One way to get Tiger Lake on desktop: this wild motherboard

(Image credit: Maxsun)

With some PC Chinese hardware brands starting to pop up in stores like Newegg, we’re going to be seeing more and more weird and sometimes wonderfully interesting innovations. To be clear, we’re not too sure this is one of them, but it is just, kind of wild.

Spotted by Tom’s Hardware, this desktop motherboard made by Chinese manufacturer Maxsun has an Intel i7-11800H, otherwise known as Intel’s Tiger Lake mobile chip released only earlier this year, baked in. It’s soldered straight to the motherboard. While it comes with a small heatsink, you’ll still need your own CPU cooler to stick on top.

Maxsun’s MS-Milestone i7-11800H Plus motherboard can support up to 64GB of DDR4 through the two provided spots, and has Intel's Xe graphics with 32 execution units for those wanting to go with integrated graphics. All in all, it actually looks like it could be a neat little low power machine, even if it’s one that’s borderline impossible to upgrade.

This board retails for about the equivalent of $450 USD and that seems like value to me. We haven’t spotted any laptops with this chip in them under $1,000 USD, and you could get far worse bang for buck on a regular desktop configuration.

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But what is potentially exciting is this is just the start. As we start to see more market bleed from China, there are bound to be some interesting and sometimes even affordable new options. When we’re in the middle of chip shortages with everyone scrambling for new hardware, products like these are finding a new niche.

That doesn’t mean we recommend going out and buying one of these yet, but we’d love to get our hands on one to see how it performs. Especially given the impressive numbers we’ve seen these mobile CPUs pull. It’d be nice if Maxsun could avoid soldering the CPU onto the motherboard in future, mind.

We recommend checking out our Black Friday deals before making any impulse purchases on random hardware.

Hope’s been writing about games for about a decade, starting out way back when on the Australian Nintendo fan site Vooks.net. Since then, she’s talked far too much about games and tech for publications such as Techlife, Byteside, IGN, and GameSpot. Of course there’s also here at PC Gamer, where she gets to indulge her inner hardware nerd with news and reviews. You can usually find Hope fawning over some art, tech, or likely a wonderful combination of them both and where relevant she’ll share them with you here. When she’s not writing about the amazing creations of others, she’s working on what she hopes will one day be her own. You can find her fictional chill out ambient far future sci-fi radio show/album/listening experience podcast right here.

No, she’s not kidding.