**The Funhouse A9-A9820: A Weird Journey into Xbox One S-Based PC Motherboard**
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### **Introduction to the Funhouse A9-A9820 Board**
In an era where technology continues to evolve at breakneck speed, enthusiasts and builders are always on the lookout for unique and unconventional hardware. Enter the *Funhouse A9-A9820*—a PC motherboard that’s as intriguing as it is perplexing. Designed around the AMD A9-9820 SOC (System-on-a-Chip), the same component found in the Xbox One S, this board claims to be capable of running Windows. But is this just a gimmick, or does it hold promise for creative builds?
The journey begins with a simple question: *Is running Windows on an Xbox-based motherboard even possible?* While the idea might seem outlandish at first, the answer appears to be a resounding yes—at least in theory. However, as we delve deeper into this peculiar creation, things get weird.
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### **Hardware Breakdown**
First things first, let’s take a closer look at what makes up this *Funhouse A9-A9820* board. At its core lies the AMD A9-9820 SOC, which is responsible for handling both CPU and GPU duties. ThisSOC is no stranger to gaming consoles, as it powers the Xbox One S. But can it handle a full-fledged Windows PC? Only time will tell.
The board itself is a curious mix of modern and outdated features. On one hand, it boasts DDR3 memory slots (four in total) and an M.2 slot for SSDs—a nod to contemporary hardware trends. On the other hand, it lacks PCIe expansion slots, which might leave enthusiasts wondering how they’ll add discrete GPUs or other high-performance cards.
The board also features USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 ports, as well as a single gigabit LAN connection. These are standard for most motherboards, but the real intrigue lies in the design choices that set this one apart from the crowd.
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### **Design Flaws and Oddities**
One of the first things you’ll notice about the *Funhouse A9-A9820* is its unusual layout. The memory slots are positioned on either side of the CPU, reminiscent of high-end HEDT (Heavy Duty Enthusiast) platforms like Intel’s LGA 115X or AMD’s sTRX4. However, this design isn’t about aesthetics—it’s purely functional. Given that the A9-9820 SOC was likely designed with soldered-on RAM in mind, the board had to accommodate traces and pathways in a way that makes sense.
But here’s where things get weird: the entire PCB (Printed Circuit Board) appears to be designed upside down. This means that all the silk-screen text is flipped, making it difficult to read without physically turning the board over or tilting your head at an awkward angle. It’s a puzzling choice that leaves enthusiasts scratching their heads.
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### **Mounting Challenges and Design Flaws**
When it comes to mounting the CPU cooler, things get even more interesting. The board uses an LGA 115X/1200 socket, but here’s the kicker: it doesn’t make proper contact with the chip. Even Noctua’s robust mounting mechanism can’t save this setup. Instead of traditional screws or clamps, the host humorously suggests using *zip ties and downforce* to secure the cooler in place.
This approach might seem makeshift, but it highlights the lengths one must go to when dealing with non-standard hardware. While the solution may not be ideal, it does underscore the creativity required to make such a build work.
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### **Other Curious Features**
As if the inverted PCB design and unconventional mounting weren’t odd enough, the *Funhouse A9-A9820* board also features an abundance of probe points in its VRM (Voltage Regulator Module). These are likely for testing voltage levels during operation—something you’d expect to see on a high-end server motherboard, not a consumer-grade PC board.
Another peculiar feature is the presence of two M.2 selector jumpers, which are silk-screened in reverse. The host speculates that this might be due to a different revision of the board or perhaps an oversight during manufacturing. Additionally, there’s a single DPN (Dual-Purpose NAND) slot whose purpose remains unclear.
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### **The Build Process and Final Thoughts**
Mounting the CPU cooler is just one part of the challenge. The host also notes that the process of building with this motherboard is anything but straightforward. From dealing with limited expansion options to troubleshooting potential compatibility issues, the *Funhouse A9-A9820* is not for the faint of heart.
Despite its quirks and challenges, there’s no denying the allure of such a unique piece of hardware. While it might never see mainstream adoption, it serves as a fascinating experiment in repurposing gaming console components for PC builds. Whether or not it’s “any good” remains to be seen, but one thing is certain: this motherboard will leave you questioning everything you thought you knew about PC building.
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### **Conclusion**
The *Funhouse A9-A9820* is a testament to the creativity and ingenuity of hardware enthusiasts. While its design might seem unconventional—and even downright weird—at its core lies the promise of running Windows on a system powered by Xbox One S components. Whether you’re a seasoned builder looking for a unique project or just curious about the possibilities of repurposed hardware, this board is sure to spark your imagination.
In the end, while it may not be practical for everyday use, it’s hard to deny the charm of such a quirky and unconventional motherboard. After all, isn’t that what makes PC building so fun?
