AMD 4800S Desktop Kit review: playing PC games on the Xbox Series X CPU

What if you could take the Zen 2 CPU cores found within Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, transplant them onto a PC motherboard, install Windows and actually play PC games on them? Short of hacking the console and somehow crafting drivers for it, it’s a pipedream, but we can do the next best thing. AMD recently – and somewhat stealthily – released the 4800S Desktop Kit for Chinese OEMs. It’s a Micro ATX motherboard built around the Xbox Series X APU, shipping with 16GB of GDDR6 memory. The integrated GPU is disabled, but it is possible to install Windows on it, you can attach a decent graphics card – and yes, you can play PC games on an Xbox CPU.

The idea that this product even exists is baffling, but there is some logic to it. Not every PS5 or Series X chip that makes it off the production line is functional. There can be imperfections in the silicon that write off the chip – or parts of it. In this case, AMD chooses chips with defective GPUs, disables that graphics component and uses the CPU portion only. As you’ll see in the accompanying video – and indeed in the headline image – we can be sure it is Series X silicon because if you put the two chips side by side, they’re a match.

There’s also precedent with this happening before. The AMD 4700S Desktop Kit follows the same principles, although that’s built around defective PlayStation 5 processors. I do own a 4700S, but it’s a bit of a dead weight. PCI Express bandwidth is too limited to support high-end graphics, there’s no NVMe functionality and only two SATA ports. Meanwhile, the cooler is slight to say the least. With the 4800S, AMD resolves all of these issues. There are four SATA ports, an NVMe slot, a meatier cooler and, although GPU bandwidth is still limited, the 4x PCIe 4.0 interface does produce good results from higher-end graphics cards.