mini's forum have another mini pc and this one's a really good one that i do like i've been testing
it out now for a few days it is called the elite mini hm90 powered by a very potent apu which is
the ryzen 9 4900h a 45 watt part with vega 8 graphics it does have 8 cores and 16 threads
now you can get it in a bare bones configuration which will be priced according to their website
under 500 us dollars so that means no ram no storage no operating system
if you need the ram and everything else then this is the configuration that i'm reviewing here today
which does have 16 gigabytes of ram ddr4 and a 512 gigabyte nvme drive and it runs windows 10 pro
so this model here can also run three displays at 4k 60 you can install two additional 2.5 inch
drives for expanding upon your storage and it has two lan ports one's a gigabit and the other
is 2.5 gigabits and wi-fi 6 support with bluetooth 5. then in our box you will find this right here
which is a visa mounting bracket there are some screws there for the bracket but also some screws
for this here which is the 2.5 inch drive holder so this bracket goes over the top of the two
drives so yes you can install two 2.5 inch drives which is great in this size and powerful mini pc
that it is and then we've got our power supply here so this one here is rated to 120 watts to
power that powerful ryzen 7 the 4900 h there is as i can see a power cable there eu one supplied and
then this which is an hdmi cable a rather short one so that's really more for people who want to
be mounting this onto the back of the monitor with that mounting bracket now i'll design and build so
we have some vents at the bottom there are the two slots for mounting this onto the bracket so you
could put it on the back of a tv or a monitor and then rubber feet right there there are four screws
that would be needed to remove if you want to gain access to the internals if you want to install
those two 2.5 inch drives now open it up later and i will show you the internals of this model
so ports here at the front power on and we've got two audio jacks there 3.5 millimeter usb 3.1 and
we have a type c 3.1 here so this one does support display out so we get video out with this 4k
60 and then with the ports at the back here we do have another option there for two 4k60 monitors
with displayport and then hdmi 2.0 here so gigabit lan and then this is really good to see 2.5
gigabit lan here too so a lot faster than just the single of course and then another four usb 3.1
ports so to power it it is a type c that it's using the power plug so not your barrel connector
which we normally have and there is a kensington lock slot either side you'll then see this which
are some vent so it sucks in from the top blows it out either side so here is the other side and
you'll see there is a little reset button there for the bios which is completely unlocked i will
get onto that soon so if you mess up any of those settings you can at least reset it there without
having to disconnect that little battery which saves everything uh which is on the motherboard
attached and here at the top you see this is where it's sucking and all that air so you
can just see the cooler right there and i'll be covering the fan noise and thermals in this video
and then our internals so you just need to remove those four screws which i've done already the back
cover simply just lifts out now if you are going to install the two 2.5 inch drives they go on the
back here okay and then that mounting bracket goes over the top to hold them into place with
those four screws and then the cables then connect up to the motherboard there you've got those two
sata3 connectors so here we have upgradable ram if you wanted to buy the bare bones model
you could simply install ram you already own as long as it's ddr4 spec of course 3200 megahertz
so i've got the pre-configured model here with the 16 gigabytes of ram and 512 gigabyte ssd
note that a mini's forum here they put a heatsink on it which is great to see
and there's also a large heatsink that is going over the vrms our bios battery is right here
and if you wish to upgrade the wireless card which is an intel wi-fi 6 one it's the ax 200
and one with bluetooth 5.1 it is under this ssd so you need to remove that ssd and then you can
gain access to that tiny little slot there and change the wi-fi card if you wanted to
and our bias now so we do have a lot of open settings in here pretty much all of the settings
that you would want are unlocked to us now some of those very advanced ones that you probably would
never even look at or need they aren't there so it's not 100 everything that we've got but almost
amd cbs is where you will find useful settings if you wanted to tweak for example how much is
going to be dedicated to the vega 8 graphics you will find that one under the nbio common option so
i'll just go into that very briefly and show you this would be under the graphics configuration
so if you do change this from auto which is dedicating with the 16 gigabytes of ram only half
a gigabyte to the vega 8. if you put it on to game optimized it will then dedicate i believe it's one
gigabyte and if you have 32 gigabytes of storage it will then be two if you install 64 gigabytes
of ram it will then dedicate four so that's one way to help boost just the lower average frames
and increase that there are many more options in the buyer spot i will not go into all of those
and then interesting one here is smu common option so this is system configuration configured on auto
it's 45 watts now you could set this to 54 watts you might get a slight advantage to performance
but i'm going to keep everything as stock in this review so we know what the stock temperatures
are going to be like when you first power it on you'll be greeted with the following pre-installed
language packs which are part of this windows 10 pro installation now i know this question is going
to pop up a lot and that'll be windows 11 support yes you can run it on this not a problem there it
supports everything that it does need so if you want that then install it at the moment
minis forum are shipping this with only windows 10 pro and that's what this units come with so that
is exactly how i will review it i won't bother to upgrade or do a clean install of windows 11.