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: en- Windows running on an X-Box.Wait, that's illegal.Also it's fake, there'sa 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 sameSOC found in the X-Box One S,and supposedly this thingactually can run Windows.So, how does that work?And is it any good?Well, as you'd expect from any productcalled 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 seguesto sponsors like GlassWire.GlassWire is the toolthat shows you which appsare slowing down yourconnection in real time.Get 25% off today using offer code Linusat the link down below.(upbeat music)Where do I even start?This thing is so weird.First things first, we've got our CPUbut actually it's the CPU, GPU and more.Like it's more of an SOCexcept that the board does have some kindof southbridge chipset thatprobably handles thingslike 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 featuresbut also super out of date features.And I find there's almostno PCI Express connectivity.We've got, whatever's linkingit to this chipset down here,four lanes for M.2, I mean,presumably, we don't even knowfor sure there's actuallyfour lanes there,and then another one lane for this puppy.And I would assume thatthis much USB and ethernetis probably handled directly offof the SOC or off ofthis chipset over here.So just for USB2s, twoUSB3s and gigabit LAN.I was about to say, I lovethat the memory slots areon either side of the CPU,like an HEDT platform,but you know what I think it is,it's probably because thisSOC was designed with the ideaof RAM being solderedto the board around it.So in order to have the traces make sense,you have to have them oneither side like that.Oh man, this thing is so weird.Oh, that's weird.It looks like the board isactually designed upside down.So whatever the intended use of this was,it would have been inlike an inverted case.You can actually seeeverything from the front panelto even just the silk screen texton the PCB is all this way up.Okay, so it's LGA115X/1200except for one small problem,(chuckles) it's nowhere nearmaking contact with the chip.Even Noctua's mountingmechanism 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 whatappeared to be probe pointsin the VRM, so where youwould take a multimeterand probe voltages, thereare two M.2 selector jumpers,curiously silk screenedthe other way around,this may be because of adifferent revision of the boardthat had two M.2s, Anthonydid find a referenceon 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.- Yikes.- so which cooler are we using, this one?- We're gonna use that one.- Oh my God.- It's prettyeasy to like strap down.- Yeah, that just makes meextremely uncomfortable.We only have one of these things.Oh, I don't, I don't like it sir.- I had no alternative.- You know, thisactually is not that bad,you're right.- No, it's prettysolid once you get it on there.- The funniest part of this isthat our viewers arebasically used to it by now.The comments section is justgonna be like, \"Yeah, and?\"- There's gonnabe like one guy is like,\"What the hell?They just, they just ziptied it to the motherboard?\"And there's gonna be like awhole bunch of replies like...- You must be new here.- Yeah. (laughs)- Pop this puppy on here,got kind of an M-ATX holepattern, pretty standard.24 pin power connector.Got your four pin CPU connector,or I should say SOCconnector, put on some RAM.So do we know which slotswould make it dual channel?- No.- Is it even dual channel?- I don't know.- Sweet, we are so close to the pointwhere this is pretty much all there isto building a computer.You just buy a motherboardwith whatever CPU you're gonnause, pre-soldered onto it.Throw in some RAM, storage,cooler will probablyjust be included in your kit.And then that's it,that builds a computer.Good job me.Okay, I think I've got thefront 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 5is coming get subscribedso you don't miss it.- Well, if you wanna makeit a little bit more exotic,we can always do this.Just what I did on the bench to make surethat the mounting pressure was correct.- Wait, no, hold on,(chuckles) lttstore.com, oh my God,that's a lot of mountingpressure, it's pretty full.It should be fine.- Don't knock it.- Till you tried it.- Oh, there you go.- Hey, wow, just like that?- Just like that.- And was installing Windowson it, just like simple.- Yeah, it just ran.- Really?- Yep.- But it, that's so weird.Primary Video Adapter,integrated graphics.Well, I mean it supports externalgraphics, which is weird.And look at this, youcan actually bifurcatethe internal PCI Express linkbetween the CPU and the GPUon the SOC, into two 8x links.Oh, you know what, that'sprobably for the other boardthat has two M.2s.- Oh, maybe.- Could be, to share lanes or something.I don't know, I'm just guessing.- Possibly.- RX-8120, A9-9820, wait, what?What's RX-8120?- RX-8120 foras best as I can tell,is the same clock speedsas the Xbox One S...- Oh, so we wanna run itat the higher one then?- Then A9-9820is a higher clock speed.It's like 2.35 versus 1.75.- That's crazy.Okay, what else shouldI be looking at here?Is there anything else significant?PCI subsistence settingsliterally doesn't do anything.- Yeah, there'sliterally nothing.Is the temperature monitor there?- Oh, okay.Wait, what does plus eightdegrees Celsius mean?Wait, does it mean like plus eight degreesover what it's supposed to be?Or like, do they think it'sactually eight degrees in here?10 RPM, whatever thatmeans, that's not right.There's only two, there'sonly one fan on this thing.There isn't two fan.- There's a fanheader for a different fan.- Yeah, okay, true.- Maybe it's 10 RPMs of like...- I don't even care, I'm done.- I don't know,background radiation.