Kintex-7 board - good deal?

[PhiMX]

Hi there,

looking for a high LC-count FPGA board, I came across this dude here:

https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005003668804223.html

comparing to other offers of big FPGAs and especially taking into account the recent price spike, I wonder if I am either overlooking something or I am about to fall into a trap 
I mean, it´s a pretty basic board and it could well be that the chip isn´t new, but come on 120$ for a 326.080 LC-chip on a board? You´d be lucky to find a fake chip for 2x the price. The chip alone is 2000$ on digikey. If something is too good to be true, it probably is, but then again the seller seems reputable and all their other offers seem reasonable.
what do you think?




 

[woofy]

I would guess its a genuine offer. Probably a re-purposed mining rig FPGA. I would be happy to take a punt on it if I needed one.
Watch out for the cost of the xilinx licence though.
 

[BrianHG]

Well, the FPGA alone is a bit less elsewhere like here: https://www.questcomp.com/part/4/xc7k325t-1ffg676ces9937/433066084?utm_term=xc7k325t-1ffg676ces9937&utm_campaign=aktype0&utm_medium=industry-cpc&utm_source=findchips&utm_content=standardpricing

You cant beat 100$usd.

It's like the Arrow DECA board for 37$.  50k logic cell FPGA worth all on it's own ~250$ and with the chip shortage, around 3 months ago, someone out there bought out almost all 1,5k units within a 1-2 days and probably salvaged the FPGAs.  It's a shame for those hobbyists who want to learn HDL and now they only have 2 left.

[voltsandjolts]

Half of those DECA boards probably went to EEVBlog members, thanks to the thread here at that time

[asmi]

That chip can consume up to 20 A of power on Vccint rail alone. Do you see anything on that board that looks even remotely like it can output that kind of power? In the description they say: Default power source for board is: 1A@5V DC 
Underspecced PDS is an Achilles heel of most of those Aliexpress boards.

Also they don't provide a license voucher for this device, so you will need to either buy a full Vivado license (3k$), or source it elsewhere - like buy a Digilent's Genesys 2 board ($1k), which comes with a voucher for a device-locked license of Vivado. This board is the cheapest way I know of getting a license for K325T device, and it can be used for all speed grades and packages (which is a nice bonus).

[Someone]

Aggressive price points tend to be on the newest generation chips/dev boards. ZCU104 Evaluation Kit comes with a full license device locked to the XCZU7EV part.

[asmi]

Aggressive price points tend to be on the newest generation chips/dev boards. ZCU104 Evaluation Kit comes with a full license device locked to the XCZU7EV part.

This device is now included into their free Webpack license. Full list of devices included into free license is here: https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/vivado-ml.html#architecture And they do add more devices into free license from time to time, so it's worth keeping an eye on this list if license is something you are concerned about. I wish they would add a full Kintex-7 lineup in this list, as these are plenty of K325/K420 boards which can be acquired for a reasonable money, but license requirement greatly diminish their attractiveness.

[SiliconWizard]

That chip can consume up to 20 A of power on Vccint rail alone. Do you see anything on that board that looks even remotely like it can output that kind of power? In the description they say: Default power source for board is: 1A@5V DC  :-D

Yeah. QMTECH boards are OK for the less power-hungry FPGAs (Spartan 6, Artix-7 35 or 50...) but even for the Artix-7 100 and 200T, as I remember talking in another thread, they are underpowered. Unless of course you use only a tiny fraction of the FPGA, making it basically useless.

With no heatsink either. Fun =)

[Someone]

Aggressive price points tend to be on the newest generation chips/dev boards. ZCU104 Evaluation Kit comes with a full license device locked to the XCZU7EV part.

This device is now included into their free Webpack license. Full list of devices included into free license is here: https://www.xilinx.com/products/design-tools/vivado/vivado-ml.html#architecture And they do add more devices into free license from time to time, so it's worth keeping an eye on this list if license is something you are concerned about. I wish they would add a full Kintex-7 lineup in this list, as these are plenty of K325/K420 boards which can be acquired for a reasonable money, but license requirement greatly diminish their attractiveness.

Interesting the free coverage has expanded on zynq/mpsoc parts, beyond the resource count of the freely supported "regular" FPGAs (the example K325T being not in the free version).

[MadTux]

Watch out for the cost of the xilinx licence though.

Piratebay and an $100 laptop with Wifi disabled ;-)

[colorado.rob]

FWIW I just ordered another board from the "HPC FPGA Board Store" on Ali Express ( KC7K325T), along with a couple of the Sipeed Tang Nano 9Ks.