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Whatever your political beliefs, we can all agree that China and the West have taken on a more adversarial relationship in recent years. So whether you’re rooting for Chinese innovation or wary of it, we wanted to make this video a window into what exactly is going on over in the 100-acre wood. Now, there is one part of this build we couldn’t get from a Chinese company yet. The processor. There are several domestic x86 chips like the Zhaoxin that we looked at a few years ago. But they are nowhere near the performance and efficiency of a modern Intel or AMD chip. More like CS slow. That is why we settled on the next best thing. Intel’s black edition China exclusive Core i5-13490F. It’s basically a 13400F, but with increased boost clocks and 20% more level three cache. There’s no official word from Intel on why these exist or who they’re even targeting with them, but Intel has been building these black edition chips for the Chinese market for three generations now. Just like how for three generations, my forefathers have been producing segues to our sponsor. Odoo, throw away all those mismatching apps that you’ve been using to run your business. Odoo’s all-in-one business software can help you focus on improving your business, not juggling apps. Click the link below, or watch till the end of this video to learn more. To pair with our deliciously smooth black label processor, MaxSun sent over their iCraft Z790 white motherboard. It’s got all the usual accessories in the box, like a QR code that you can scan that thanks you for choosing their graphics card. The user manual, which is also a QR code you scan, and only available in Chinese. Luckily, Google Translate does PDFs now. As well as the standard cables, a nice little case badge, and some ultra-kawaii enchanted princess stickers, but… that’s not what I’m into. This is what I’m into. It comes with a mounting plate that you can use while you test your build outside the case. How cool is that? And it even comes with a little screwdriver. It has a Gen 5 GPU slot with a mix of Gen 3 and 4 for the rest. All four M.2 slots are Gen 4 and it’s got a pretty decent mix of I/O considering the price. USB 20 gig, two and a half gig LAN, Intel Wi-Fi, and a handy-dandy clear CMOS button on the back. Altogether, this is an uncharacteristically premium looking motherboard from a brand that I’ve only ever really known for its weird products. And for 1149 yuan, MSRP, or about 160 US dollars, it’s right in line with the cheapest Z790 motherboards on the market though. Maybe that makes sense that they can’t charge a premium given their brand reputation. Back in 2018, it was revealed that some of MaxSun’s H310 motherboards weren’t using the H310 chipset at all. Instead, they used minor hardware modifications and some BIOS hackery to make H110 chipsets appear as H310 allowing the use of eighth gen Intel processors. But what they couldn’t spoof was the ability to use DDR4 RAM. However, none of this is so bad that they don’t deserve a shot at redemption, and MaxSun’s strategy seems to be a good one, targeting the budget-minded high-end gamer, which is gonna end up being a bit of a theme for this build. Continuing with our RAM. We’ll be using this pair of dual-channel 16 gigabyte sharp blade DDR5 sticks from King Bank that- Ow! No, I’m just kidding. They’re not actually sharp. They run at 6,400 megatransfers per second, support XMP3, and, this is cool, King Bank lists the exact chips that they’re using on these sticks, which is a welcomed move that I wish more manufacturers would adopt. As long as we can trust them to use what they say they’re using, and King Bank, I’m not so sure. See, they say they’ve been around since 2001, but their website only shows up on the Wayback Machine as far as 2018. And their account on the popular e-commerce platform JD.com was opened only in 2016. It’s not the only thing we were able to dig up on them. They were sued alongside Adata by the alleged inventor of the USB flash drive back in 2016. But aside from this lawsuit, there doesn’t seem to be any readily available information on Google dating them before 2016. On Baidu, however, the Aichicha… Business Encyclopedia, similar to Bloomberg, shows them as being registered in 2014. Regardless, they weren’t publicly a noteworthy player in the memory space until sometime after the Made in China 2025 campaign kicked off in May 2015. That campaign kickstarted a lot of Chinese tech companies and birthed even more. One of those companies is