So finally arrived if you follow me on Twitter I've been waiting for this mini
PC here for three weeks thanks to a seller and that's very frequent that
happens to me now in Aliexpress that lies that give me fake tracking numbers
they didn't have stock of the 2.5 inch model that I originally wanted to get
and instead of just being honest and truthful with me they didn't come out
with the facts and didn't say oh look we don't have it in stock you're gonna have to
wait for two or three weeks no they gave me a fake tracking number they gave me
all these stories about it being held up by DHL customs anyway it is finally here
that seller by the way is a Hystou I think that's how you pronounce it
they're the guys that make these many pcs now I reviewed the fanless i7 7500
you mini PC wasn't bad at all I use that for quite a few almost actually two
years or so and I decided to sell that one because I just want to something
with more power so this has an i-5 8250 u 3.8 to gogo gigahertz maximum single
core turbo or it can run all four cores at 3.4 depending on the turmoil and
power limits and things like that so the same CPU that's in the shall meet me
notebook pro now I reviewed this recently which has Intel's nope this is
the Gemini Lake and it's not a bad little mini PC but of course this is on
the real low-end performance wise this would be a nice step up it's got hdmi
2.0 which is another feature that attracted me towards this and it costs
me just 329 u.s. so the box here suggests that there's three different
models I know of the i-5 model and the i7 so the i7 there one's the 8550 you so
another CPU that you will see commonly in notebooks because it's 15 watts that
one turbos up to a 4.0 gigahertz so it's gonna be faster but only
slightly but in my test of the i7 me notebook pro I found out that it wasn't
really actually that much faster for multi-core performance and video
encoding and things like that okay so this is the brand here so it's the high
so - that was the salah' - that I got it from an Aliexpress but yeah not happy as
I mentioned about how long they took the ship this
out and the fact that they lied to me that's the big issue I'm having at the
moment with a lot of sellers so they've given us a driver's seat D here while
it's a she a DVD I don't even know if I have a DVD a little one around so check
the accessories first and here we have oh actually my cable good to see and
we've got some it looks like what's that right there a little rubber feet
okay screws and little rubber feet and something else is in here perhaps I
should be the power cable power charger all right
EU style cable with the figure eight style plug which is good these are very
easy to get hold off and this will be the power adapter so hopefully it's not
too big and this size it actually looks alright 19 volts three point four two
amps so that's the same actually as Intel's nuke the Gemini Lake I looked at
so here's the mini PC I just pulled it out of the plastic wrap and it surprised
me because it's a lot shorter than I thought it would be even though it is
missing that 2.5 inch drive that Bay for it this is the size of it here so the
height of it next to the internal nuke this is the Gemini Lake J 4005 that I
just recently reviewed you can see there's quite a height difference there
the intel has a much better build to it the quality of it the frame of this one
is plastic however it just feels really solid this one has a metal frame around
it so right here at the front we've got a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack USB 3
port power button there on the top this top here is just like a shiny plastic
made to look like glass and you'll see we've got another two ports here so USB
3 USB 2 and the rear of it where we've got everything really going on here so
you've got a display port HDMI 2.0 whoops what just happened there no the
bottom has fallen out of it ok it's not even screwed in place that's why we've
got those screws in the box a Gigabit LAN DC in there and then of course a USB
2 port and that type C port so this is the vent all the hot air is going to
come out of this hopefully this is not going to be noisy I'm not very fond of
fan noise so hopefully this is going to be quite tame
it comes to fan noise under full load and oh there is actually a little
Kensington lock slot there and on the side just a little vent a little hard to
see because it's very dark paint job of this now there is one thing that's
missing I think we should have a micro SD card slot on this or an SD card slot
I feel but you can probably use of course one of those USB ports for that
so take a look at the internals right here as our nvm e slot this is also set
of three and you're going to have to use the 22 by 80 spec drives because the
screw is placed for that particular size and not any shorter they could have
maybe put something in here but you can see there's actually some resistors and
things there on the tiny little circuit board that this has a book quality looks
good not bad at all you can see there's the battery plugged in there that's for
the BIOS so if you needed to reset the BIOS the easiest thing to do would just
pull out the power and then pull out this plug here which of course is
retaining that information in the BIOS so there's the two double data rate for
RAM slots that Ram just slots and then clips down in place typical laptop Ram
now one thing I don't like what they've done here can you see this the antennas
for the wireless AC card they've glued them in place so that's gonna make it
tricky to swap and use your own tiny little it's m2 card now I just removed
the motherboard to have a look at the fan so it's a little 5 volt fan that
they've put in here and you can see there's some cables that attach to the
little lid here that's why the lids plastic because this is for the wireless
AC antenna reception and Bluetooth so it's a little tricky but you will be
able to clean this do you maintenance on this if it does fall with dust then you
should be able to blow all that out you just got to remove two screws and
then flip out the motherboard so I got lucky and I managed to pick that glue
off and use my own faster 90 to 60 wireless AC card and the last thing to
install of course is your SSD now it's time for me to set up Windows 10 get
that installed here from a USB pendrive and from here on in I'll be using a
capture card so I got Windows 10 all set up it was really really quick it
surprised me it did not take long at all to install it get myself up and running
so so far running well I can hear the fan it's pretty much constantly on at
the moment never got something bad you
and some good news the bad news is the biases pretty much fully locked out to
us you can disable secure boot you can change the boot order but there's no
