Nintendo Switch 2 Motherboards with Chips Available in China for $124 — Directly Sourced from Production Line PCBs

Oh man, just two weeks after the new Nintendo Switch 2 dropped, some crafty folks in China are already snagging its production-line motherboards. Yep, these resellers are hawking them for $120 on places like Goofish. Baffling, right? I stumbled upon this via some dude named HXL on X (that’s what Twitter is going by these days…still weird to me).

So here’s the deal. In their pics, you see these panelized PCB designs. Imagine a bunch of little PCBs chilling out together on one big board before they get cut apart. Yeah, kind of like those pre-sliced brownie trays. Foxconn’s in the mix too. They’re the ones who separate these panels later on.

Here’s the kicker: these PCBs look just like the official ones, complete with those quirky marker stamps from the assembly line. But, uh, they’re missing some metal shielding bits. Not a huge deal, but still a thing.

I did some snooping around Nintendo Japan’s repair costs – out-of-warranty, they’ll bill you $175 for a PCB fix or swap. So, these aftermarket boards seem like a solid deal if you’ve got a trusted local repair guy who won’t botch it. But, heads up, Nintendo might have some sneaky ID system on these parts to mess with the third-party repair gigs. Who knows?

Now, wouldn’t it be wild if someone went all Frankenstein and built a Switch 2 from scratch with this motherboard and random parts? Sadly, that’s probably just me dreaming out loud – the parts are rare since the console just launched. The motherboard’s packing Nvidia’s Tegra T239 SoC. That’s tech talk for 8x Arm Cortex-A78C cores and a rather beefy Ampere GPU with 1,536 CUDA cores, courtesy of the GB10 die, whatever that is. Fast, yet oddly cheap, using Samsung’s older 8nm and 10nm tech from, like, 2020.

Oh, get this – in some durability test, the Switch 2 survived being clobbered with pliers 50 times. Seriously. However, it lost in a duel against…staples. Apparently, GameStop folks stapled receipts to the box, and the screen said “nope.” And remember iFixit? They dropped the original Switch’s repair score from 8 to 4 out of 10? They’ve now given the Switch 2 an even harsher 3 out of 10. Honestly, this flunking trend’s got to stop. Consumers will feel the pinch once Nintendo’s warranty’s toast or if they refuse repair requests.

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