hi guys Chris here back checking out another mini PC this is one that a
viewer said why don't you check this one out here it was : thank you so much for
pointing me in the right direction to pick this up from Aliexpress for 400 us
now why this little mini PC is interesting as you can see it's got a
small form-factor it's got a little bit of upgrade ability but it also packs
quite a bit of power with an Intel 8th gen I7 8750H in here so that's a 6 core
12 thread CPU and it also has 2 SSD slots in here which are the nvme form
factor so you can put a lot of storage in it also a 2.5 inch hard drive bay it
comes with a wireless AC chip in there a little tiny card you can upgrade that as
well little antennas you see on the rear but it's a very good little mini PC the
best that I've looked at in some time so let's take a look at what we've first
get in the box and the design of this little mini PC from Aliexpress so let's
check out what we have in the Box first side is well packaged up there's some
padding around it there's the mini PC obviously and feels pretty heavy we'll
have a look at that in some detail in just a minute so we have two remaining
boxes here okay there's a instruction or leaflet that looks like it could
actually all be in Chinese and yes it is so not too much used they're all Chinese
and here is oh how supply by the looks of it yes and we've got a bracket here
so that's for a visa mount so you can put it on the back of a monitor or a TV
if you wanted to and this one I think is another cable or something here so let's
take it out so we've got to be you cable here that's good
let's just fill out some screws so that's obviously the screws for mounting
and some little rubber feet here is well for the mini PC and then this must be
the power supply right here so we'll check out the writing of that okay so
there it is it looks like a notebook power supply as you can see with the
plug that we've got right there and the maximum voltage output is 19 volts 4.7
and so if you needed a replacement it's positive in the middle and they also did
include an HDMI cable so the frame of the whole thing is
made out of MIDI you can see the back there we've got those tiny little
antennas now these things are really small but they are the standard
connectors this is a SMA I think it is so you be able to get replacements that
are higher gain antennas that just those tiny little ones they've included I
don't know why they didn't just put normal bigger ones in the box so the top
of it if we are looking at that that way so the top is where we've got our fan
you can see good ventilation is ventilation all around so far and we've
got type C port on the front 2 USB 3 power status LED and then it's 3.5
minimum headphone jack now that type C port I believe is only just USB 3 spec
it's not Thunderbolt it's not Jin 2.1 or anything like that 1.2 L on the back we
have a Gigabit LAN port there that's good so if you wanted to connect this up
maybe run it as a server or just have faster connection not even bother with
the wireless you can do that we've got display mini display out HDMI now I
think it is HDMI to spec but I will confirm that in this video another 2 USB
3 ports and then of course there is our DC and there for charging and some vents
here this looks like it could actually be yes it as a Kensington lock slot so
you'll be able to lock this little mini PC down if you needed to so on the left
and the right are those little mini PC there and no extra ports here we do have
top and bottom some gaps there so the ventilation looks to be pretty good of
course in this review I'll be covering the fan noise any throttling any current
limiting that all be covered then on the back of it we have four screws this is
the panel that we need to remove to get access to the internals of course to add
your components I just got the bare bone one you can buy ones that are
pre-configured and there are two little screw holes here and that of course is
for that visa bracket with the lid now removed you can see there this is where
the 2.5 inch drive is going to go there's a set of three of course and
here is our connector so later you would just plug that in and have that screwed
in place there I don't know how you're gonna actually do that are the two
screws there I see how you have to do it it's gonna be a little bit awkward I
think but it is possible we've got one of two sodium's slots so this is double
data rate for spec you can put two thousand four hundred megahertz RAM in
this and then underneath that set of three connector we have the MVM em2 or
SATA 3 connector see there's a screw right here you can just see
and this is where you would start that end so I'm gonna put one of those drives
in there and then I remove those four screws on the top to remove the top
plate which you can see is right here so that quite easy to come off in fact they
did not screw them down properly so now we can access our other sodium slot for
our RAM right here and then the main drive slot so this is the nvme slot you
can see it's just hidden right there and there is a wireless card down here as
well so that is upgradable if you wanted to put a better card in because they're
just using the 3165 and that has a maximum throughput of just over 400
