so i still try to check out tech that i think is interesting and cool and this one's been pointed
out to me a few times from some comments that i should review it it's a mini pc called the am r5
but they market it as a gaming mini pc it's powered by the amd ryzen 5 the 5600u
that's a 15 watt part so we're not off to a really good start for a gaming mini pc
however they have set a higher power limit we do have a little dial at the top of it to change
our different modes so we've got a silent mode auto and a performance mode and because it's
marketed as a gaming mini pc of course it does have some rgb bling on it you can see and you can
cycle through that with the settings the software that is included so configuration wise it does
come with 16 gigabytes of ram and 512 gigabytes of ssd storage that is nvme so pcie 3.0 spec
full specs type c port display port hdmi all supporting up to three monitors at 4k 60 it
even has a wi-fi ax so that's good to see wi-fi 6 support what does it sell for well i run about 500
us dollars so is it worth that price tag and is it really a gaming mini pc let's find out
so here's what the outer box looks like you can see it's a very different looking mini pc gaming
style one so just slip this off and we'll take a look at what we get included so the r5 here
presentation wise for the box very different from what we typically get and a little bit bigger here
so there is a user manual that's in various different languages just showing you where you can
upgrade the ram and how to slot it in how to take off the side of it but i will show you that too
go over all of it so these are the key features of there that it does have the power switching
modes on it you're basically just adjusting the power limit for it so silent mode auto mode
and a performance module channel ram and the dual ssd slot that yeah we all kind of know about so
just a protective bit of phone there on the top there is the mini pc so it's actually smaller than
what i thought it was going to be because i don't know on the box it makes it look kind of big
doesn't it so here we do have a hdmi cable okay so that's a standard kind of length one good that
they do include that our power supply so a little power supply brick and this is rated to 65 watts
well just under there and then of course the power cable for it so how do we access the internals now
this is really good i like this design because we just got magnets that keep this top on you pull it
out and it simply just slots out like so giving us easy access then to the other pcie 3.0 slot
when you first power on this r5 mini pc it just goes straight into windows now this is something
for security reasons obviously that i don't like because it could be that someone could have
installed something whatever but i would probably do a factory reset to start with but it does have
this a folder which is for the rgb lighting so if you do want that or you don't want that this is
the app you need to then just simply switch and turn it off you've got breathing option you can
cycle through all the different colors or rainbow that's it so not a lot personally i would just
turn that rgb bling off but hey it's up to you of course if you want that so for free memory we do
have 15.4 gigabytes because a little bit allocated to of course the vega 7 graphics with its seven
cores and i'll get on to the gaming performance later on you can see currently i'm in the power
mode too by the way with the switch i'll leave it in the performance mode the whole time 44 degrees
so far but i'll be monitoring those temperatures and the ram is running at the correct speed which
is good so we do have wi-fi ax with this mini pc which is the faster wireless which gets over
gigabyte speeds it's from realtek so that's great and the disk drive i'll get onto the benchmarks of
this mini pc just after this is an as int that is that ssd of course you can put your own pcie 3.0
ssd and you can expand upon the storage you'll see the ryzen 5 the 5600u shows up here 12 times
that's because it's got six cores and 12 threads in total this is a fast mini pc everything i do
loads in quick and snappy and you'd expect that with a pci e3 spec ssd and of course
the six cores and the the kind of power that this apu does have so those speeds there four pc ie3
they're slow the rights are a bit slower but this is still faster than sata 3 so it's okay of course
you can upgrade that put in your own fastest say samsung 970 evo if you wanted a little better so
document spreadsheet basic computing all really quick on this i will not be covering any of that
but here are some benchmarks there's a just a few of them here that i want to show you
so you can see geekbench 5 a decent multi-core score thanks to the 6 cores and the 12 threads
this is good performance single core score won't be as great as the intel's which is important with
gaming but then again it doesn't have a dedicated gpu it's vega graphics so the vega graphics here
you can see does perform reasonably well for integrated graphics it's getting a good score
this is a decent score and you can compare and run this benchmark to your own system so it's the
night ray 3d mark benchmark fire strike is well here too that you can get with the free version
uh for integrated graphics it's a good score now if this had a dedicated gpu i
would be a bit disappointed physics score again quite good there cinebench this is the last
synthetic benchmark i will show you uh there's no need for me to continue on with a whole bunch of
