b link's got quite a few mini pcs that are on the way due to be released this model here
that i've got that they sent out to me is their gti 11. the 11 because it's 11th gen model here
this one is powered by the core i5 1135 g7 it has iris xc graphics 4 cores maximum turbo is
4.2 gigahertz now this configuration is paired up with 16 gigabytes of ram and dual channel
ddr4 spec 3.2 gigahertz it has a 512 gigabyte ssd which is an nvme one but there is room to install
another ssd say to 3 spec and even a 2.5 inch drive bay even though it's quite a small little
chassis here the build of it so it does have a fingerprint reader it's got intel's wireless ax
201 as our wireless chipset so wi-fi 6 support with bluetooth 5.2 and it does also have gigabit
lan and 2.5 gigabit lan ports on there so two of them inside the box we do get a 51 watt
power supply with this a short hdmi cable then a standard size hdmi cable our visa mounting bracket
and some screws for it and then some screws for a sata 3 2.5 inch drive there is also a user manual
which is in various different languages and it just goes over the basic operation of it
and lets us know what all the ports do looking at the design and build of this one now so around the
outside is metal there's plastic on the top nice finish and we have a fingerprint reader here for
windows hello instead of passwords you can simply just touch this of course if you're going to be
mounting this behind of monitor then you won't be using that there but at least it's an option we
do have core i5 sticker and looking at our ports here at the front so we've got two usb 3 ports 3.5
millimeter with headphone jack support and then a type c port now this type c port i've tested it
4k 60 frames per second 60 hertz is what is possible out of that one there data but it does
not support power delivery at all there and we've got our power button with a status led below it
and then our clear cmos and you'll see why later on it's because the bios is fully unlocked to
us if you mess up any of those settings you can simply reset it by pressing that which is quite
good there now either side we have gi5 here and that's because it's the core i5 that it has so
this is a vent you'll see there again there's the other one and then the back of it with our ports
here we've got quite a bit this is where the cooler is so this is all the hot air is going
to be blown out of this top part right here two usb threes two usb twos display port 1.4 hdmi 2.0
so that supports 4k 60. now it looks like it could run 4k 120 hertz with my lg cx but when it goes on
to that higher refresh rate it simply cuts out so i don't think it's going to support it there and
we do have gigabit lan and 2.5 gigabit lan there which is good and then dc in here for charging and
finally along the bottom we've got these two mounting points there for the visa bracket so
you can put it behind a tv or a monitor but let's have a look now at the internals there's just four
screws here to remove to gain access here with the internals there is some good news that i do
like that they've used a large thermal pad look how thick that thing is on top of our pcie 3.0
ssd there it's a kingston one now we do have our wireless card which is the intel ax201 you can
see just near my thumb there on the left that's soldered onto the motherboard so no upgrades there
the ram so this one comes pre-installed with 16 gigabytes of ddr4 ram you can easily upgrade this
and it is in dual channel then our 2.5 inch drive that is where it will go installed onto the bottom
of it that boot drive which is our gigabyte pcie nvme drive is a kingston there and a 2000. you can
see that we do have this a secondary slot there for another 22 by 80 sized sata 3 ssd only in that
one so it's just this one that supports nvme first up the bios so this one is completely unlocked you
probably thought it would be because they give us that clear cmos button on the front of it right so
if you mess up any of the settings that's what you have to use so we do have access to all of
our power limit settings for example overclocking performance menu you can go and under vault tweak
and do all those kind of things if you want to do so all right you can go into processor right here
and if you know that you're able to under then you're able to do that if it's stable but
probably test it out first with intel's extreme tuning utility well that's what i would do before
setting it at a bios level but it's easy enough just to reset it so we've got more tweaks in
here including uh ram for example if you wanted to tweak that to see if you could get it a little bit
better those timings that the performance could be slightly faster you can do that as well in here so
fully featured bios really good to see and one of the pros of these blink mini pcs so i'll go over
into windows now now this pc does come with windows 10 pro so not windows 11 however it
does support it and you can freely upgrade at no additional cost you just simply need to download
it run all the updates and you'll be on windows 11 then so it does support it when you go to
check you can see it's got everything that it does need of course this having an 11th gen processor
tpm 2.0 it's got that secure boot and enough ram and storage space so not an issue there to run
windows 11 on this or you could just keep windows 10 if you want to so the disk drive that i showed
you is that kingston one and it's pcie 3.0 the speeds on it they're fine it's definitely a lot
faster than sata 3 which is the main thing here but certainly not the fastest i've seen for a pcie
nvme drive there it could be a lot quicker if you had like a samsung drive there but it's good it's
still good there so don't get me wrong so with our processor here it is the core i5 1135 g7
the important thing about this one is it does have the iris xe graphics it's a 28
watt part 10 nanometers the maximum turbo is 4.2 gigahertz now you do see it listed here
eight times because it is multi-threaded so we have four cores but eight threads in
total now with our wireless chip this is one i showed you when we looked at the internals
you can't upgrade it not that you would probably want to it's a very good chip so i get about 1.3
gigabits per second transfers and it does have bluetooth 5.2 which is great there and you can
see our fingerprint reader so instead of typing passwords you could use that to log into windows
using windows hello now other things to point out let's get on to the geekbench now i'm going to
test that the single core score is just over 1400 points that's good and their multi-core score for
a quad core again is good there that's excellent score just over 5 5000 so it is a fast mini pc
and general kind of workloads i'll get on to now general kind of computing like spreadsheets
