Chuwi is back with another Mini PC now this model retails for 350 US Dollars approximately and the
call box from them I think is actually a good little mini PC and don't let the core I3 naming
put you off as it did me because you'd think that oh core I3 that's going to be terrible right well
actually it's not bad because it's 12g and core I3 so we do have the Intel UHD Graphics it's got six
cores eight threads it's got ddr5 Ram 16 gigabytes worth this configuration they sent out to me with
512 gigabytes of storage it has Wi-Fi 6E gigabit Lan and even a USB 4 Port that does support
external gpus power delivery and it can also run a for example 8K TV at 30 Hertz if you happen to
have one of those which most people don't but hey for future proofing it's still good to have
you can also install a 2.5 inch drive and it can run two displays in fact sorry three to display so
pretty impressive for the price point and as I see from the performance it's actually a good little
mini PC included with the core box you will find a user manual we do have a product inspection report
a warranty card our power supply here and the power supply cable we then get a sata 3 cable with
the power there to it and some screws four of them for a 2.5 inch Drive they're using a brand power
supply hunt key I have seen many of these before and it is a 90 watt power supply and let's have
a look at the build of it now so we have middle on the top here but it's just this part here and then
on the reverse side the rest of it is Plastics you see on the underside this is the metal we've got
here looks like there's two fans there but in fact the cooler and the fan is right in the middle and
I'll show you that shortly when we take a look at the internals two rubber feet right here front of
it this again is plastic our power about it now I like the look of it it's kind of like a small
Tower PC look and because it's a little bit larger than some of the other mini PCS plenty of space
inside for cooling which is good so we do have a vent here on that side vent on the other so again
that's a positive there having all the ventilation and again here you can see another vent so all the
ports on the back we've got two separate 3.5 millimeters so audio out to audio in this is a
USB 4 Port here so it's 40 gigabits per second it supports DisplayPort out 8K 30 4K 120 I am able to
run with this which is good with my LG CX and it does also support power delivery and that again is
great so if you don't want to use the DC in which they provide then you can just use type c gigabit
Lan Port only kind of understandable because they are trying to make this a more affordable
mini PC here and it's priced about this version with the 16 gigabytes to RAM and 512 gigabyte
SSD around 350 US Dollars which is not bad at all considering it's got the six cores eight
threads and the Wi-Fi ax 201 so Wi-Fi six in there and then you get USB for support so it's pretty
good HDMI 2.0 DisplayPort 1.4 a and four USB 3.0 ports unfortunately not 3.2 that's all right again
because of the price it's understandable then to gain access to the internals is very easy so
we have the four screws here it simply just pops up which is great and you'll see on the underside
that is where we do have the area four of course a 2.5 inch drive so be it a spindle hard drive or
an SSD you can add that and that gives you great expandability when it does come to having well
slower slightly slow of course than pcie but a good choice there for expandable storage and now
you can see where we do have our cooler very large cooler the alloy there all the fins and our fan so
for maintenance it's going to be quite easy to clean that then looking a little closer you can
see the Theta connectors and the power connector there so we've actually got a second set but
there is no room in here looks like they could have actually put two side by side but for some
reason maybe costs they decided not to actually do that you can see the SSD this is our wireless chip
right there so the Intel ax 201 as mentioned so that is Bluetooth five support that it does have
I think it's Bluetooth 5.1 off the top of my head with a course Wi-Fi six they're fast transfers up
to about in theory 2.4 gigabits per second but I only get around about 1.3 with my Wi-Fi 6E router
now if you look through the fins there I can just see some of the RAM chips right there so ddr5
sold it onto the motherboard no Ram upgrades and no Wi-Fi card upgrades with this model
and here we have our bios menu so it looks like it's completely locked down to us if you tap
Escape however you get into this where then you have all the advanced settings so this is great to
see I won't go into this in detail because a lot of it's just way over my head and everyone else's
head and a little bit boring to be honest but we've got this overclocking performance menu now
I haven't messed about with this you could enable it you could go in here and see if you wanted to
undervolt for example on the processor you can do that you can tweak quite a few things you can
see there is well really pretty much every single option you can think of is in here which is really
good to see a lot of Manufacturers just block this out they don't want people going in here of course
now you could even go over to the graphics and I believe you might be able to tweak that up I'm not