the semiconductor fabricator, YMTC, who has made a lot of progress since their founding in 2016. And who made this SSD, this YMTC Zhitai PC-005 came from a seller on Newegg. It’s one terabyte and it’s only PCIe Gen 3, but it’s noteworthy because it was the first SSD to be produced entirely in mainland China. It’s been common for years to find some made in China components on an SSD, but NAND flash chips are usually produced by Korean or Japanese companies while the controllers have often been produced in Taiwan. Fun fact, by the way, these chips likely would have been used in the iPhone 15 were it not for international sanctions. Originally, the plan was to use these chips for iPhones sold in China, but because of their lower cost, Apple eventually changed the plan to use these for up to 40% of their iPhone NAND overall. At least they were gonna do that until 2022 when the US government added YMTC to the trade ban list, meaning they were no longer able to use American technologies in their products or their manufacturing processes, leading Apple to drop them from their plans. Lenovo still uses YMTC drives in some of their China exclusive systems though. Now let’s talk cooling. PC Cooler sent us a couple different options from their new CPS line of parts that’s aimed at the higher end market. And this is the CPS BE360. A 360 mil AIO with dual pumps, whatever that means, aluminum fins, and a copper base. There’s not much other information to glean from the outside. The base kind of looks like it uses an Asetek cold plate, but also the mounting mechanism is totally different and Asetek doesn’t use dual pumps. So maybe it’s their own homegrown thing. I noticed as I was playing with these fans, like, wow, these are really rigid. These feel really good. Wow, they look an awful lot like Noctua’s. They’ve even got the little. Removable rubber corner pieces. So boy, are they ever similar. We weren’t able to find much else about this cooler company but they also sent us this fish tank looking case. It’s kind of similar to the NZXT H9 Flow, but with a $100 MSRP, which is $60 cheaper. It looks pretty impressive. It supports ATX, MATX, mini ITX and the new YTX motherboard size, as well as having support for backside mounted connectors. It’s undeniably a little cramped to work in. I found that in particular, screwing in these bottom motherboard screws was pretty tricky, but for its size, it has ample support for fans and radiators, even if it lacks some creature comforts, like support for a vertical GPU mount or support for any GPU over 400 millimeters. Though luckily the biggest RTX 4090 we came across was 380 millimeters, so you can put pretty much whatever you want in this thing. This is looking great so far, aside from the weird yellow discoloration on the water cooling tubes. Anywho, along with their motherboard, MaxSun also sent over their RTX 4080, which I’ve been informed is gamer best choice. All right, MacSun. Let’s have a look, shall we? They’ve got a stabilizer included in the box and a GPU that feels beefy enough to need. Oh my goodness. Did they sneak into my brain to come up with the aesthetics for this back plate? Tanner’s giving me a look, but I like it. Triple fan cooler on the other side, and it’s got a shorter PCB, so it ends right here, so you get some of that blow-through action that helps with cooling. It’s not white, though. The annoying part is that they do actually have a white version that matches the branding with the Enchantment Heart Princess thing. It would have really matched the aesthetic of this build, but what are you gonna do? Other than the mismatched looks, I have no complaints, but on the ever-popular GPU forum on Baidu, which is kind of China’s version of Google, users have compared Max Sun’s after-sales support to Asus, for what that’s worth. When one user returned a GPU with a noisy fan, they were told it arrived with a scratch and therefore wouldn’t be covered under warranty because of physical damage. MaxSun allegedly pushed the customer to pay for repairs. Then when the customer refused, they said, "Okay, well, we’re just gonna send it back without repairing it." Except when it came back, the customer noted that the serial number didn’t match the serial number of the card they sent. MaxSun did end up issuing a public apology, as they should, and claimed that they would punish the entire customer service team involved in the incident. But whether they learned from that experience or not remains to be seen. What I know now is that this thing at least looks pretty interesting, even if we would have preferred the waifu edition. At this point, we’re pretty much done with this side of the case and it’s time to turn our attention to the back where cable management needs to be a thing and also we’ve got to install our power supply, but what power supply is it? Well, we went a little overkill and purchased the 1200 watt Great Wall Hunter’s Fire F12 on AliExpress. Despite having FIRE in big letters on the front of the box, it seemingly is a fairly solid offering. 