but you're welcome to do that of course on your own unit so the apu that's in this the ryzen 9 the
4900h it's a very good apu mostly because of those because the vega 8 graphics here now this one can
turbo up to the maximum you just saw it flicker there for a second 1750 and it will hold that
thanks to the 45 watt power limit that this does have so it's a potent apu and even though it is
yes last gen it still is very close in terms of performance to say the rise in nine for 5900 hx
it's not that far off really especially when you take a look at the integrated graphics performance
from the vega 8 which i'll get on to later in this in-depth review so the maximum turbo is 4.45
gigahertz and the ram is running in dual channel timings are typical amd not very good
not for at least these mobile processors here so 22 for our cl cast timing there yeah that's
not amazing i get better with the intel's so it does ship here with windows 10 pro as you
can see you will need to run some updates with that and they have dedicated half a gigabyte is
shared well well dedicated sorry to the vega 8 but it can use a lot more shared and you're
able to tweak that in the bias as i showed you before but i'm just reviewing it here
as stock so i made a mistake before i said that it has the intel ax 201. it's in fact the ax 200
here so it's got bluetooth five still a very good wi-fi six card so connected to my wi-fi six router
i've got no problems with the signal strength and the maximum throughput is the pretty standard what
i get with this router it's about 1.3 uh gigabits per second transfers so very good now i have run
one benchmark and i'll get on to some more now and that is geekbench five so single core score here
um that's nothing amazing the intel's can normally do a little bit better there uh but multi-score
multi-core score there for the eight cores 16 threads uh that's good so it's decent you'll see
now onto cinebench which is about to finish up you can see the single core score there is well very
similar to the one i got with geekbench 5 which is just over 1200 points there and this is just about
to finish it should be getting around ten thousand eleven thousand points so let's take a look
after the ten minutes two as well all right eleven thousand so that's very good for a ryzen nine four
thousand nine h and the boot ssd which is that kingston that i showed you they had the heatsink
on it well these are the speeds using crystal dismark here you can see that it's not the fastest
nvme drive out there pcie 3.0 spec but still a lot faster than sata 3 and remember we can add another
two 2.5 inch drives you could put in some ssds but of course they won't be as fast as this main boot
drive here free available space with windows we do have 433 gigabytes approximately on first boot
now this is very obvious that performance general windows performance has excellent this thing is
very fast everything opens up quick rapid and not a problem so spreadsheets documents i won't
really go into them in detail just to point out that nothing lags it is all very fast there now
the vega 8 graphics on this can handle demanding clips here so this is a hevc 10 bit 140 megabits
per second file and it plays it back without any issues no problems with that so anything you
throw at vp9 hevc is going to run fine 4k demo here 60 frames per second sony swordsmith one
and that is running without any issues there so great performance for general computing this
thing is very quick okay video editing now with adobe premiere pro the timeline i just
have set to the half playback resolution and for my basic 4k video edits of my
reviews you'll probably actually it's fine it doesn't seem to be dropping any frames there at
the moment with the timeline you occasionally see it's a little bit laggy so i would not be
running this and the full playback resolution now if you do complex edits with lots of layers
and transitions and things you probably do need a dedicated gpu to get the best performance it would
start to then lag a little bit and then how long does it take to encode one minute of footage 4k to
the youtube 4k preset well i've got the clip right now encoding and it looks like it's going to be
just under a minute which is very good so excellent encoding speeds here adobe have improved
things with the amd support normally then tails are a little bit faster but still this is looking
really good okay once that disappears 100 so there we go about 47 seconds for one minute of footage
to be encoded into that 4k youtube preset in adobe premiere pro gaming performance now cyberpunk 2077
lowest possible settings on 720p and we're getting around 30 frames per second this is really good
for integrated graphics vega 8 i'm impressed now the gpu clock will always hold 17.50 constantly it
does not throttle down that's what we want and the thermals when gaming gaming will remain normally
