- For the longest time, Intel reigned supreme,
all the way from the highest power workstation
and gaming rigs to the tiny power sipping chips
that you'd find in an ultra portable laptop.
Fortunately for consumers,
AMD got their crap together a couple of years ago,
bringing the world Ryzen.
A return to at least competitiveness
on the consumer desktop,
and even the high end workstation,
but one area where Intel was on top,
that isn't until very, very recently was super small PCs
with their NUC or next unit of computing lineup,
which possibly changes.
I can't get my hand on this today.
This is what appears to be one
of the very first AMD Ryzen based NUCs.
It's tiny it's light,
and I have very high expectations,
just like you have very high expectations
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(upbeat music)
Many these forums goal for the DMAF5 on Indiegogo was
like, what a weird number?
Like $13,500 or something like that.
They ended up raising over 400 grand.
So why don't we do a quick unboxing
and have a look at what we get inside?
So we've got a VESA compatible mount,
so you can pop one of these on the back of your monitor.
If you want like a, an AIO look to your setup,
we've got wow, really?
Apparently it includes what appears
to be a little Bluetooth keyboard.
So the receiver just tucks into the back.
You plugged that puppy in.
If you wanted to use this as like a media PC,
for example, this would be great.
I have something very similar at home.
It appears that there's left and right click on here.
Is this an air mouse too?
- [Jake] I'm not sure, but it only comes.
It only came for like the early backers.
- Oh only the early backers get this?
- [Jake] Yeah.
- I'm actually I'm jazzed to try
this because mine is super bulky.
It's one from Sedeko
and I haven't been able to find an alternative to it yet.
You also get a power brick, HDMI cable.
That is a really short HDMI cable.
That is a pinner HTMI cable.
I mean, I guess it's good enough to go
from a VESA mount to the bottom of the monitor,
but that's about it, ladies and gentlemen.
You get an equally Pitzer display port cable.
I'm bringing back pinner.
You know that right?
- [Jake] It's just cause you're a pinner.
- Hey, there's no shame in being pinner.
You've also got a USB type A
to micro B charging cable
for that included keyboard.
I kind of inadvertently showed you guys
how easy it is to get access to the internals,
but let's, take a tour of the outside first.
On the front, we've got our power button.
We've got a Headphone Jack, two type A USB three.
Now this one, according to the Indiegogo page
anyway, is 10 gig and this one's five gig
but this one provides power even when it's sleeping,
but it used to be color coded yellow.
Like those normally are, now it's not.
So I don't really know what the deal is with that.
You've got a Type C running at 10 gig
and then nothing on this side, nothing on this side.
I keep accidentally popping that top off.
And then over on the back,
we've got a couple more 10 gigabit per second USB threes,
display port HDMI, dual gigabit LAN and power in.
Okay.
So that gives us a total of one, two,
actually, apparently this front USB Type C can be used
as a display output.
So that's three outputs.
And because it's got dual LAN ports,
one of the use cases that they advertise
for it is actually as like a pfSense box.
Although personally,
I think I'd feel kind of limited by something like this.
Anyway, let's formally open it up now,
you've got two clicky do duds right here
and you just pop it off like that,
that reveals, looks like
we've got a SATA drive connector right here.
It's not immediately apparent to me exactly
where that's gonna mount to
ah! To the bottom of the lid.
I have two SATA memory slots
for dual channel DDR4,
as well as an M.2 slot over here.
Now what I can immediately see is the cooling solution
and socket for the CPU,
or rather, I should just say
the BGA SATA point to the CPU.
Reveal your secrets.
- [Jake] Well we don't have quite with you today.
- Secrets.
- [Jake] It's plunged in its probably not best.
(laughs)
- Reveal them.
Why is this not coming off?
Oh, I see.
'Cause there's probably some clips or something
for this back part here.
Ah, ah.
Hey, wow, that was awesome.
Knock that screw right into the parts tray.
That's an advanced dropping technique right there.
Oh my goodness.
(chuckles)
Why?
Is this screwed in from the other side.
Why?
Maybe I over complicated things for myself
I bet I didn't see these screws
because there was memory in the way there they are.
Way to go Linus, see, the whole thing would have
just popped off like that.
I blame, I blame Jake.
This seems to be a VRM heatsink of some sort.
So let's go ahead and pop that puppy off.
Here we go.
Oh, interesting.
Well, I mangled the Jesus out of that thermal pad,
so that's cool.
But yes, that is in fact what that was for.
So that's good.