80 plus platinum, advertising 93.7% efficiency and Japanese capacitors. From what we can tell, it appears they’re manufactured by Nichicon, Rubicon, and possibly Nippon Chemicon. Now granted, we have not sent this through the labs team yet as of the time of writing, but we are going to link to the results for this power supply in a pinned comment as soon as we’ve got them. It feels really light for a 1200 watt power supply. Price-wise, it’s listed usually for around 140 US dollars on popular Chinese marketplace sites, which is pretty appealing for this wattage and efficiency level. But we didn’t choose it for the price. Great Wall is a very widely distributed brand around the globe, but remains relatively unknown in the West. This is likely by design since their focus is on their OEM work, rather than their own branded power supplies. They provide PSUs for all kinds of pre-builts, as well as for better known enthusiast brands like Corsair and Asus. This model even uses Corsair type four cables, meaning that our kit from Cable Mod worked perfectly. Now, Great Wall is an organization that is really interesting. As a subsidiary of the state-owned China Electronics Corp, their sister companies are involved in all kinds of shenanigans. There’s Tongguang Group, an electrical infrastructure manufacturer who’s assisted with building Belarus’s nuclear power plant, and Fidium, a fabulous semiconductor company who makes ARM server processors, including for the servers that were used to test China’s DF-17 hypersonic missile. There’s also Panda Electronics, who manufactures and assembles desktops and laptops, including these kind of neat-looking, water-cooled gaming PCs that they built for North Korea. They even included a Corsair power supply in it. Big moment. Time to see if it works. Or wait, no, we’re getting a monitor. Ah, another interesting OEM that many of you might not have heard of is KTC, who has a history of producing displays for the likes of Samsung, ViewSonic, and LG. The MSRP for this bad boy is around 200 US dollars, but on Taobao, it regularly sells for 140, 250. Unfortunately, the height isn’t adjustable, but it’s otherwise comparable to this ONN 27-inch curved monitor from Walmart that has the same resolution, size, panel type, refresh rate, and response time. This one, notably, has two DisplayPort inputs rather than two HDMIs, and… Ooh, support for HDR 10. Although at this contrast ratio, I’d probably rather have the more robust stand from the ONN. KTC does produce mini LED and OLED displays as well, but at much higher prices. Let’s see if it works. Ooh. Were all these RGB fans included at that $100 price? Yeah, six of them. Man, this build looks kind of awesome. And look, it even booted. But wait. I’m gonna need peripherals. I’m gonna need peripherals. Meet the Hecate G3M Pro by… Meet the Hecate G3M Pro by Edifier. Yes, that Edifier, the one that we do know in the West, but more for their premium audio products. Their Hecate-branded eSports peripherals includes a few keyboards, mics, and mobile phone chillers. The G3M Pro weighs 62 grams. It features a PAW3395 sensor and a little switch on the bottom to switch between switches? That’s right. You heard me. You’ve switched between the switches. Noisy. Quiet. Noisy. Quiet. The noisy switch is a Huano blue shell pink dot, while the quiet one is a Huano micro motion switch. That’s better. And how much fun is this vibrant yellow USB-C charging cable? These are available for $40 on Chinese sites like mechkeys.com or 55 if you want the transparent version. And at that price, it seems like a pretty good value. Across all three pairing modes and with both switch types, it managed very reasonable latency results with only about a half a millisecond added by the 2.4 gigahertz wireless dongle. You know what else has a wireless dongle? This F98 keyboard sent to us by Aula. It’s a 99 key layout. It weighs a kilogram. And it will run the average Taobao or JD shopper around 370 yuan or a bit more than 50 US dollars. Really? That’s it, huh? She clacks pretty