in about the 70s and even when you've got a bit of action going on screen so i start blasting
some just random cars on the screen here getting popped out it will normally still stay around a
very playable frame rate and i've been wiped out already let's have a look at gta 5 performance
performance is looking great with the medium settings so population density viewing distance
set to medium and 1080p here so around 50 frames per second this is really good i mean of course
it's an old title an oldie but a goodie and really quite pleased with this so the only integrated
graphics that i have seen that can do better than this with gta 5 at least is intel's new iris
xc and that's probably able to get around eight frames per second more than this here
so overall the performance i still think really good
even going crazy with a shotgun it's not lagging out
be safe lastly counter strike so i have it set at 1080p and the last possible settings now
this is just a bot match here not to annoy real people with my terrible gameplay on the server
and it's yeah over 100 frames per second normally but right now it's down to about
70 there when there is a bit going on screen so still great performance from this older title
so i'm able to get a few kills here because it's just the easy box
that makes it nice and easy for me here and where have they all gone off to the side oh
i'm the one with the bomb so i should plant that now but hey that's enough of my terrible
gameplay you can see that an older title like this a very light title great frame rate
onto all thermals power consumption and fan noise so you can see it reached a peak of almost 90
degrees now this is a lot cooler than the rz box that i reviewed from chewy with the same
chipset fan noise is so good in this mini pc i'm really impressed it's just like some of the others
from mini's forum that at idle you can barely hear it it's whisper quiet under full load it's audible
you do hear it but it's not what i would call loud at all it's a very pleasant fan noise too it's not
annoying so almost 90 degrees peak power consumption so 115 watts is what my wall
meter is telling me that it's pulled under full load and then at idle with just nothing running
in the background it's using around seven watts so just sipping away at power there it's good
so very good fan noise and the thermals are excellent it all checks out now linux i did
a quick test here that it will run linux just fine this particular mini pc i don't think you're gonna
run into too many issues just make sure you go for a more modern distro so it will support wi-fi 6
the ax 200 and the 2.5 gigabit lan port that this has on board with it so this is an impressive
mini pc there's so much to like about it it's definitely better than the rz box that i reviewed
from chewy that has the same apu in it the ryzen 9 4900h however in the chuwi it had very bad fan
noise it would reach 99 in fact went over that it was about 103 degrees i think it got up to this
tops out at 90 degrees the fan noise is so good in this mini pc it's excellent you barely hear it
when you're just doing something a little bit stressful if you do stress it out with
continual exporting videos gaming or benchmarks it's just a minor whooshing noise that you hear
the middle around the outside so it is a middle frame around the outside here does
get a little warm where the vents are either side but they've done an excellent job with
the cooler i really do like it great performance and most importantly fan noise when you do nothing
you really cannot hear this unit so performance wise very good getting cinebench r23 score
of 11 000 points that's what you kind of expect too out of the ryzen 9 that this has
and then the vega 8 graphics does really well for older lighter games you can play even cyberpunk
which is a very heavy game at 30 frames per second yes i know not amazing but hey you can do it and
at 720p so really there's so much to like about this all the ports to additional storage now
what are the things i don't like about it well i have to really start nitpicking with this because
it really is that good i would have liked to have seen micro sd card slot or an sd card slot on this
and i would have preferred i think a lot of people probably agree with me on this
another m.2 slot in this instead of the 2.5 inch well one 2.5 inch bay would be good we've got
two of them but i would have preferred to have seen another second more faster option there for
storage i think would have been great and for those that maybe in the future wanted to hook
up an external gpu you can do that of course via a nvme m.2 slot which uh well it's going to be our
boot drive now with this one so really this is a fantastic mini pc here from mini's forum the hm90
i think is one of the best i have seen so far from them thank you so much for watching this
review and i hope to see in the next one so do subscribe for more upcoming videos from me