too sure if it is actually locked down remember this isn't a k processor at all it's only a core
I3 but these core i3s as you'll see later they're so much better than what the previous generations
were now you see Thunderbolt here one is that there well usb4 does have the Thunderbolt so it's
basically like Thunderbolt 3 and you can just use an external GPU it's all enabled it's all working
which is good uh some of these I definitely don't recommend messing around with switchable Graphics
because of course it's only got the integrated Graphics here there's a lot of different things
in here now there is an option for powering it on if it detects power now this has been a real
surprise to me there's many PC just forget about the core i3s you know of the previous generations
that used to have like dual cores four threads only because this particular model here we've
got okay the two performance cores and four efficiencies and it's actually really quite
good look at this this is bettering some of the core i5s from the previous gen it's that good
so I don't even know why they call it a core I3 they should probably even call it something like a
core i5 and make it a u Core i5 chip but the 1215u because shoe is configured out with 28 Watts with
the power limit 1 and then 45 it is performing a lot better than you would probably see it in
some laptops which would limit it at only 15 watts so it is overall a good I think a good
processor I can't even believe I'm saying that about a core I3 so the maximum turbo is 4.4 the
only real weakness of it is it does not have the iris XE Graphics that's one of the things that it
will be good if it had it but you know they're never going to give that to a core I3 now when
you take a look at our Ram it is in dual Channel and of course it is very quick it is running at
4.8 gigahertz which is fantastic so we're getting some extra performance there which will still Aid
the UHD graphics and I've confirmed this also too with HW info that yes it runs at that speed and
it's definitely in dual channel so that's going to help out now the SSD not fast so this is one area
that Chewie decided okay we'll cut Corners we'll put in an SSD that's you know not amazing but
it's better than say to three speeds it's about you know three times faster that's really it the
good option is you can expand upon the storage so you can add the with the cable included an
extra 2.5 inch drive and if you Source another one of those cables and figure out how to mount
it inside you could actually add two 2.5 inch drives and I don't really know why chewy hasn't
included an extra cable and the bracket well I kind of do actually cost wise again just to keep
the price down a little bit so if you look at the device manager there's nothing really interesting
in here apart from I can show you that there it is the ax 201 it's a good Wi-Fi chip I'm a fan of it
I think it's great the transfer speeds are over a gigabit and even though it's only got gigabit
Lan and not 2.5 gigabit which would have been nice it's still quite quick and yes you can upgrade it
unfortunately so you can see the processor there the core I3 1215u actually really good so Windows
here I won't bother showing you things like okay document spreadsheets performance all that sort
of stuff because everything is really quick and actually multitasking is surprising me it's not
bogging down how the other previous gen like 11th gen core i3s would be that bog down they'll get
slow they get a bit choppy Now video playback I'll just play a file here Sony swordsmith I only just
plays for a few seconds it's actually Flawless very good not a problem and this jellyfish file
540 megabits per second 4K again really good so if you wanted to use this Mini PC this core box
as a media player it's going to be perfect I think for that now just to show you here that I did run
cinematch R23 so multi-core score there again for a core I3 this is a phenomenal score but because
of the power of it mostly they've upped that and you know it's got the eight threads in total so
it's almost pretty much like the quad cores from before with the four cores eight threads so these
listen good performance there and I really do like what I'm seeing 4K video editing isn't something
that I would ever think about doing on a core I3 because I would just go no no that hasn't got the
cause hasn't got the power why would I even bother but with a basic 4K edit like this in
Adobe Premiere Pro this is the latest version two by the way it's all right and there's sometimes a
little bit of lag but again it kind of feels like a core i5 or even a core A7 from the 11th or 10th
10th gen intels it really is that good I'm really quite impressed with it again the power limit
that they've set is certainly helping out so the timeline there is only set to a quarter playback
resolution and that's probably all I would leave it at it sometimes drops a few frames you see
but overall yet the performance here is good I am impressed so what I want to do is the typical test
I do here export it we'll see how long is it going to take to encode now I will go with the YouTube
4K preset so it's not a demanding bit rate but it should be hopefully under a minute we'll find
out okay so it is women of footage here now it's going to be slower than what it normally is and
that is because it does not support Hardware encoding this chip well according to Adobe