documents all very quick video playback so hevc vp9 support and this is a 4k timbit file
hevc 140 megabits per second and it plays it just fine it does not drop any frames at all so ir60
graphics handles video files even really demanding ones without any problem at all it's all flawless
i'll just skip ahead there and you can see that that is not dropping any frames that one's 60
frames per second so really good when it comes to video performance here it'll display everything
taking a quick look now at 4k video playback performance so this should be fine because
it's a powerful enough chip to be able to handle this so enabling the stats here
we can see that we've got zero dropped frames and it is streaming this in 4k with youtube not an
issue this is in chrome 2 by the way so it's not an edge edge is even better
than performance so it's quite capable of this this is a very light task for iris xe graphics
now this core i5 1135g7 with the iris xc graphics can handle video editing and 4k with demanding
applications like this one adobe premiere pro so we'll export this file and let you know just
how long it's going to take it's a typical test that i do with these mini pcs to see just how
good are there this now normally this kind of spec should be able to do this within about one minute
that was pretty laggy just then for some reason so we'll just get a minute of footage and i'll
skip ahead and i'll show you how long it's going to take to encode that at 4k
and it looks like it is going to be just under one minute so approximately 55 seconds that's
really good performance so it's capable it can handle 4k light video editing anything that's
really demanding with lots of layers and things you really do need still a dedicated dedicated
gpu for that of course gaming performance now so gta 5 looking very good this is around
70 frames per second on average but of course when i get into the street with more cast arena you
can see now it's dropping down okay so about 50 but this is still very good considering it's all
integrated graphics so 1080p now i have not got it on the lowest possible settings when i'm running
is in between so view distance and the density of the population everything like that is all on
the middle kind of settings so you could say yeah basically medium settings here looking very good
so what i'll do now is test out a few other titles and what kind of gaming performance you
could expect from a tiny little mini pc like this and then i'll check on those thermals
which are three performance so this game can get around and over 50 frames per second sometimes up
to 60 but i do have it set to 720p however this performance is really good considering that okay
yeah it's an old game but it's a demanding game and this is certainly a very playable frame rate
what i'll do now is just test it at 1080p and see if that's still going to be playable
this is looking good we're scraping just over 30 frames per second so you could say
similar performance to playing this on say a console really that will be capped out at 1080p
30 frames per second it's not ideal but it is possible and it still looks alright i don't know
if i could happily play though at 37 frames per second in the towns here i really want that 60. so
me personally i'd run this game at 720p and lastly shadow of the tomb raider so this game still is
quite a demanding game here so i've got it set to 720p on the lowest visual settings and we can see
looking around there's a bit of screen tearing going on so really don't want to run it at 1080p
because it will be a little bit too laggy i feel because it's already at 45 here which isn't great
cinebench are 23 scores now so the single core score here i was expecting maybe about
100 points more than this so it's okay not too bad and the multi-core score there not too bad
either that's off somewhere of where a core i7 7700k would be so it's not too bad considering
it's a quad core and a 28 watt processor i think it does it does well there performance wise
so what about the thermals then is it getting a little too hot is it thermal throttling
it's actually pretty good look at this so 83 degrees celsius this involves me gaming on it
stress testing the benchmarks that i've done so that's not a bad result at all however yes
the fan you do hear the fan a little bit i'll give you a sample of what it's like
under full load and it does cycle on and off now and then which can be a little bit annoying
linux support here so i did a very quick test there just to boot it up and check a
few things and what i could not connect to was my wireless for some reason it's not detecting the ax
200 m1 which is really odd because this linux mint distro that i test out on other mini pcs
and hasn't had a problem with the ax 200 or the 201 so a bit of troubleshooting there probably i
need to try out some other distros out there some other builds and see if it's going to
work or not but it's just a little minor set back here linux should actually work just fine on this
now we do have a really good mini pc i feel from b link with this one it's got a lot of options there
you can install more storage so you could add another two terabyte 2.5 inch drive another two
terabyte 22 by 80 millimeter m.2 as long as it's say to three and then you got your fast boot drive
so plenty of options there type c port so video out it can run three monitors with a display port
hdmi and that type c port that's also great two lan ports on here so more options there as well
and it does have plenty of usb ports on this the other thing i like about it well is the
performance is iris 60 graphics means that it can even handle a bit of light 4k video editing light
gaming older titles like gta 5 1080p on medium settings had a very playable frame rate so that's
great to see there is really only one con with this particular unit here for me and that is the
fan noise and i wouldn't say it's a deal breaker either but it does make a little bit of noise
so the thermals they are good they check out there's no thermal throttling it doesn't get too
hot it's just that the fan noise when you really push it hard you'll hear it
and sometimes the fan cycles on and off or it's on a lower rpm steps up to the higher one
and literally 30 seconds later it'll drop down again so you can hear that sometimes especially
if you've got this mini pc just sitting right in front of say your monitor there if you've
got it behind the monitor you're away from that fan noise and it won't really be so bad but it
is minor but it's just the fan noise that is really it the only con with this particular
system here so do like it now i will have more up and coming mini pc reviews some more models here
from b-link so make sure you tune for those and i do hope to see you in the next one bye for now