- No, I'm done, I'm out, I'm out.We're going to the, we'regoing to the window,we're going to Windows.Some other weird stuff, the AMDchipset has features exposedfor which there's no hardware,like FireWire, SD card and anIDE controller of all things.There's menus for SurroundView 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 onthe forum, the madhaxorand shrimprine, theywent and found a driveron a Japanese blog about this,and the blogger in turn got itfrom some strange filerepository called djproduct.com.And I have no idea howthey figured that one out,'cause it's literally just a file dump.- Huh?NBME performance lookslow 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 explainwhy it's kind of junkand networking performance is also junk,only 500-600 megabit persecond, which is like 1/2of what we'd expect froma gigabit connection.It seems like this thingreally does not respond wellto being loaded up heavily.And apparently transferring filesover the network countsas loaded up heavily.Look at this, changing the mode of the CPUactually changes what it'sreported as in task manager.Crazy, all right, here we go.CPU multi-core, whew!Cinebench R23, is this gonna work?- 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 about1/2 of the performanceof 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 runany more benchmarks on camera.What was the single course score?- I got 235, but then again,I got 1744 multi-threaded, so.- Okay, so it's kind ofall over the place then.- [Anthony} It's kindof all over the place.- Got it, how about a game?- Okay.- Wait HDMI tops out at 1080p 60?So that's HDMI 1.2, butthen it supports free syncin the Radeon software and it works.- It does work.- Okay, what is going on here?What is this thing?- I don't thinkthat monitor is free sync.- No, no, it's not, but like what?The Radeon soft, I can't even believethe Radeon software runs.- Yeah.- Like I would've thoughtit would just be likekind of like a randomcrappy, just like, yeah,the driver, but no, no control panel.- You would think so, yeah.Good old Counter-Strike.- I was gonna start with Doom Eternal,but I have now decided tostart with Counter-Strike,I have lowered my expectations.While we wait for this to load,can we take a moment to appreciatethat games run as well asthey do on the dog (beeps)Jaguar cores in the XboxOne S, One X and One.- It's beenlike 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 runningat 15 frames per second.All right, we're playingan unranked casual match.3v3, good luck team.- You're going online?- I'm going online.I'm going on the line.- Should thatvoice chat be like,\"Hey guys, I'm playing on my X-Box.\"No, it's actually runningbetter than I thought I would.- It's 14 FPS, theminimums are pretty Savage.Is the game actually runninga little bit slow motion here?I think I might.- Yeah, I thinkyou just got kicked.- Dang it, I was, we were gonna win it.At the end of the day,it's pretty obvious thenwhy AMD never officially released this SOCoutside of the X-Box,because far more goes into a consolethan simply the hardware alone.Which leads us to the question of the day,what is this thing?On the surface, the fact thatthere are seemingly so manyof these, make it appear to be overstock,or in our systems case, B-stockfrom X-Box One S production,but the true story could go a bit deeper.As of shooting this video,AMD hasn't commented on thisand I doubt that they ever will,but considering that almosteverything about it is Beta,the drivers from 2017 andthe motherboard says AMD BL2.We think it probably firstcame to life as an attemptto reuse engineering workthat had already been done,probably at least partiallyon Microsoft's dime,to build affordable commodityPCs for emerging markets.And at the time it probably lookedlike a decent stop-gap solutionto the poor performanceof their excavator-basedAPUs and Ryzen delays.It's important to rememberthat Zen hadn't even beenofficially announced yet,when the development onthis would have startedand AMD was in prettyhot water at that time.Whatever the intended purpose though,it was obviously put on iceonce it became clear thatit wasn't competitiveand Ryzen APUs showed up on the horizon.Another idea we kicked aroundis that it could have beenproduced as a collaborationwith a Chinese game console manufacturer,kind of like the SuborZ+, which also happenedto 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 answeris some combination of all of the above,but like I said, we'llnever know for sure.It's always fun to ask what might've been,but sometimes as in thecase of the A9-9820,what might've been was far worsethan what we ended up getting,but at least we got acool story out of it.So hey, thanks AMD,and thanks Chinese board manufacturersfor unearthing these freaking thingsand soldering them toboard so we can enjoy themand you can not buy them.You know what else you can not buy,your time back if you waste it.FreshBooks is the easy touse accounting softwaredesigned specifically with you in mind,the small business owner.With FreshBooks, you'vegot everything you needto manage your books with.Invoices, expenses, timetracking, and more built-in,and it's designed to be easy to usewith built-in automation,so you spend less timeinvoicing, expensingand tracking projects, and moretime doing what matters mostwhich is growing your business.Whether you're a tradesperson, creative agency,or a YouTuber, you can choosea plan that's right for you.They've got award-winningToronto-based supportthat's always ready tohelp if you need it.And you can try it out forfree for 30 days today,no credit card requiredat freshbooks.com/linus.If you guys enjoyed this video,go check out our video onanother interesting storyout of China, the (coughs)Zhaoxin KaiXian CPU.I honestly, I cannotremember how to pronounce it,but it's very interesting,x86 even, and not AMD or Intel.\n"
