this is the G box from Chuwi it's their new Windows 10 home a mini PC it's
powered by the Intel Celeron in 4100 that is the Gemini Lake the successor to
the Apollo Lake so it's slightly faster the clock speeds are up 200 megahertz
and now has hdmi 2.0 support double data rate for this models got four gigabytes
of RAM which is not a lot but it still be enough for most mini PC tasks I hope
to see an 8 gigabyte model however it has 64 gigabytes of internal storage
which is e MMC 5.1 spec which is reasonably fast now if you want more
capacity and faster storage then you can upgrade it there's two ways you can do
that so you can either install a 2.5 inch hard drive or SSD or an MDOT to set
a three SSD into this model I'll show you how to do this in the video and
we'll also cover the performance and then my overall opinions of Chuy's new
Windows 10 budget mini PC inside the typical Chuwi box we've got the mini PC
there which getting it out it does succeed feel a little bit heavy because
the frame around the outside is all made out of metal but I will show you that in
a minute we have a little leaflet in here so that's just your warranty card
and all of that instruction manual specs then stuffed inside the box on the side
you'll find the power adapters this is 12 volts 2 amps DC n then we have the
little air remote so this is very similar to one of the first mini pcs
that I reviewed from Chuwi and the power cable so this will either be a UK one EU
or US depending on what model you're buying and then there are some screws
and the adaptor so you can mount this on the back of your TV using a VESA mount
so the little remote here is very similar to those LG magic remotes if you
ever use those for lg tv so when you're moving around the mouse pointer then
moves around on the screen so it's quite easy to control and you isn't good for
media centers and things like that you've got two basic controls here LED
power on the menu back mouse-click button as you can see which is this one
so left mouse button home and then volume up and down looking at the design
of the g book so we've got this middle that goes all around the
outside and it does feel very solid thanks to that medal the top of it this
is made out of plastic and it does have this vent that goes all the way around
so underneath this there's a heat sink there is no fan in this mini PC so it's
passively called zero noise which is really good along the bottom we've got
this rubber foot that goes around the whole outside this is the panel you need
to remove to gain access to the 2.5 inch hard drive which I will show you in just
a minute on the front of the device you have the power button status LED micro
SD card slot that is only wired up via USB to hub so speeds are gonna cap out
on your micro SD cards at about 23 megabytes per second which is a shame
but we do have a coarse USB 3 ports on there so two on the front and a USB 3
type C port then along the back reset button DC n VGA HDMI 2.0 a Gigabit LAN
to USB to ports and audio out now VGA on here I don't know where the lot of
people will probably be using that in 2018 personally I would have rather had
another hdmi 2.0 out just like the Alpha wise T 1 to the left and right of the
device there are no additional ports it's just bare metal so we have to
upgrade options once advertised and that is to install a set of three SSD 2.5
inches there is the bay there so you need to remove all of the screws just on
this rear panel that is relatively easy and then if you want to install a MDOT 2
set 3 SSD 22:42 then it's a little bit more complicated you have to remove all
these screws around the outside lift this out here
and then the motherboard well I've already partially removed that you have
to remove about three more screws actually four more screws it is somewhat
tricky to get out because there are these cables here there's a plug on the
rear as well so truly probably doesn't want us going this fun that's probably
why they don't advertise the fact that it does have this important SSD slot
here now you can see the heatsink is made out of an alloy it's very large it
doesn't have the fins like the advertising material but it is very
large and quite fuckin sized so it should do the job what we're looking at
now is the wireless AC chipset so it's an Intel 31 65 the two wireless
antennas are located in the lid of the device where the plastic is for the best
reception of course so for SSD sizes we have two options 22
42 which I'm going to install right here or a 20 to 80 now it doesn't actually
come with a screw unfortunately so there's another sign that Chuy doesn't
really want us to go this far into the internals so because there are a few
fiddly cables in there it's very easy to damage perhaps the wireless antennas as
well I recommend probably your best bet is just to do this so slot in either a
solid-state drive or a 2.5 inch spindle hard drive up to 2 terabytes so jumping
right into the bias here first you can see that the memory speed there 2133
megahertz now that's not the fastest that this
chipset supports which is in fact 2.4 gigahertz as seen in the ec book x4 now
we've got options here for secure boot obviously boot order we need to change
that if you decide to upgrade the hard drive aboard an SSD in there and that's
it so no advanced settings like power limits with this many PC so this is a
screen you get on first boot I'll set up languages we've got English German
Spanish French Italian Korean and Russian and Chinese of course but you
get approximately 43 gigabytes free on this 64 gigabytes of each MMC 5.1
