The whole video feels like a vehicle to talk about the salvage-chipset motherboard market in China, which is genuinely very fascinating. They’re all over AliExpress, usually sold as a platform kit with a 6-10 core Xeon and 16-32GB of quad-channel RAM (DDR3 or 4 depending on the CPU gen) for around $150-200. This can legitimately be a fairly powerful setup once paired with a modern GPU.

Also, the fact that Russian enthusiast forums have thousands of pages of research and custom software for these boards is somehow not surprising whatsoever. Russia is full of competent technicians, but they also don’t have a lot of money, so extracting every possible drop of value out of cheap hardware only makes sense.

USB 3.2 Gen 2

Correction: it’s now officially USB 10Gbit/s.

USB 3.2 Gen 2

Correction: it’s now officially USB 10Gbit/s.

It’s amazing to me how much money Russia’s dumping into this drive for independence from Western tech (exchanging it for dependence on Chinese tech, but that’s another story), as if that’s going to be a long-term direction of the country. There’s precisely one person in Russia who actually thinks it’s a good idea, and he’s 71. Whoever succeeds Putin will inevitably have to mend those bridges, and the West will be all too happy to play along if only to prevent Russia from becoming a full-blown ally of China.

Also, Russian customers still have access to all the Intel/AMD/Nvidia tech they want; even if they’re not supplied officially, pipelines have been established for importing through neutral third countries. My personal PC has a 4090, a 5800X3D and an ATX 3.0 PSU, none of which were ever officially available in Russia since they released after Feb 2022.