A Chinese firm called Erying Technology has released its first compact motherboards offering a choice of Intel Raptor Lake Mobile chips pre-installed, VideoCardz reports. It calls this PC DIY product category ‘Mobile on Desktop’, or MoDT. The new choices open to Taobao customers in China are Erying Micro-ATX form factor motherboards with either an Intel Core i5-13420H or i7-13620H pre-installed. Prices of these foundational system components start at 1299 Chinese Yuan ($180).
Once you buy the Erying motherboard, you will be stuck with your CPU, as it is soldered in place, being a laptop BGA package CPU. Other than that, these motherboards are almost as good as their thoroughbred desktop counterparts for expansion and upgrades.
Reports suggest that the chipset that is used by Erying for these refreshed MoDT components is the B760M. However, Intel’s mobile platforms have fewer PCIe lanes. There could be a little impact on a powerful gaming system based upon these boards, with the primary PCIe Gen 4 slot offering just 8 lanes for a graphics card. Such a limit isn’t thought to have serious implications in 2023, though. It is estimated that a GeForce RTX 4090, for example, will only lose low-single-digit percentage performance due to this restriction.
Beyond that primary PCIe slot limitation, the boards offer a PCIe Gen 4 x4 slot, plus two PCIe Gen4 x4 M.2 NVMe slots for your SSDs. To help you get a better overall grasp of what is on offer, check out the specs and feature table below.
It is interesting to note that RPL mobile chips have better iGPUs than their desktop counterparts, which are limited to 32 EUs. However, we think that these MoDT products will be most frequently selected by those wishing to equip a discrete GPU – otherwise you could use one of many extremely compact alternatives.
If the above sounds like the foundation for a compact system that would work for you, these MoDT platforms aren’t prohibitively expensive, assuming you can get your hands on them. You are limited with regard to CPU upgrades, but if you are gaming on a modern system the CPU is rarely the bottleneck.
The Chinese retail listings show the Raptor Lake Core i5 Mobile version is 1299 Chinese Yuan ($180), and the Raptor Lake Core i7 Mobile version of the system board is 1699 Chinese Yuan ($234). Buying these products in the west might be a little tricky, but we shall have to wait and see how widely they get distributed. Previous gen Erying MoDTs are available on AliExpress, for example.