And you know what?
Let's just pop the M.2 out
who needs this thing to ever do that again anyway right?
But am,
- [Jake] We do
(Jake laughs) - And but am okay
Yeah, we haven't really done the video yet,
so that's, challenging.
Wow, why do they have these little rubbers
on the M.2 stick here?
I don't like rubbers on my stick.
- [Jake] Does anyone?
- Don't appreciate it exactly.
Well, they have an operation for that.
(Jake laughs)
Let's give you the rundown here.
It's available in two configurations
with 256 gigs of storage
and eight gigs of RAM for 429.
That's early bird pricing those.
We have no idea how that's gonna shake
out to regular pricing
or double that for, I think it's yeah, 529.
Now we do have some concerns.
This is a SATA drive.
So it's M.2,
but you can tell by the key that that's a SATA M.2
not an NBVe drive.
They have gotten that feedback though.
And apparently the newer ones are gonna be NBVe
as for RAM, unfortunately the eight gig configuration ships
with a single stick.
So you're not running in dual channel,
which means you kind of have to go with the higher end one.
If you want the full performance,
speaking of full performance,
as we all know rising benefits
from higher memory speed in a big way.
Unfortunately not only is this 2,400 megahertz RAM,
but we actually tried installing some higher speed stuff
that we had lying around at the office.
And the bio seemed to still be locked to 2,400 megahertz.
So we'll see how that works out for us
when we do our performance testing later.
Oh nice.
So we got ax wifi.
So that's wifi six in there.
That's pretty sweet.
Hey, they took the gamers nexus approach
to thermal compound.
You can't have too much.
So don't even try.
I have no idea which screws go where anymore.
This is quite disassembled.
Now we get our first look
at the Ryzen 5 3550H, APU
that's installed in the system.
Now don't let AMD confusing naming scheme mislead you here,
even though this is a 3000 series Ryzen,
it is not Zen 2 it is unfortunately Zen plus.
Don't feel bad though,
if you didn't know that right off the hop,
I too was bamboozled.
The fact that I thought this was Zen 2 was one
of the main reasons
that I was so excited to check this thing out.
So it's not seven nanometers.
It's 12 nanometer everything is PCI express of Gen 3,
and all of that good stuff.
With that said, this is still an utterly unique product.
And one that I really wanted to look
at just because it's finally an AMD alternative
to Intel's NUC lineup.
Now we can go ahead and put this puppy back together.
With it mostly reassembled.
All that remains is to pop in some dual channel memory
so that we're giving it,
its best chance possible
as well as throw in some more storage
that we've got room for all of our, games about warfare,
that's very modern and all that,
all that kind of good stuff.
So we'll pop that in there.
Now, one of the things you might have noticed
about that cooling solution
as we were looking at it was
that it's pretty darn robust by default AMD specs,
this particular CPU for 15 Watts TDP,
but it can be configured to up to 35.
And that is apparently the route
that Minisfirm has gone.
Now we're still not expecting
it to compete with a Zen 2 based CPU.
And Asus actually has some sort
of NUC competitors based on Zen 2,
that are probably gonna beat the stuffing
out of this thing.
But I wanna give it a shot anyway,
just because hey, first out of the gate, right?
Got our screen capture working,
which involved poking
around in Radeon software a little bit,
but yes, Radeon software,
that's right my friends,
it's a Nuc like,
Hey, can we call them that Nuc likes?
That's not bad.
That's not bad
it's a Nuc like running Radeon graphics.
Now Intel actually did a Nuc with AMD graphics
in it a while back, but this is different.
And unfortunately not as powerful.
These are Vega eight graphics
and they are clocked at around 1200 megahertz.
And our expectations are
basically that we should get a pretty solid experience
in esports titles.
But beyond that, probably not that amazing.
While performance as we expected,
it's not, jaw dropping or anything.
to their credit it's not loud.
Like that's very reasonable
for a mini PC and check this out.
The whole strategy of more than doubling
(Linus chuckles)
the suggested TDP from AMD seems
to be working out pretty good.
3.36 gigahertz at a 100% load across all course,
60 and 67 points puts us right
in range of a mobile skylight core i7.
So that's pretty respectable,
but well behind even a quad core like desktop CPU
from that generation,
a little unfortunate,
but maybe we'll make up some ground in,
let's say rocket league.
I mean, obviously this is not a gaming oriented product,
but, Scott Radeon graphics compared to Intel onboard so.
1080 texture detail, high performance
world detail, high quality,
most stuff turned on, but not everything.
