For most people, the above probably doesn’t mean much, but those who have a hunch that this article will be about an Engineering Sample are right. I found a cheap Chinese mATX motherboard on Aliexpress which is really interesting for two reasons. One has already been explained by the title, the next will be obvious when you look at the image below.
Yes, there is no socket. The board has an 11th gen 45W Tiger Lake CPU soldered onboard, which you’d normally find in higher-end gaming laptops. Otherwise, it’s a perfectly normal mATX motherboard, uses standard DDR4 sticks and you can plop in expansion cards. The heat spreader has been specially designed to allow the mounting of a standard lga115X cooler, which means one can use a standard CPU cooler to keep the chip under control. Underneath, there is a perfectly normal H-series Tiger Lake chip with a separate chipset on the board, which is not visible here.
It works quite well, but for whatever reason, I couldn’t get suspend to work properly in Windows (and I haven’t tried Linux). The BIOS seems to be a bit generic with options that don’t explain much on what they do, or in some cases they may not do anything at all. I also noticed that the 10Gb/s USB3 ports are a little finicky. Some devices, like JMS583-based NVMe to USB3.1 gen2 adapters don’t get recognized and it’s the newer A3 revision of the JMS583 that shouldn’t have these problems. And if you like to listen to music, you should really get an external sound card, as the analog output of the integrated one is really bad.
Aside from these quirks, it’s really cheap for the performance you get and it’s also fairly power efficient. I did run some Cinebench tests, so have a look below:
| R11.5 | R15 | R20 | R23 | |
| Single | 20.30 | 1861 | 4501 | 11678 |
| Multi | 2.51 | 220 | 564 | 14 |
| Multiplier | 8.08 | 8.47 | 7.99 | 7.98 |
The multiplier is always very close to 8 and that’s with hyper-threading enabled, which means the single-core turbo is quite aggressive, as hyper-threading normally gives a 30-50% advantage compared to a single thread per core setup.
The board has been in a PC for the past 6 months and it’s been performing really well, so aside from what I mentioned above, there are no stability issues or other problems I have encountered.
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