megabits per second so you could go with one of those gigabit wireless cards if
you wanted to from intel the 9000 series alright so if now got my PCIe SSD which
is a samsung 970 evo in here 256 gigabytes and 16 gigabytes of hyper x
impact double data rate for RAM installed let's power it up so it looks
like our bias is completely locked out to us really there are no options this
is all you get there's a few under the boot menu you can adjust a few things
like the intel speedstep turbo options setter and irst configuration and then
your boot order so very basic all right so I've got it running now through just
a little portable 15.6 inch monitor qiao what's going to do some screen capturing
but unfortunately the RAM that's in my notebook I've had to have put it into
this mini PC so that's why I'm not doing a screen capture of this and I just
wanted to show you just a couple of things first here obviously Windows 10
you need to install that yourself the drivers will pull through from Windows
Update use your own license I bought one from ebay so that's an additional cost
of it cost me only about 10 us and it's working fine so Windows 10 home there I
didn't go to extreme my 960 Evo that Samsung nvme Drive that is also running
here you can see at its full speed so depends on what kind of drive you put in
here you can install a cheaper set of three if you wanted to and it would run
at then 500 reads in about 500 writes it's a very good speeds there so run a
couple of benchmarks as I normally do in these videos just to give you an idea of
the performance so what we're looking at right here is the same exact chipset so
the Intel Core i7 8750 H but in my laptop this
the GR 63 and you can see their performance they're very good the
multi-core score and now we have our little mini PC here from Aliexpress with
an even faster single core score for some reason multi-core score slightly
less but overall really good now this is stock I've done no tweaks no under
vaults at all there and the OpenCL score so this is the Intel 630 that's
integrated graphics em this is a good score for integrated graphics so Intel
really has improved things here and as you see later on you can play certain
games just of course with lower settings I did overclock this a little bit so you
can overclock the GPU the integrated GPU with Intel's XTU which I will show you
in ten seconds and I just over come to the hundred megahertz and this has
brought the scrub a little bit as you can see so here we have Intel XTU I've
under volted now a little bit on the CPU you don't have to do this but the
thermals are great it's not going to go over in my testing eighty degrees and
this is even with a boosted power limits you can see right here power limit by a
default is 50 watts in 58 peak the max boost so increased it a little bit just
to help with my performance there and it's holding 3.9 gigahertz on all six
cause without any problems you don't run into any thermal throttling occasionally
you will see our current power sorry power limit throttling that just
pops up now and then and that is kind of normal that's going to happen but
obviously it's all going to be really pendent really on what you're doing but
you don't normally see any of that so there's no real problems with any
throttling whatsoever so I'm impressed with that and I just increase the
graphics here so the clock at the top you can increase that by the ratio limit
so I increased it from 11 to 12 and then will give us twelve hundred megahertz
for the maximum turbo there on the GPU okay so a few other tests here I did run
Cinebench r15 and this is with the on dove under vault very good score here so
just over 1200 CB is really amazing for such a small little PC especially when
you factor in the fan noise of this which I will get onto later on this
review it's a very quiet little piece and it really is impressive the stock
score here I will just show you that as well is 1100 CB so that's without any
under vault again is still a very good score very impressive there and a
Pathmark rating as well so four thousand seven hundred and fifty six so that's it
for benchmark so I'm not going to show you any more than that it's performance
is really good for what it is so do have here are dope Premiere Pro that is open
latest version CC 2019 what I edit my videos with and I wanted just to
demonstrate that editing 4k video very good performance here with us no
problems I'm going to now encode one minute of footage and we'll see how long
it takes with hardware acceleration alright so here we go with the YouTube
4k preset I'm gonna hit export there and at the same time or a less hit the
stopwatch so let's see how long this takes to encode one minute of 4k footage
okay so it's just finishing up now just a few seconds left looking like it's
going to take about two minutes 30 seconds now there we go two minutes and
23 seconds to encode one minute of 4k footage with the YouTube preset I will
go back and to Intel XTU and have a look at how it fared here so
it was holding the 3.9 gigahertz across all the six-course there without any
problems and the maximum temperature got to was a 37 33 degrees there I can see
some reason I can't see all there was a package temperature run up there about
77 degrees is what it peaked at now I haven't had any problems at all with the
