it, but it has my 32gb ddr4 3600 kit running at 3400mhz oddly enough. That's actually pretty good though.

 

So, obviously overclocking was out the question due to thermals so the goal was undervolting to get the temps in order. However, yes the overclocking settings do work and you can even adjust the BCLK (more on that later). 

 

As of now playing around with throttlestop I've got it to a 4.19 ghz all core, -137 on the CPU core voltage offset, and -80 on the cache voltage offset. That has it drawing 65w in Cinebench r23 with a max temperature of 86C in a run. 

 

All that said, the performance is 14006 in r23 with it dialed in some. On cpu-z with those settings it's a 562 single core and 5784 all core. 

 

So I paid $158 plus tax and for that price I think it's actually interesting at least because it's competing against probably a Ryzen 3600+b450 combo which Microcenter does for $130 or a Ryzen 5500 and motherboard for probably around $150. It's creeped up in price since ($172 now), but I'd say with the overclocking being basically useless just get the 11800h ES version for $150.

 

End of the day, it has a lot more in it and offers a ton of performance for the price but the thermal solution they use sucks and limits it. I do want to try direct die cooling it eventually if I can find some way to adapt it, but that's pretty janky and risky. 

 

The use case I see for this is as a super powerful HTPC or something like that if you are technical and can deal with the quirks. 

 

Hopefully someone on YouTube does a good video on these. Dawid Does Tech Stuff did one on the 11800h version but he messed up and didn't enable XMP and said it was impossible. There's some really good Portuguese videos I watched to get the bios settings figured out, seems this sells well in Brazil due to the grey market on electronics over there. 

 

[unclewebb]

21 minutes ago, toasty99 said:

Mx-4

MX-4 direct die is not good. You will get much better results with liquid metal. MX-4 will probably pump out quickly at high temps.

 

It sounds decent for what you paid for it. Something unique to play with. AVX512 for cheap. Just need to re-engineer the cooling.

[toasty99]

Just now, unclewebb said:

MX-4 direct die is not good. You will get much better results with liquid metal. MX-4 will probably pump out quickly at high temps.

 

It sounds decent for what you paid for it. Something unique to play with. AVX512 for cheap. Just need to re-engineer the cooling.

That's true, but I don't have any liquid metal and I'd be concerned about it leaking onto places it shouldn't over time.

[toasty99]

Update:

 

Since I didn't like the temps, I went and took everything apart and used generous amounts of thermal paste hoping to fill in some gaps. Kept working on undervolting. Switched to using XTU to get specific per core clockspeed adjustments. That's actually a big help, because the cores had 20C differences, so being able to dial it in per core adds quite a bit.

 

After all that, managed to get to 14500 all core in Cinebench r23 using only 75w of power. Fastest core goes to 4.59 ghz, slowest core is 4.29 ghz. Temp down to 84C for a single run. Single core performance is a tad above 1500. 

 

In cpu-z, it now gets to 596 single core and 6058 multi-thread.

 

some photos (sorry for bad quality): https://imgur.com/a/l6eNX0C

 

[RandoCommentGuy]

Thanks for the info you posted, I just ordered one of these a few weeks back for fun to mess with, im gunna try to replace an old x58/x5650 mobo/cpu with this for 3D fix manager to play 3d games on my projector, but also may use it for PS3 emulation if that AVX 512 works well.  Any tips or do you have more info on this for HTPC/gaming uses or more, like how hard it was to pull off the IHS and repaste?

[toasty99]

On 3/6/2023 at 2:50 PM, RandoCommentGuy said:

Thanks for the info you posted, I just ordered one of these a few weeks back for fun to mess with, im gunna try to replace an old x58/x5650 mobo/cpu with this for 3D fix manager to play 3d games on my projector, but also may use it for PS3 emulation if that AVX 512 works well.  Any tips or do you have more info on this for HTPC/gaming uses or more, like how hard it was to pull off the IHS and repaste?

Sorry for the late reply,

 

I can say that the IHS is pretty easy to remove. It's just four triangle shaped screws (I didn't have the proper tool, but a small flathead worked) on a backplate. You remove the backplate, then just pull off the IHS. Put it all back together with the four screws. 

 

Definitely reccomend liquid metal, got my hands on some and now I'm in the 70s under load. Only problem I'm having is it's hitting an EDP limit preventing me from overclocking past around 4.6ghz all core I can't figure out how to disable.

 

Overall, it's a janky system but performance is solid. After the liquid metal application it's up to a 15,200 Cinebench r23 with an undervolt/overclock using around 110w.