this little mini pc here from b-link is their gt r5 it is very powerful because it has the ryzen 9
5 900 hx within this with vega 8 graphics now this configuration they sent out to me has 32 gigabytes
of storage with 500 gigabytes of pcie fast storage there too as well however you can expand upon the
storage because there's an empty sata 3m.2 slot and room for a 2.5 inch drive even though the pc
is very small has a top fingerprint reader it can run three display outs which is very good so 4k
60 and even a single display hdmi 4k 120 hertz i have tested that is also working it has two
2.5 gigabit lan ports on this and wi-fi 6e and no this rtx 3080 ti i have here isn't just for show
i'm going to test it out and see if i can get it to work with the b-link gtr5 here pcie to pcie m.2
included in the box you'll find a user manual now that's in various languages we have a power supply
cable short hdmi cable that's handy if you're going to be visa mounting it a normal sized
hdmi cable the power supply which is 90 watts and then some screws here for a 2.5 inch sata drive
and the mount this mini pc has a typical build quality that i've come to know with blink which
is very good so we've got middle around the outside 3.5 millimeter headphone jack with
mic support this is usb 3.1 gen 2 usb 3.1 clear the cmos so you might need this because the bias
is completely unlocked if you do happen to mess up any of the settings and it won't boot that's
what it's there for and dual array microphones on the mini pc itself is quite handy and then on
the back here that's the exit vents for the fan inside the fans that are in there that's going
to be blowing out the hot air of this powerful ryzen 9 5 900 hx with its eight cores 16 threads
so this is power in and we've got two displays here that they can support so that is 4k
60 on both of these hdmi 2.0 and then displayport 1.4 with them so another two usb 3.1s two usb
2s there which is good for mouse and keyboard of course and then we've got two 2.5 gigabit
lands there which is very good because not only are they fast but we've got two of them
either side we do have these vents there so that's just to help with the airflow and the cooling so
we have plastic along the top here fingerprint reader this is the mesh over the top so intake
for the fans which then blow out the back and the underside there's just some notes here which
is quite good that tells you how to get into the bios and here we do have the two mounting points
for the visa mount bracket which is included in the box so there are rubber feet here and
then these four screws which i'll remove to show the internals then to get the back off there's a
little tab here and you simply just need to pull up on that and this will come up but you do have
to be careful because we have our sata mount there so there's a cable that's connected on this side
that you do have to be careful of so crucial ram kingston drive and the wireless card real tech the
only thing i don't like here is those antennas have been glued on i do like it when companies
just put that adhesive plastic over the top to stop the wireless antennas coming loose in transit
in typical b-link fashion the bias is completely unlocked so we've got a lot
of advanced options that you can tweak ram this configuration the one that you want to
go into isn't the amd overclocking it's amd cbs and this one which is the mbio comment options
you can adjust the allocated memory there so the igpu configuration is for the vega 8. now you can
set this to game optimized and that's going to give us i believe two gigabytes of ram dedicated
to the vega 8. now i'm not gonna mess with this i'm gonna keep it all default as is as you get it
out of the box for the purposes of my review but that's where you wanna make any changes if you do
now you can tweak other things like ram timings and whatnot but i do not recommend it because
it's never taken for me with amd you end up breaking it and you have to reset the bias so just
don't go there those are really the only settings you want and you can even configure it to detect
the power state and automatically power on so it could be run as a server this mini pc is
running windows 11 as you can see and it is all activated no problems now the general performance
very quick as you can imagine with 32 gigabytes of ram and the ryzen 9 5 900 hx so i won't go
over this in detail because general day-to-day performance spreadsheets documents all very quick
so internal storage we have 512 gigabytes that ssd that i showed you well 500 gigabytes and the
speeds here they're not bad under the devices we have an aegis tech touch fingerprint sensor
so that's the one on the top that you press down and you can use it for windows hello just to log
in straight away no passwords required you see that we do have both of these real tech
that is the two lan ports they're very quick these ones 2.5 gigabits per second and they are
working just fine no problems with them and this too so it's an rz 608 wi-fi 6e for our wireless
chip and that does have bluetooth 5. so geekbench 5 score single core score there and then the
multi-core especially that is a great score and what i kind of expect out of this with the 16
threads so excellent performance multitasking on this is great not a problem i don't see any
slowdowns or anything whatever i'm throwing at it so graphics from the vega 8. it's not too bad i
mean for integrated graphics these scores here for time spy i have seen a little bit faster but it's
good okay for this type of chip and then our fire strike score getting almost 4 000 points is what
i would expect yes out of vega 8 here and running this ram and this configuration with the ryzen 9
cinebench r23 we do get a very respectable score considering how small this mini pc is so over
11 000 points here is excellent and nearing 1500 for the single core score very powerful
what is also excellent is its playback support here so for hevc vp9 and i have a test file here
which is 10 bit this is 4k 140 megabits per second and this is not a problem at all for