them but you can see again a decent score it's not bad for a six core apu that this does have
so what about video playback now because it's running windows 10 well it didn't have codec
support out of the box so i've installed uh vlc player which this should then open up okay i
need to select it here so these are some demanding video files just to see what the playback is like
now this shouldn't lag but it always does that even with the default windows player the initial
loadout of this demanding 140 megabit file does do that can see just a few little stutters and lags
otherwise the performance is quite good and that's the vega graphics
of course that's handling that so stepping it up now to 4k 60 frames per second
ah yeah that's why it wants me to buy the code no thank you microsoft i know there's a
way to do that uh to get it actually uh for free but anyway let's just try it with vlc
all right that is looking really good no stutters in the beginning that to me that oh that was that
was 60 frames per second so it's looking good that's good performance the vega graphics again
just handling all of that pretty much with ease no real problem playing those files
how about streaming 4k 60s a surprising amount of chipsets do choke on this because it is
quite demanding now this is through chrome i will just enable here our stats for nerds
and we'll see what's going to happen is it going to drop frame so i can see it's drop 24 ready and
looking reasonably stable with the occasional oh occasional drop frames per second but
just looking at that video do you notice it not really that much look it's just
40 then okay it takes a while so it's not constant frame dropping but it does happen
randomly now and then it seems to stabilize now a little bit oh more but then it just suddenly
dropped a whole bunch then so not perfect but i would still say this is watchable
now this i really do like and that is the speed through the type c port now this is limited by
the internal drive it's only writing at about 800 sequentials so it could actually be a lot
faster than this so good speeds through the type c port great to see that's not crippled
and that type c port does support 4k 60 video out you can run three displays with this mini
pc finally on to gaming after all they do market this as a gaming money pc so i wanted to test
out could it actually game and play titles that are really demanding extremely demanding
i like this game which is cyberpunk 2077. now i do have it set to 720p you could go a little bit
lower on the resolution but it's going to look like garbage i think 720p is okay i am of course
on the lowest settings but i believe there are other ways to actually lower it down even further
so you're getting close to around a playstation 4 level here of performance and that is 30 frames
per second with some clear screen tearing and some dips and things so the performance is not amazing
but considering look at the population density and how many cars are here and all being rendered it's
not doing bad now if the gpu wasn't throttling it would maintain 1800mhz the whole time and you can
see that it is actually dropping here down to 1600 1675 so a little bit of throttling taking
place the power usage has dropped from about 25 watts just down to 19 right now
gaming performance with gta 5 now is looking good very playable here this is 1080p normal settings
and i'm using basically the same save points that i always test out now i've seen the vega 8
graphics vega graphics get up to around 70 frames per second with higher power limits of course set
at 54 watts so you can see that occasionally it does dip down at 1800 megahertz to 1662 so there's
the occasional little bit of integrated graphics throttling happening there especially when i'm
firing things and stuff there's a bit of a frame dip there too so performance is it's good it's
playable definitely playable here an older title like this so for old games yes you could call
it a mini gaming pc but you know it doesn't have the dedicated graphics of course on this so it's
not very powerful so just stick to these older lighter titles and you should be fine for gaming
and here are the thermals so i have been pushing it hard with gaming benchmarks things like that
it gets up to 94 degrees it does not trigger any thermal throttling which is good fan noise yes you
hear it i would describe it as being basically like a gaming laptop cpu fan that's really it
okay uh it does run a lot quieter if you use silent mode or the auto mode you'll still hear
the fan cycle on and off and that is really it so not bad the thermals okay could be better and i
really think with this temperature here you cannot really push the power limit i would not increase
it in the bias from the stock auto setting of 25 watts if you go to 34 54 it will end up i think
rebooting itself because it'll just simply get way too hot so just keep it all at the standard
power limits unless you mod the cooler in there now to get into this bios you just need to tap
delete or f2 i typically just smash away at both of them when i'm powering on the system
then you get get straight into this menu so advanced tab chipset everything is open to us
completely unlocked bios be very careful what you change in here if you don't know what you're doing
just leave it you've got ram disk configuration great if you install a lot of ram imagine you