Premiere Pro it's not going to support it so it's software only so that's going to slow it down it
won't be using the UHD Graphics unfortunately at all here so start on our timer here and export
it will be slow and what I'll do now is is I'll just skip ahead and show you the final result
of how long it takes to encode one minute of footage with the 4K YouTube preset there we
go it is about to finish up now and it is taking over two minutes here so approximately you could
say two minutes and eight seconds that's very slow but for a core A3 to be expected however if it was
using Intel quick sync and the hardware encoding it would probably be I would say it would be under
a minute for core I3 I'm still impressed that it can edit and encode 4K video these kind of speeds
all right this is just crazy and in a good way look at this with the core I3 I never thought
in my life I would be saying this I'm playing GTA 5 at 1080p medium settings normal kind of
settings that is with the presets at look at this 60 frames per second at 1080p I I can't
believe this this is a core I3 that's why I say it's not really like a core A3 this to me is like
a core i5 11th gen Core i5 kind of performance so looking very good just a quick preview at
gaming so yes it can do a little bit just lower the resolution lower the settings older titles
and look at this even cyberpunk 2077 the lower setting preset 720p I would not try 1080p it's
just going to be like 10 frames per second or 14. it's not quite what I would classify as playable
I have seen it up to 30 frames per second at the moment with all those NPCs in there to render uh
it's around you can see about what 23 24 frames per second so a little choppy a little laggy but
still this is absolutely amazing for a core I3 to be able to well play this and do this now there
are some scripts out there I believe that you can tweak those settings to try and lower things down
even more so maybe with a few tweaks you could even get a game like cyberpunk 2077 at 720p to
round around 30 frames per second on average it's absolutely amazing and how is it able to
do this well that's because of the two performance cores mostly and because of that really fast ddr5
RAM and the power limit of 28 Watts that Chewie has set fan noise and our thermals very good on
the core box so the fan noise Chewie's using a fixed RPM you do hear it just a little but it's
not offensive it's not what I would call loud and it's a constant RPM so it doesn't fluctuate and
that's good in a way too so quiet good thermals and it only gets up to about 81 degrees maximum
is all I have seen now for some odd reason it does tell me an HW info that yes it did trigger thermal
throttling and I don't know why it's down there maybe they'll set the throttling Point quite low
um it's probably because of the higher power limits which you can see if I just scroll down
here that it's set power limit one 28 Watts power limit to 45 which is well above what
most people would be running with this core I3 1215u then if you're looking to run Linux
yes it does work now the test USB pen drive that I've booted up here is of the Linux mandaro this
Dro and I really don't have any problems with it they've been so good lately using
the open source drivers so Wi-Fi is working Bluetooth everything really and that's great
well I can happily report after using this now for a couple of days and what I've seen with
the performance that it's actually a very good Mini PC I feel for the price point and what is
offered so we get that USB 4 spec you do have Wi-Fi 6E gigabit Lan you can install extra hard
drive in fact you could probably even install a second 2.5 inch drive if you can get hold of
that cable the SATA and the little power cable I think AliExpress is probably your best bet for
that but the only thing is it's probably going to be loose and floating around in the inside
there so the performance for a core A3 is not what you'd expect the core i3s that I'm used to uh the
older generation ones which are just two cores for Threads in pretty low clock speeds and they
normally don't even turbo at all but this one is not bad at all you can even go as far as editing
4K video playing GTA 5 at 1080p really quite good thermal is good fan noise uh is excellent
It's just there a little bit you hear it it's not completely dead silent but it's not bad edit oh
and then of course you can run three displays out you've even got 8K support power delivery
support run an external GPU so really I think for the price point it's not a bad deal at all when
you get that fast ddr5 Ram which is another thing that I think a lot of people uh would like and of
course it is 16 gigabytes worth you can't upgrade it however so this is where we get into the cons
no upgrades really apart from adding extra ssds so you can't for example go along and say Hey I
want to put a different wireless card in I want to upgrade the RAM to 32 gigabytes it's just not
possible there so that's the downside to it but otherwise I mean it's got a decent build to it not
bad a little bit bigger than others but then the cooling and what is on offer is quite good so well
done chewy this is certainly better than what I've seen with your tablets and your laptops I think
many PCs if you continue like this probably a good segment for them to really start getting into