the vega 8 graphics no drop frames here that's very smooth that of course is 4k 30 so i will
step it up now to a 4k 60 file and again no issues playing this 4k 60 sony swordsmith file
that is not dropping any frames so it is an absolute beast really when it comes to media
playback video files anything you throw at it it will be able to handle just fine
4k 60 frames per second streaming with youtube here this is in chrome and i will enable these
stats for nerds so it just dropped a couple of frames at the start and that's probably because
of my internet connection which is terrible but now as it is playing there is no problem here with
it at all oh it's dropping a few here okay it's just a bit random i think that's my internet why
this is happening but normally it is flawless but chrome could be the issue here i've noticed that
with edge it didn't seem to drop any frames at all gaming now so this is the gta 5 on the low kind
of settings well actually it's normal settings right here and 1080p resolution getting around 80
frames per second what i do like is that the clock there for the vega 8 graphics or gpu clock always
at a solid maximum 2 100 megahertz this means we are getting peak performance here and you
can see that even at 1080p with the normal or medium settings that's pedestrian density
population and uh the view density distance sorry it means it's playable here so this is
great for integrated graphics performance i think this is excellent vega 8 is still
almost about the same if not ahead of the iris xc at least or the 11th gen that i
have been testing out and even when there's a bit of action going on really good frame rate
cyberpunk 2077 this is a very demanding game i have it set to 720p lowest possible
settings and the frame rate in the lower 30s here i don't think is too bad now there are
not a lot of npcs around just randomly shoot at people and see that yes doing so and with
more action it will drop down more the frame rate but it's not bad at all vega 8 is holding up well
here and look at that clock again the gpu clock is stable at the 2100 megahertz it's not budging it's
not throttling down at all and the temperatures when gaming are normally in the mid 70s another
positive and yes there is a lot of tearing around as you can see i probably need to turn on vsync
thermals and power consumption so i've seen 76.8 watts is the highest that it has pulled and the
lowest has been 6 watts exactly but right now i do have a couple of applications open and a usb
drive plugged in it's using 13 14 and sometimes 12 watts which is fine for a mini pc like this
so the thermals are good there is no thermal throttling it gets up to 85 degrees 86 and
that's it all right it's not going to go over that however the fans that is my only real complaint of
this mini pc the fans when it is under load can get a little loud and they're on all the time
and can you run an external gpu the answer is yes this is an rtx 3080 ti the azus tough gaming
and you see it does all right this is the time spy score getting close to 19 000 on
the graphics score which is exactly the same well almost identical to what i run with my
desktop the only difference is the cpu score is lower so it is the ryzen 5900 hx that's limiting
my score with this so it's simply just a m.2 pci adapter to then a pci gpu so we've got the slot
there and it runs just fine perfect no real tweaks i just have to use the sata 3 as my boot drive
4k video editing is possible with this vega 8 graphics and the ryzen 9 here 5900 hx
now i do have a playback that is set to just a quarter resolution you can probably run half but
with 4k files like this i don't think it's wise to really go over that considering we don't have a
dedicated gpu here now i'm not really noticing any slowdown or any problems with just a simple basic
edit here but what about our export times just how fast will one minute of footage be let's find out
and it is about to finish up so there we go you can say approximately 42
seconds for one minute of 4k footage to be encoded at the youtube preset that's really good
finding linux support just very quickly that yes it will run it it will boot however i ran
into issues with the wireless cards and then the two lan ports on this so you do need to
hunt around for drivers in order to fix that okay so final verdict on the gtr5 here is that it is a
really good mini pc ample power there thanks to the eight cores 16 threads vega 8 graphics for
integrated graphics does perform really well and it does not throttle down there's no throttling
whatsoever with this build quality is excellent i really like the fact that b-link do give us an
unlocked bias we have even things labeled like how to get into the bios
and all the parts inside are laid out quite good for easy access there to install more storage if
you wanted to do so you can run three displays at 4k60 has two lan ports which we don't often see
and wi-fi 6e with bluetooth 5. there is only one thing i don't like about this mini pc
and that is the trade-off that so much power there generates a lot of heat they have to run the fans
quite high rpm so you do hear it often especially if you're pushing it hard
sounds a little bit like a gaming laptop there so it's not the quietest mini pc i have tested out
and then if you want to do a bit of a hack there like my frankenstein gaming mini pc that i did
with this you can do this connect up an external gpu so it has to give up of course one of the m.2
slots that well the pcie the only one we have on there to then an external pcie gpu set up
like this and that does mean the boot drive has to become one of the sata 3 drives but it did
not seem to throttle or affect the performance of my rtx 3080 ti the time spy score was pretty much
identical to my desktop which is really good to see that a mobile ryzen 9 apu is not really
limiting at least with that test this external gpu setup if you were going to go down that path
but it's a bit ugly and you do need an external power supply depending of course on your gpu
so thank you so much for watching my review here of the b-link gtr5 ryzen 9 mini pc