install 64 gigabytes or 32 you can make a small little ram disk for caching files and things
like that temporary because when you reboot you lose it and we've got this right here ac power
loss options so if you want to see all of that just quickly pause the video and then we do have
these settings here so mbio common options is basically the menu that most people will want
under advanced settings graphics configuration now this is normally auto i have it set to uma game
optimized now that is dedicating four gigabytes to the vega graphics which does these videos out
there help the average frame rate especially the lower frame rates just to boost them up a little
bit so that's why i've done it uh you can also try different options never set igpu disabled you run
into huge problems uh or auto but i would just leave it on auto here for that for most people
now if you want to increase power limits i don't recommend this because the cooler cannot handle
it i've tried and tested this system configuration i will leave it on auto which is 25 watts maximum
uh power consumption sorry the maximum t dp so power limit and you can either experiment with
35 it might be able to do it depending what you're doing but i think you'll run
into thermal throttling so that is on auto for me as for linux support of course i did boot
a live pen drive image and that was linux mint it did work fine so that's good so the ports
will at least allow us to boot uh linux distros however i ran into driver problems with linux mint
i probably do need to look to another distro one that's got a more complete driver package to not
have those issues so let's go over the pro pros of it form factor definite pro i like it i like
the look of it actually it's got rgb and you can just turn it off if you don't like it uh it's got
the little switch for what is basically different power modes there so performance auto and then
silent i would just leave it in performance of course if you want the best performance out of it
it does perform quite well it's only a 15 watt part but in the performance option there it's
configured to 25 watts it's got a fast nvme ssd well relatively fast faster than sata 3 of course
and everything was very quick and snappy video playback was good it can handle just handle uh 4k
60 streaming so if you me playing like youtube like i did with my little example then it will
drop a few frames but overall it doesn't completely ruin the experience now running three
monitors out of this is good the full spec type-c port at the front and four usb ports there that's
all quite good i love how easy it is to upgrade you simply just pull that panel off and you
can put more ram in so you can swap out the two sticks of eight gigabytes and put into 16 or 232s
and then we can add another ssd not a problem to do so is very simple and let's see if i can just
get that lid back and it hooks into the bottom and it sits in place so build quality is quite good
out of it so the cons fair noise it can get a little louder sounds a bit like a gaming laptop
uh when you are gaming and it's being pushed very hard with things like cinebench benchmarks really
stressing it out it did show an exhibit a little bit of throttling when it came to the vega
performance in games now that was to do with the temperatures i believe so we saw the clock go from
1800 megahertz which is where it should sit the whole time at its maximum performance to drop down
sometimes to about 1600 1650 which i don't really like to see that's just a minor thing but it will
affect the performance a little now the bias is completely unlocked so you could experiment with
just adjusting that to see if you can get away with running 35 watts in your favorite games at
slightly better frames and you could dedicate as i did more ram to the vega graphics
instead of having it being shared around well it's all shared ram of course but instead of having it
scaling up and down you give it that fixed four gigabytes or fixed two gigabytes if you wanted
to the other which is more of a personal thing and probably not a problem for a lot of people
is i didn't like the fact that when i booted it up it just went straight into windows there was
no setup to go through so for security reasons i do recommend that you just do a complete
fresh install but first copy over that folder with the rgb setup drivers the controller for
it so you can turn the rgb on or off or whatever you want to do you can adjust that which is good
so it sells for 500 us dollars is that a fair price for a 5000 series amd
apu mini pc i don't think it's bad i wish it was of course a little cheaper but overall i like it
it's a good little mini pc and if you're going to be playing light titles as i showed you you can
game on this so if you desperately need hardware to be just to be well only just playable play for
example cyberpunk 2077 you can scrape by with just 30 frames per second at 720p but other games as i
showed you older titles but reasonably modern well gta 5 is quite old now you run at 1080p
with a good kind of frame rate and more stable you can adjust and tweak settings so the golden rule
with integrated integrated graphics as always as i mentioned a lot of my videos low settings lowest
possible and low resolutions to get the playable frame rate so it's not i wouldn't market this as
a gaming midi pc they have it isn't it needs a dedicated gpu i was going to call it a gaming
mini pc so there we go that's the full story of the am r5 gaming mini pc thanks a lot for watching