storage that this has on here so it's not a lot of free space of course you'll
probably put in a larger extra Drive you can see I've got my two drives in there
they detected find they're running and they're full set of three speeds so no
problems with that I've tested out the USB ports on there they power external
hard drives up to my large 4 terabyte drive without any problems it didn't cut
out so that is good there so the drives of that send disk it's actually saying
this they've gone with and these are good for MMC 5.1 no complaints here with
the speeds it's not the fastest I have seen but it will not bottleneck the
system really it's gonna be perfectly fine there the bottleneck will be of
course the CPU so when you have a look in the device manager you've got the
four cores or the CPU there and there's nothing really of interest here to point
out only that the Intel wireless AC 31 that I already showed you so I found the
range to be good and you're going to get about
320 megabits per second the maximum throughput from this so it's not super
quick you can get faster probably from an external one there so we do have
these two microphones inside and I have recorded a quick sample here for you as
you can hear now from this sample the microphone quality is not amazing as it
expect for microphones located within the G box here now it's enough for one
knows Cortana it's working fine with it windows did fully activate so there's no
problems with the license and we have only three point eight four gigabytes
free to us which is of course not a lot I really want to see an 8 gigabyte model
and more hopefully eight gigabyte models with the germinate Lake of tech coming
out from China no chewy sorry teclast they're working on
something with 8 gigabytes and you also see that the ram speeds when I did take
a look at them in the BIOS they're exactly the same here so the same it is
running in dual channel according to this but DIMM slots no so there's no
sodium slots on this you cannot upgrade the RAM now a synthetic benchmark well
this is Geekbench 4 and it does show that the single core scores here are up
approximately 23% 24% over the Apollo lake in 3450 that other cell run chip
last year's one and then the multi-core score is also up about approximately 19%
so I would not get the cell run in 34 mini pcs anymore stick now to the Jimmy
Lake get the latest ones because it's definitely worth it for the performance
you're gaining I know we're losing 2 gigabytes of RAM but it is faster Ram
and we also have things like HDMI 2.0 a and the n22 score now this is a dated
version of and to to this on the Windows Store but this puts it 140,000 about the
same as the Snapdragon 660 if this happened to be running Android of course
it's not jule boot any more Intel don't support your boots on these since the
old cheery trails which is a shame I'm gonna boot over to the Linux Mint so
what I did is just goes into the BIOS and then from the BIOS on the save and
exit menu you've got a boot override minyan you can just select to boot
you'll USB pendrive so let's see how it runs so what is running Linux Mint
perfectly fine this is just one of the latest builds that I have lighted from
that pendrive and tonight is working as far as I can tell everything works here
the performance also seems decent and even the little remote is working as
well in Linux I just push the back button then and I'll just enable the
mouse turn you see that mouse cursors going around so that works too in Linux
which is great moving over to real-world performance and this is what matters to
me and I'm pretty sure everyone else so you can do minor Photoshop edits now if
you've got a huge amount of layers filters and things like that
expect some slowdown remember that this only does have four gigabytes of RAM so
you are really pushing it this is not a Core i5 is not a core i7 and this as a
very low powered 6 watt CPU in there so I'm running quite a few things at the
moment I also have 4k streaming you can see here in the background I'm just
pushing it to the absolute limit so that CPU now you can see is running at 100
cent so it's really taxed now normally you would not do this with these kind of
systems you need to close things down you can't keep things open like you've
got 32 gigabytes or 16 gigabytes of RAM know you've only got the 4 there so
remember that steam is also there in the background I think I'm downloading
something that there's probably actually finished now
so even swapping between these little spreadsheet here you can see the
performance is fine now spreadsheet editing things like this is the perfect
kind of use for one of these mini pcs so like tasks editing documents checking
your emails writing emails basic internet browsing is all perfect for
this type of chipset and is the word document there as well so you can see
scrolling up there a little bit of lag but again bear in mind that I've got a
lot of things open here at the moment I just want to show you how far you can
push these little mini pcs how far you can push the cell run in 4100 now on
Cody I'm using the little magic remote so it will work if you tap the mouse
button then I've got the mouse pointer it takes a little while to get used to
as I mentioned it's kind of like those LG magic remotes so the Menu key is our
right mouse button and the okay is the left mouse button and the power button
just puts it into sleep or turns it on so I'm going to play now
all that same exact file no won't actually going to play a 4k file hear