Okay sure.
Yeah.
Let's see.
Let's give it a shot right?
Okay.
So we're getting anywhere from around 30 to 40 FPS.
Not bad.
- [Jake] So like game console territory.
- Yeah.
Look at that.
Oh yeah.
I mean, obviously it's not amazing,
but like if you'd showed me this, like, 10 years ago
I'd have been like,
of course just cause it's quiet doesn't necessarily mean
that the thermal performance is good.
So I wanna take a look at what our CPU temps are like
when we're hitting it hard.
Okay.
That's respectable 80 degrees.
I mean, obviously it's not like my favorite thing
in the world to have a CPU running at 80 degrees,
but it's not like your water cooling the thing in here.
And given how quiet it is,
not bad, not bad Minisforum.
Is that how you're supposed to pronounce it?
- Minis, I don't know.
- I don't really know
They can play Valorant, I'll be pretty happy with that.
Okay.
- [Jake] Looks like its playing valorant to me 4k
(Jake laughs) - Wait what?
Shut up.
- Client FPS.
Here we go, graph
- [Jake] Show both,
show both. - Show both, alright.
Well, why not both?
Okay.
What are we looking--
- What? - Client FPS?
50 to 60 FPS Valorant 4k,
hold on.
Get over here Brandon.
We're gonna have to do a quick check.
We're gonna have to do a quick check here
for alternate computers plugged into the thing.
Nope.
That's it.
That's pretty good for onboard graphics.
- [Jake] I mean the settings are probably pretty
oh, is there a render resolution maybe?
- Let me check.
Let me check back--
- [Jake] Even the settings are low people play esports games
at low settings to get better performance.
(Linus mumbles)
- Okay yeah, it's pretty low.
It's pretty low
- [Jake] That's what most people use anyways.
- Let me just see if maybe it's like rendering
at 50% res or what not
it doesn't seem to be. (Jake mumbles)
- Okay.
That's pretty cool.
What was the thing 500 bucks?
Sure.
Now for fun, let's try some media Encoding.
Now, one of the ways we could do
this is fire up handbrake or FFN peg.
But the reality of it is most people aren't doing that.
So let's take something else
most people aren't doing,
running a Plex server at home
and let's put it through the paces there.
So the idea behind Plex is you rip your favorite blue rays
or DVDs or whatever the case may be.
You throw them onto a NAS or a little box like this.
And then from anywhere, whether it's on a computer,
on your TV or on a phone,
you can access it kind
of like your own little personal Netflix.
So Jake actually has his account signed in here.
He is firing up his phone
and let's see how hard this puppy's getting hit.
So Plex Transcoder is asking for about 22% on video
and about 20% on audio.
It's running nice and nice and quiet.
- [Jake] It should be playing--
- And what is this?
Is this 4K
- It's original quality 4K.
So the only thing that's Transcoding is audio.
- That's fantastic.
It's actually kind of crazy how heavy audio is hey.
Look, I didn't realize until I started running Plex,
how video is like no big deal in some cases
in this case, it's because the 4K video stream is
actually just directly streaming
because a Jake's phone has built a decoding for that.
But it's the audio that you actually have trouble
with in some cases.
So this is, this is freaking awesome.
- Oh, no way.
Oh, it looks terrible.
Something that's not happy.
- That's horrendous.
- Come on give it a sec.
Oh, there we go.
- It's back to a 100%.
There's no way.
No, you're done. You're out.
- All right it can't handle a 4K.
Oh, well.
Oh, it's no, it's dying.
- Time for a 1080p Transcode test.
4k was ridiculous.
- It's playing it hasn't buffered.
It might be building up a buffer
- Oh - and then maybe
it'll relax a bit.
I don't know.
- Yeah there it is.
It's chilling out a little bit now.
Well, that's fantastic.
- So it's enough to do probably one 1080p Transcode.
- And then maybe one 720 or something like that.
But I wouldn't count on it.
Still for an all rounder little machine.
I'm impressed as heck by this thing.
Of course I'd be more impressed
if it was Zen 2,
but fortunately, we're gonna be checking
out something like that very soon.
Make sure you guys are subscribed.
Because Asus has an absolutely killer Nuc likes coming
that are gonna be Zen 2 based.
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If you guys enjoyed this one,
you're looking for some more mini PC content,
maybe check out our ghost Canyon NUC review.
It's in a very different price bracket,
but it's also in a very different performance bracket
because you can put a full sized graphics card in the thing.