I've said it before: AliExpress is a land of horrors and wonders in equal measure. Some of the hardware combinations sold there seem impossible, and any search for extended support or warranty is a game of roulette, but if someone out there is willing to bet, they'll find exotic configurations like this nameless motherboard, based on the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS. That's right, a Mini ITX motherboard with the latest of the mobile Ryzen chips, and a PCI Express slot. Wendell from Level1Techs gave it a look, and this is what he found...
A while ago, the name Erying took the hardware forums by storm. That company began distributing motherboards with Intel mobile processors, mixing engineering samples and models that were (supposedly) meant for laptops. The Web filled with guides, tutorials, alternate BIOSes, and horror stories with errors and crashes... but that's the point: The boards are entertaining, and gave rise to a lot of experimentation.
What about AMD hardware? Well, there are many Mini PCs, more than we can count, and almost all of them use mobile versions of AMD Ryzen chips. However, Wendell from Level1Techs entered AliExpress territory and discovered a nameless motherboard based on the AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS. It's the fastest Ryzen 7 of the Hawk Point family, and with a maximum TDP of 54 watts, the Mini ITX format suits it quite well:
A Mysterious Motherboard with a Mobile Ryzen Processor
From the start it's clear we're looking at an unusual creature: its four 2.5G LAN ports and Mini SAS connectors equivalent to eight SATA ports (plus a standard SATA3 port) betray a certain NAS origin for the hardware, but the 24+8 pin ATX connections and the PCI Express 4.0 x16 slot (with x8 wiring) point to desktop use. It uses DDR5 memory in SODIMM format, and includes two connectors for NVMe M.2 2280 drives (one on the front, and one on the back).
The presence of HDMI and DisplayPort outputs confirm access to the Radeon 780M graphics available in the Ryzen 7 8845HS, but Wendell didn't do any multimedia testing; instead, he decided to explore its potential as a server or router. I imagine the motherboard is too expensive for those roles (the price averages around 600 euros), however, it's only a matter of time before the videos of “gamer PCs” with this hardware explode on YouTube.