record it on the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and see how place that now you can see
that a little bit of stutters at the beginning but it's relatively smooth and
running around 50 frames per second there and using the remote again I'm
gonna sternness skip ahead so that's working fine Kodi performance I've found
is actually better than the Windows video player now I moved over into each
I'm streaming one of my videos in 4k and you can see zero dropped frames so edge
does a much better job at this than Chrome down so just get out of this will
close it down and I will now play a HEV C codec which is a hundred and forty
megabits per second ten but this is a very demanding file for K remember and
you'll see at the start that it will stutter a little bit this is the same
exact kind of performance as the Apollo lag so this is native vp9 and a TVC
decoding and can see once it gets going that that runs perfectly fine that is
now very smooth that's running at 30 frames per second and just to also show
you that without having all those things going on in the background once you
close down as applications you manage the memory a little bit here you can see
now that this spreadsheet is very smooth the same goes for any Word document so
the system is perfectly fine for that and on to gaming performance so light
engine titles for example League of Legends which I'm playing right now this
is running in 1080p on the medium settings hovering around 36 frames per
second so you can see so the performance is not wonderful but the game at least
is playable now if you would lower the settings you'll boost up that frame rate
by about 10 frames per second
Android emulation so BlueStacks that is an Android emulator and it will run very
slow you need a much more powerful system for this I've got pub G here
loaded because someone asked me to test it out and asked me if it would run it
well you can see it runs the game but at about 10 - 5 frames per second dipping
down to even 3 frames per second impossible to play it
this is Counter Strike global Offensive on 720p resolution lower settings and
super choppy down to 11 frames per second hovering around 20 and it just is
not playable at all now I tried to boost the performance I ran a program called
read write everything and I entered in the basically the memory hack that we do
to override and get rid of the power limit but it didn't take it doesn't work
so I can't double the framerate like they did with the easy book x4 I was
able to double my framerate with that one which worked really well but it just
cannot do it with this so I wouldn't buy this many PC for gaming performance so
looking now at the thermals and the wattage so it's going to pull about 12
watts maximum from the wall 12 13 which is ideal it's fine if this is a mini PC
a low powered PC so it doesn't consume a lot of power at all thermals cap out at
85 86 degrees they plateau at that temperature they will not exceed it so
this is fine remember that it is passively cooled it's not actively
cooled there's no fan in there so this really is a very decent little mini PC
here from chewie we've got a good build quality the middle frame around the
outside makes it feel quite sturdy now I didn't mention in the beginning
but the USB ports are actually upside-down that's very - you just have
to remember to flip things around plastic on the top
it does get warm after hours of use but it's nothing alarming there's no fans in
here so you don't have to worry about number one fan noise number two it
falling full of dust eventually clogging up those fans and causing it to overheat
so if their malls top out at 86 degrees it's not going to go over that at least
here worth my ambient temperature of 26 degrees that's good
I really do like the little remote so this remote I remember testing it out
with the high and it's good because it means you don't
actually need a bluetooth mouse or a mouse connected if you want to launch
something basic like you want to launch some video files from a hard drive then
it is all possible from a distance using that little remote there so it works
well it does the job and it's good to have it included in the box
so the performance yes it's faster than the Apollo date in 34th 50s typical
chipsets that you would see from last year and those models I wouldn't go for
anymore so you've got HDMI 2.0 on this now and we have about 20% according to
synthetic benchmarks more performance so it does feel a little bit snappier
differently go with an SSD if you can if you want to boost the performance it
just makes it load apps up faster and just feels quicker overall so it does
come recommended from me there's just a couple of things that I wish it had so
first off I wish there was an option in the BIOS that if you powered it on you
plugged in the power that is that it would automatically turn on if you
wanted to that you could set that it's only the Intel nukes that seem to do
that the other is of course you probably already know and you're aware of the RAM
4 gigabytes of RAM in 2018 it's just not enough I want to see this Gemini O'Lakes
with 8 gigabytes or at least 6 gigabytes now apparently 6 gigabyte systems are
coming soon but an 8 gigabyte version would be the sweet spot with this I feel
and that gaming performance isn't particularly wonderful with the 6 watt
TDP thanks a lot for watching this review I hope you did like it it's long
but I did include a lot of details like all my other videos and I hope to see
you back soon in the channel bye for now