Advanced Settings but the good news is I've installed Windows sorry
Intel's XTU here and yes we can tweak up the power limits now why would you want
to do this well basically what you can do is tweak the power limits here and
get this core i5 8250 you to perform very similar if not better than the i7
7700 h-q quad core that means it's going to basically hold the turbos as you can
see three point six megahertz across all four cores
it's been able to hold that for about 20 minutes continuously without any issues
now temperatures max temperatures I have seen it peak at about 78 degrees here so
it is getting hot and as mentioned the fan is probably the con so far so we
have a look now in HW info a little bit more information about CPU so it's the
cable a car it has four cores eight threads and you can see the
features of it all listed right here for us and the graphics of course is the
Intel UHD 620 so exactly the same chipset in the me notebook Pro that I
reviewed here and it's wanted to point out a couple of other things so the
wireless card that I installed that's working fine it's had to get the drivers
for it even though it's not really listing it here properly now maximum
link speed that's not actually correct I'm getting really good speeds out of
this card I don't know why it's listening to 60 so so far for me the
wireless range because I'm about to three rooms away with some concrete
walls and things like that away from my actual router and you can
see down the bottom here that I do have the full signal strength there so I'm
not running into any issues with that so I'm gonna run a couple of benchmarks
here this is just my initial first impressions unboxing video so here's the
speed of the Samsung 160 Evo so no problems here it's running at full speed
this is a very fast drive so great to have this option boom no bottlenecks so
set of three limits us to about 550 megawatts read and write so if you went
with a set of three drive just bear in mind that it's not
going to be as fast so one more benchmark just to quickly look at this
is Cinebench r15 so around the OpenGL benchmark and it's 56 frames per second
average so this is about 3035 frames per second on average less than the
dedicated NVIDIA MX 150 GPU that is often paired up with this particular CPU
the CPU score 517 CB this isn't bad but remember I have the power limits pretty
much increased and disabled well up to 45 watts so can use really all the power
at once so it should actually be over 700 CB but it seems to be running into
some current limiting so not power limiting but current limiting and that's
limiting it a little bit so that's really about the best we're gonna get
out of this first so for video work and things like that it's not looking as
good as for example my me notebook Pro where the same exact CPU with a 35 watt
power limit can get around 700 CB so we'll test out one game this is
fortnight running and 720p on the last setting 60 frames per second so this is
actually running a lot better than I thought it would as I should actually
jump out
and it is tipping down to 40 frames per second 39 here so you want to keep it on
that low setting and see that already
so when I was gaming there it did peek up to 84 degrees but of course I do have
that increased power limit so if that's lower than probably expect a lot less
than this now the fan noise is probably the con so far that it is a little bit
irritating it's on you can probably hear it just in the background here now
performance and things like Chrome and all that that's really fast I mean this
is a core i5 this is really good the performance so far that I'm seeing out
of this particular little mini PC it's got a lot of power packed into such a
small portable little package so 4k 60 frames per second streaming test and
this is handling it just fine no problems it's dropping a few frames here
but that's just when you go to the full screen size it tends to do that you see
just dropped a couple then so overall this performance is really good of
course the wireless card is keeping up depends all on the connection you have
and it also will play natively a TVC codec files vp9 and things like that
it's not a problem for a third generation Intel Core i5 CPUs ok so
there we go so far the pros of this this has got a lot of power when you think of
the size of this it's very very small as the size of the Apollo Lake Gemini Lake
Mini pcs you get from Intel the notes in fact it's actually a little bit smaller
now you can get one of these with the 2.5 inch drive bay that's the model I
originally wanted because my plan was then to add a one or two terabyte hard
drive for backing up files on there so there's a media PC I think it's going to
be great for that because it can it can handle 4k just fine and 4k 60 Hertz
because it does have that HDMI 2.0 port you got display out you can run in
theory up to two monitors for sure maybe even three there now there's a few cons
here that one that ok when you increase the power limits it's going to boost the
performance but I've noticed that it will still run into some sort of current
limit and I think it's connected to the little tiny power supply so it's
probably asking for too much that the power supply cannot keep up with the
current so that's why it's not performing as good as say my Xiaomi Mino
but pro when I removed the current limits sorry the power limits on that
one you could get a Cinebench r15 score of over 700 but not the case here but
even so the performance of this it's very very fast again considering
size of this mini-pc that is really good so the biggest con would be the fan
noise so it's at the moment you can hear it you can probably hang on just hold it
up towards the microf got here that's the kind of fan noise you're gonna have
to speak when it's running and it's slightly irritating when it's running
out of a scent it does pick up a little bit but if you've got it behind a TV or
monitor or something like that then you won't hear it as much there the other
con of course it does not have that 2.5 inch drive slot I wish it all models had
that but the other one is a no SD card slot there's no mics on this for Windows
Cortana and it doesn't have optical audio out which some people may like got
HDMI out and you can do your HDMI audio pass over pass through with the with the
cable at least to do that so that's just the the preview there of it I hope to
see you back later with a possible second video the full review I'm gonna
be using this now at home for the next week or two weeks or so before I do any
update videos thank you so much for watching and subscribe to the channel
because I will have the Gemini Lake the new Pentium silver J 5005 that will be
featured in the channel oh and almost forgot Linux support yes it will run the
next I've tested it so far and it's running everything just fine