today i'm taking a look at a new brand of mini pc that i've not covered before
from a company called geekcom it is their mini it8 now this mini pc is powered by the intel
8th gen core i5 8259u quad core 8 threads and it does have the more powerful potent iris plus 655
graphics not quite as good as iris xe but it is really the next best thing it's a 28 watt part and
we do have with this configuration which is the top spec they sent out to me 16 gigabytes of ram
with 512 gigabytes of pci 3.0 storage it has wi-fi ac gigabit lan plenty of usb 3.1
gn2 ports and even though it's small it can run up to four 4k 60 displays it has a mounting bracket
in the box so you can even mount it behind a monitor or a tv getting it out of the way
in the box you'll find an instruction manual there is a power supply which is from hunt key
that is a known brand that one's 90 watts we get some screws there now what are those screws for
that's for the sata 3 drive and the visa mount so that's a visa mounting bracket you can put
on the back of a monitor or a tv a little pouch for the mini pc a power cable and an hdmi cable
this pc has a great small compact size to it so we do have microphones at the top here power button
with status led 3.5 millimeter headphone jack a type a usb 3.1 gen 2 type c usb 3.1 gn2 and
then on the back here you will find a lot of ports quite close together so we've got hdmi 2.0 we have
type c with display out here that's usb 3.1 2 as well another 3.1 gen 2s gigabit lan and then our
display port which is mini display out there so those three there do support 4k 60 and power and
this is the exit vent so the hot air is going to be pushed out of that on the right side we
do have a kensington lock slot and a grille there which acts as a vent there is the same
on the left side of it and we do get a full size sd card reader that's great that this is on board
with this geekcom mini pc and then the lid here so the build quality of this is good it is plastic
the lid that's because we've got wireless antennas right underneath this you can actually pull this
off if you've got reasonably strong fingernails you can lift that out and you can see where
part of the fan is there at the top it's just underneath that and then the antennas right there
now flipping it around you'll see on the back here we've got four screws with four
feet there now if you remove these four screws you can take a look at the internals which i'll do now
shortly just to point out we've got the two mounting points there for that visa mounting
bracket now there are a few things you can upgrade in here with the internals so we have our pci e3
kingston drive here so that's pci 3.0 spec and we do get a heatsink on top of it with a thermal pad
this is a heatsink area right here now 2.5 inch drive would be installed in this part here we've
got the connector right here and you do have to be careful with you pull the bottom off it
with the ribbon cable there not to damage it now there is a con here that you can see we've got
two sodium slots but they've just got a single 16 gigabyte stick that's installed i mean that
is great if you want to run 32 gigabytes of ram you just buy another kingston 16 gigabyte stick
you install that and you get dual channel but as a result this mini pc is running in single channel
and we're missing out on very important rand ram bandwidth here with it so there is a wireless card
and it is located just right here now it's sold it onto the motherboard you cannot upgrade it
and it's wi-fi five spec so wi-fi ac it's intel's ac 7265. now the build quality of
this mini pc is excellent and they've managed to fit quite a bit into this very small compact size
so here in our bios we don't have a lot of options open to us there's no under volting there's no
power limit settings but we do have this which is under chipset which is under pci express
configuration you do have restore ac power loss now this is handy if you're going to run it on a
switch you want to run it as a server you've got that option there with it the rest of it is quite
locked down i'll just very quickly show you here that that's about it with the options we do get
boot order secure boot let's jump over now into windows 11. this mini pc comes with windows 11 pro
installed and when you go into check the status of it that it is fully activated no problems there
with the license now because we have that ram that is just in single channel we are missing
out on a little bit of performance there so this is some memory bandwidth that is definitely
going to be helping out the rs plus graphics which we're simply not going to be getting so
if you can if it's possible i would recommend getting another stick of ram to install this in it
to gain that maximum performance especially if you intend to use the graphics a lot for things like
video editing or a little bit of light gaming so in the device manager here the wireless is intel's
ac 7265 and i'm getting a throughput of around 340 megabits per second i would have preferred this to
have as mentioned the intel ax 200 or 201 which is wi-fi six-spec wi-fi ax this course is wi-fi five
with it and you'll see that under the processor that it's listed here eight times because it has
four cores eight threads and a little bit more information on that uh processor two
right here so it is of course the eighth gen so it is the 8259 u maximum turbo is 3.8
and although it is now quite a few generations old for general kind of computing needs this 28 watt
part is still not actually that bad it's still quite usable definitely even in 2022 even though
okay yes it did come out as you can see there in 2018 so it's a four year old part now that we have
you can see from our geekbench five score that it gets close to a thousand points multi-core score
could be a little higher again this is because of the configuration of the memory if they
just use two sodiums to get then dual channel ram these scores would be a little bit better here
the internal storage for pcie 3.0 spec this kingston drive is quick a
lot faster than sata 3 and you can also add an additional one if you want a 2.5 inch saturn 3
ssd you can put it in there but this boot drive is a lot faster however for pci three spec drives
it's not the quickest out there as you can see from the speeds benchmarking this kingston drive
then our cinebench r23 score here so we get close to 900 points single core score
and then just over 4100 with a multi-core score again it could be better if it was
running dual channel ram not the single channel configuration we have then a video playback here
4k hevc 140 megs per second quite demanding even for the iris plus 655. let's have a look
and see how it runs it so it does an initial drop frames and then it settles down and it
plays it fine as you can see now that's smooth that's not dropping any frames so what about
even more demanding than that which is 60 frames per second this is the sony swordsmith test file
that i always test out uh that is playing fine there you can see that's not dropping any frames