range and the reception of the wireless it has those tiny little antennas and
the Intel 3165 chipset you can upgrade it my pic speeds through it through some
downloads here with the steam you can see was 25 megabytes per second peak
which is not bad because faster cards I can normally get around 30 megabytes
peak or even up to about 35 as you would imagine with the core i7 8750 H in here
that everything is really fast it's very fluid
there's no point me going over basic things like document editing
spreadsheets and all that it's going to be very very quick
is a powerful chipset that is in here so I'm gonna go ahead and test out games
what about gaming performance let's find out if we can play a few titles on this
at least now often when I test out these many pcs the low-end once I do edit
documents and things like that and spreadsheets but there's no point in me
covering that here and even Chrome performance and stuff like that because
it is very very fast here I'll just go along and start opening up some random
tabs here and you'll see that I mean this Hardware is very quick this is
really high-end high-end notebook hardware this chip that's in here the
60/40 sorry 45 watt chip that's in this and you can see that as lighting up
everything really super quick in there and you can do YouTube streaming and 4k
you can play 4k videos vp9 native decoding HEV see no problems whatsoever
so let's skip a hit now and check out just a couple of games and see how this
chipset fears with that integrated graphics so this is a light title or
Counter Strike global Offensive on their highest settings 1080p and we're getting
around 50 frames per second so this is not too bad considering it as Intel's
integrated graphics so this one looks fine I'll step it up now with a more
demanding game will test out which the three okay so which is not faring as
well you can see 21 20 frames per second this is 720p on the lowest settings too
by the way C might better lower it to 800 x 600 get this game at least
playable but this one's just too demanding too slow for the Intel
integrated GPU and then GTA 5 this is running in 1080p on the lowest settings
is jazz playable here you probably want to run this one I would say and 720p be
a little faster it's not the best you can see but others play ball just
scraping that 26 frames 25 frames per second I thought it might run a little
bit better here but again we're just on an integrated GPU so it's not a gaming
beast this machine here and the shame it does not have Thunderbolt 3 either so
you cannot hook up an external GPU so there's many PC in one area has really
surprised me where they are often terrible and that is fan noise the fan
noise is actually very good it's quick to ramp up and quick to completely die
away as well which is great now we'll reach just over 50 decibels
and I'll give you a sample now what it's like the fan and a complete load but
when it's not under load you don't even hear it at all it's just so quiet very
impressive so after all that benchmarking stress testing and gaming
let's have a look at the surface temperatures and they do feel really
quite good so you can see it is heating up to just about thirty degrees
and along the top here doesn't seem to go over that okay about 35 but that's
actually pointing right into the internals now my probe but very good
very good and let's take a look at the power supply now so that is heating up a
little bit hotter actually up to 38 degrees now the power supply but overall
this is acceptable very good thermals on this okay guys here so to quickly recap
this has surpassed my expectations I did not expect the fan noise to be this good
the last ones I've looked at they've been a little noisy but this one when
you're not doing anything is just super silent it's whisper quiet the fans they
ramped up really well and then it disappears as soon as it cools down
enough the fan will go down with the temperatures very quickly so that is
great performance very very good plenty of storage options on this overall the
build quality is good and the design you can upgrade that Wireless if you're not
happy with the speeds the Ethernet port on here I did check out as well and
that's working fine so it is to me a recommended little mini PC if you don't
need an external graphics card so if you're not happy with the internal
graphics unfortunately you are stuck with it because there's no Thunderbolt 3
on this the only other thing that this mini PC for me is missing is hdmi 2.0
spec at least so we could get 4k 60 Hertz however there is mini display port
out on this so you can at least get 4k 60 Hertz so overall this is a very good
little mini PC now the price of this will all be going up and down that's why
le Xpress is like so wait until they have those sales and you might be able
to pick it up for jeepers this one cost me about
approximately 420 us which I feel is okay considering the spec what it's got
it's a tiny little size great little package great fan noise overall I'm
gonna be keeping this one here thank you so much for watching this review hope to
catch you with my next up-and-coming reviews and if you haven't please like
and also subscribe to the channel for more up and coming reviews bye for now
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