Strange AliExpress Motherboards with Built-in CPUs: Erying Skyline & Polestar

The Erying Skyline and Polar Star (sometimes "polestar") motherboards offer a unique combination of a laptop CPU with pseudo-DIY motherboards, potentially offering a good value short of going full DIY. You could build cheaper than 13400 and board combo with this - but it comes with some oddities (and some bizarrely honest marketing). The mini-ITX board in particular is a fairly high-power laptop 12th Gen 12700H CPU with a custom-made "IHS," with the CPU directly soldered to the board. We also bought one with an 11980HK - -but we got malware flags on the driver downloads.



TIMESTAMPS

00:00 - Curious Mini-ITX Motherboard
01:29 - Directly Soldering the CPUs
03:36 - Cultural Background on 'Weird' Products
05:45 - Features & Tearing it Down
10:19 - The Backplate & 'IHS'
12:04 - Impressive Honesty
13:43 - BIOS... Creativity
15:50 - Benchmark Disclaimers
17:29 - Gaming & Production Benchmarks
20:54 - Malware Concerns - Maybe
22:56 - Interesting & Unique

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Host, Tear-Down: Steve Burke
Testing, Writing: Jeremy Clayton
Video: Vitalii Makhnovets
Video: Mike Gaglione

[TheMhannah]

Just the fact that they are going through the trouble to translate into how many languages, and being very upfront about issues, I have to give them props.

[penteractgaming]

It is shocking how transparent this company was about possible problems. A refreshing change

[royboysoyboy]

When ASUS screws you so hard, you turn to the depths of AliExpress for a decent deal

[Pwnr]

I bet they're thrilled seeing their benchmark as compared to top brands in a controlled environment. Such a "we did it guys" moment for a proof of concept. This is awesome.

[giZm]

Those item descriptions are adorably honest. Back-alley chop/solder shops coming up with their own hacked products like this is the kinda cyberpunk future I've always imagined, and it's somewhat eco friendly on top of that. It'd be cool if GN could cover more stuff like this in the future.

[Frendh]

I am impressed by Erying's company morals. They are being upfront with a lot of sketchy things, maybe even upfront with everything they are aware of.

[Cory_]

I always appreciate how you don't immediately write off things as garbage and give them just as fair of a shot as any other product.

[cmd]

It became very famous in Brazil last year. Many people bought it to build their gaming rig based on that mutant solution because it was cheaper than a desktop regular version. Good to see Steve reviewing it!

[sneugler]

I fully support them harvesting otherwise trashed silicon and breathing new life into them. These are a super cool concept, I hope they expand upon them in the future with 13th gen and beyond. It’d be even cooler if they start putting their own twist on them by adding cool features otherwise missing from other mobos.

Please make some more content about stuff like this, it’s great :)

[nonyabizz]

For about $250, I bought the Erying 11th gen i9 engineering sample motherboard, with 32gb (16x2) ddr4 3200 Erying brand ram.
I used it to upgrade my father's ancient gaming setup.

The Erying ram worked at 3200 right away without going into the bios, and I have been absolutely tickled how well the system has worked and how stable it is. I think these are such cool boards they've made, and it was fun using something so unique to build my old man an upgraded system.

[xxtimo_titanxx]

that's honestly super cool and so interesting, crazy how much stuff is not covered because of mainstream brands.

[fonsui]

the disclaimers and explanations are, in my experience, entirely or nearly entirely unique in this market. very impressed and pleased with this choice that the manufacturer made - i always say that people arent mad because they dont get what they want, people are mad because they got what they didnt expect. directness and forthright communication like this manufacturer has shown should be encouraged and acknowledged. thanks to the GN crew for bringing this content piece to us!

[RafitoOoO]

I have one of those. Bought because I needed a new budget pc on the side and thought it'd be fun. Honestly once I managed to stable the OC I never had ANY issue. It's legit insane the value you get from this little board+cpu combo.

[nemtudom]

13:50 Honestly, the fact that they figured out on their own, how to engineer a bios, is just impressive as heck

Kudos to them

[scoophaines]

This is low key kinda awesome . I love the idea of repurposing ewaste into something usable . Wouldn't mind seeing them do a mini PC,

[HackThemDown]

Their honesty was a breath of fresh air and also the options in the BIOS was nice to see, we'd have to spend a fortune for a motherboard with all those options from the big manufacturers!

[ThePhil]

When a relatively obscure Chinese Company is, or at least appears to be, more honest than a lot of big established household Names, what fun times these are.
Always fun to see the more unknown items up for reviews, would definitely like to see more of them.

[carbon_no]

The fact that the company provided so much information and the fact that they were so open about about limitations and possible shortcomings, is very rare these days. Getting the money for products is prioritized so much more than being upfront or taking longer to ensure a quality product is developed and sold. There’s inconceivable amounts of variables, but when companies release products that they legitimately have the opportunity to actually fix any quirks and they choose not to, that becomes a telling sign of the core.

[Akselmoi]

I think it's brilliant to recycle laptop CPU's like this. We should do this over here too, there's tons of really viable laptop parts but discarded as broken because something else broke.

[telumatramenti]

The complexity that went into DIY-ing something like this is simply astounding. And I worked on many similar Mini ITX format setups from the more known manufacturers who have better resources and funding, so seeing smalltime technical teams Frankenstein something like this from components pulled from other products, and without formal support from the parent companies is quite inspiring.