just when it starts up and i do see this with other mini pcs even higher spec even 11th gen
does that little stutter in the beginning for some reason and then later on it just smooths right out
then in chrome here with these sony demo 4k 30 frames per second i will set it to the 4k
option just enable those stats for nerds so we can have a look now and see is it dropping any frames
so for 4k 30 in my experience the iris plus 655 handles this
just fine it's not a problem you can see it is not dropping any frames there if it does drop any
frames it would probably be my network connection now taking a look at 4k 60 frames per second even
at 1440p it has dropped four frames setting it now to 4k i do expect a few dropped frames here
so i'll full screen that of course and my internet connection might not be able to keep up no the
buffer health is not good it's already gone under a second so it looks like if your internet's good
you won't get any drop frames here but there we go i've run out of buffer and it's starting
to drop frames that's my internet connection so if you've got a good connection even in chrome
at 4k60 streaming youtube it won't drop any frames so now it's just caught up and there we go it is
smooth not dropping well just one occasional frame there that's it now this geekcom mini pc does
handle just standard things like word documents this is in fact a very large one here as you can
see 859 pages but it doesn't get bogged down with this at all so you can edit images and things and
it's not going to be really slow it's not going to show any real kind of lags which is good so
it handles multitasking well and not really a problem at all having other things going on in
the background there so for general computing for documents spreadsheets media consumption
all that sort of stuff internet use this is what this mini pc is good at the spec
and 4k video editing it is possible with this spec of mini pc even with the ram and single
channel now this is a very basic edit that i always explain when i test out these many pcs
so it doesn't have any transitions there's no major grading or anything like that
that's going on in fact nothing there so for this it is going to work now the playback resolution
here i only have it set at a quarter playback resolution i think going to half or over that it
will sometimes definitely exhibit some drop frames you can see now that that sometimes looks a little
bit stuttery there what about the actual export time so one minute of footage now i will export
at the 4k preset it should be around one minute or just over for the spec of mini pc
alright so it just finished up and it took 1 minute and 50 about approximately 51 52 seconds
slower than expected and why is that well this is what happened it thermal throttled so the cores
were actually lowering all four cores down to around 2.3 2.4 gigahertz and this did affect the
speed now the iris plus 655 was doing most of the work and also the cpu so it does use both of them
so the thermals i'll talk about that now you can see it does actually end up thermal throttling
getting up to 100 degrees celsius which is not really great to see so it's under these
very strenuous workloads like exporting video cinebench benchmarks is when i do see it hit these
temperatures otherwise the temperatures normally are reasonably good now the fan noise it's not
really that loud you can hear it but it's not a super loud what i would classify as a super
loud mini pc so perhaps i could push the fan a little louder to help lower those top temperatures
it is of course a 28 watt part and such a tiny little mini pc
and onto a little bit of gaming performance this is counter strike i have it set at 1080p
and the frame rate's pretty good so the iris plus 655 graphics even though yes it's old for
integrated this used to be one of the best back in the day back four years ago and again if it
did have the dual channel ram we would actually see a slightly better frame rate here with this
now i'm just going to go charging it probably be killed off pretty quick oh everyone's already dead
okay oh i didn't even see that guy so so bad so that's enough of my terrible gameplay finally i
have a look at gta 5 if it can run that running 1080p as per normal and the normal settings
worth the normal view distance and pedestrian density playable frame rate here so in the car
it gets a little low into the 30s 40s now it could be a little bit higher i did just
see before i started recording this cpu peak at 100 degrees c 101 degrees c it thermal throttled
it brought the temperatures right down the water just now a lot lower than it was before so the
thermals here are affecting the performance so you will be looking at once it throttles around the
40s and it could just do so much better because it was around 50 60 frames per second when it was
not thermal throttling finally i look at linux well i was going to show you linux
but this happens that i just can't boot my live image here usb pen drive it just keeps
flashing all the time and i do have secure boot disabled and normally this pen drive which is
up to date will work on all the other mini pcs i just can't get it to work here for some reason
then our pricing i've seen that it's selling on amazon with a coupon the mini it8 for around 460
us dollars so the performance of it for general computing as i showed you with a mini pc it still
works out quite well the 8th gen especially this particular model being one of the more potent
eight gen hd parts 28 watts with the iris plus 655 graphics so it can handle even 4k editing but
yes light 4k editing 4k video playback perfectly fine a little bit of light gaming older titles as
i showed you so counter strike gta 5 ran fine on this so the build of it very good the size it's
very similar to one of those intel nooks nuts in that regard being almost identical and having the
metal plate on the bottom so you can visa mount it you can run up to four displays and the fan
noise isn't too bad but then what about the things that i don't particularly like so as i pointed out
it comes with 16 gigabytes of ram which is very good but it's only in single channels we're
missing out on that dual channel ram bandwidth there so the performance could be better than
what i showed you however the performance is being limited because it's a 28 watt part which is quite
powerful considering how small it is the little cooler in this does struggle at times so when
you do something very demanding that it was i showed you peak at about 101 degrees celsius
triggering thermal throttling lowering down the clocks there so that's a little bit disappointing
it comes with a wi-fi five spec card in this wi-fi ac and i would have liked to have seen wi-fi
ax you cannot upgrade the wi-fi card either but it is good that you can add a 2.5 inch drive into
this expanding on the storage you can add more storage later on and you could easily get another
16 gigabyte sodium stick of 2.4 gigahertz ram slot that in and then have dual channel so there we go
that's my thoughts then on this geekcom mini i t8 midi pc thank you so much for watching my review