nice for 50 bucks. Like many of the products we’ve looked at today, it’s more expensive through Western brands like EpoMaker because, I don’t know. F*** you, Guilo, I guess. But anywho, it’s hot swappable and uses semi-transparent ACE sole switches made by Leobog, Aula’s sister company. For our first one, not too bad. Function shift seems to change the mode of the RGB on the side that I didn’t even notice before. It’s the only one that knows on both sides. Function tab changes the, you can see here as I go function tab. Not on mine. Not on your, really? Just wondering if there’s a lock somewhere here or something. Hey, there we go. Function backslash. Here’s all. All your different lighting modes. Dang, that’s cool. And in our labs tests, we found some really great consistency across the board with the switches traveling four millimeters with a 1.9 mil 40 gram actuation point and a bottom out force of 55 grams. Now, that’s not to say we didn’t have any issues on one of our units. The screws that hold the name plate onto the front here have caused the transparent plastic to do what transparent plastic does best, cracking, but it’s only a little. And overall, given the price, I really like this thing. Aula’s biggest claim to fame is not their own branded products though, but rather their status as an OEM of keyboards, mice, and headphones for companies like HP, AOC, Philips, and Lenovo’s Leku. They also have a wide array of very entry-level mechanical keyboards that can be purchased in bulk for dirt cheap. But this collab with Epomaker seems to indicate that their focus could be on premium products in the longer term. Now it’s time to try it all together. I’ll accept that. It’s time to play some games on this thing, but before we do, overall guys, I am kind of loving the look of this build and the overall value per dollar, other than the GPU, which is on the expensive side for a 4080. Everything in here is really reasonable, especially this keyboard. I am loving this keyboard mouse combo for under $100. One thing I’m noticing right away is that this SSD is not very fast. Its usage is extremely high and the data rate while patching Halo Infinite is pretty slow. Let’s give it a quick rebooty boot and see if maybe, you know, we can enable XMP, tell it, "Hey, maybe you want a turbo "for a little bit longer," that sort of thing. Pretty normal looking BIOS layout. Oh, that’s cool, legacy game compatibility mode. You can press the scroll lock key to toggle the efficient course between being parked and un-parked when the LED is on and off. Is this a thing? I have no idea. Maybe I just missed it, but I had not seen that before. Oh, turbo, here we go. Okay. I don’t see any obvious way to increase the turbo duration or anything like that though. So, all right, let’s see. Wait a second now, this is curious. Power button on the motherboard. Sure, that I expect to see. Power button on the GPU. What do you do? I didn’t even notice that was a screen. Is it even a screen? No. No, it’s just LED lighting with a clear. Okay, so that’s pretty cool though. There’s one here too. All right, let’s see if those memory settings stuck. Yep, 6400. Maybe the CPU just didn’t need to turbo that high yet. Guess we’ll find out. Oh, there it goes. Oh, I saw four gigahertz there. All right. By the way, did you guys notice our white cable ties we were using earlier? We have so many different colors on LTT store. No complaints when it comes to performance. Good gravy. We’re looking at anywhere from 150 to 200 FPS in the 1% low. So averages are more like 250 FPS. And this is at 1440p Ultra in Halo Infinite. I think the star of the show. is the case. Just outstanding. A hundred bucks with all that RGB, all that cooling potential and looking like that. For better or for worse guys, it is a really interesting time for Chinese PC tech. Semiconductor manufacturing on the mainland continues to grow and evolve while the government seems dead set on eliminating any dependence on foreign technology, which is of course the primary drive behind their Made in China 2025 initiative. Just like the major initiative I have to tell you about our sponsor, oh no, Odoo. 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Odoo Unify your processes by checking out the link below for a free 14-day trial or to set up a demo with Odoo’s expert team If you guys enjoyed this video, check out the pre-built PC we bought from Taobao. It had a very strange motherboard in it that is worth taking a look at.
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