So today I'm going to have a look at a mini PC that isn't the typical stuff I
look at so it's not an Apollo Lake or an at a mini PC but a fanless i7 7500 you
with a maximum turbo of 3.5 gigahertz now this comes pre-configured from
banggood it's called the Hystou i7 and it's got 8 gigabytes around 128
gigabytes of storage I do believe it doesn't come with an operating system
installed so that's up to the end-user so I'm going to install Windows 10 on
this and test it out and review it with that so it's about 420 us other specs
includes land put on there Gigabit Ethernet that it has and while it's in
or AC I couldn't quite confirm what it has on there it just says dual band
which could mean while it's in dual band or AC
anyway let's check this one out so the box was surprisingly heavy and it took a
while to come to me it took approximately two and a half weeks from
China to Spain so they've included a rather large power adapter therefore the
plug which will probably just be us so the box has taken a bit of a beating but
it should be ok inside here because it's a rather bulky chunky heavy mini PC now
I don't think it looks like this image because that certainly wasn't what I
paid for which should have been a black one but we'll find out in a second get
this open ok so they've included the high so two mouse pad for me just in
case they wanted out a little bit of propaganda from them
we do have a driver DVD and a small of the user manual so they gave me a power
adapter but I didn't need there because look they've already included did
typical 3 the Mickey Mouse prong sorry Mickey Mouse plug and then euro
connector and the power supply is rather small actually not as big as I thought
it might be so 12 volts 5 amps is the output of that
now there are a couple other things floating around in here there's a SATA
cable there so if you want to hook up a 2.5 inch one terabyte drive or another
SSD you're able to do that and this here is for the power for it so there must be
a power connector on the motherboard in the inside there to connect that up then
to power a SATA 3 Drive this of course is a bracket if you wanted to stand it
up right then that's the support for it it's got some screws that will be for
hard drive mounting and one antenna there should be another one in here
there it is stuck on this side there so I can see that it hasn't sustained any
damage it is well protected inside that box which is good so on the front of the
mini PC we have a full-sized USB 2 port an SD card reader the power on button
with a status led to the left of it the whole top of it's made out of aluminium
we've got these grilles here that's to help dissipate heat because obviously
the CPU is going to be up against this and dissipating let's heat through the
whole housing of this so that's a massive passive heatsink for it because
there is no fan inside this as you'll see soon when I open it up and the rear
of the devices will find all the main ports here so we have two antenna
connections there for those antennas included in the box
3.5 millimeter audio in and out four times USB 3.0 spec ports then I'll
Gigabit Ethernet a display port they can output for Kate 60 Hertz and then HDMI
1.4 spec they can only output 4k at 30 Hertz so if you have a 4k TV and you
want to run 60 Hertz you're going to have to use and adapt
and you can get active adapters that will convert DisplayPort
to 4k 60 Hertz so that's what's going to be required there so it's a real shame
that they don't include HDMI to spare corners which would be perfect so to
gain access to the internals what we need to do is remove the three screws
either side so six in total and pull up the rear panel now
you're 2.5 inch hard drive or SSD will go here you'd screw that on here and
then we have the SATA 3 connector for data and then the power would come up
here to plug that in to your hard drive or your SSD so as expected they've only
used one Ram sodam here so that's 8 gigabytes of RAM and that's only going
to be in single channel so that's going to affect performance a little bit
especially when it comes to graphics performance so I am going to actually
swap that out and put an 8 gigabyte so it's in dual channel here we can see the
wireless card and then the mSATA SSD so both of those components can be swapped
out if you're not happy with the wireless card they've used in here then
you can of course remove that and put your own in the same goes for the mSATA
so you can increase the capacity from 128 gigabytes up to 512 I think it is
the maximum or even a terabyte there so you can put a Samsung Evo and so this is
the RAM I'm going to use its course here vengeance 2 times 4 gigabytes and that
means it will run in dual channel and you can see the speed of this this is
one of those plug-and-play kits that will overclock automatically up to 2133
megahertz now that doesn't work I'm going to have to clock it back down to
something like 1866 or 1600 megahertz so the rounds gone and there no problems
just clips in its laptop Ram so make sure you always get the Soudan spec
double data rate three and I consider the build quality of it in general it's
a good little motherboard that they've got in there I can't see any problems
with it at all so from now on the rest of this review is going to be captured
using my screen capture card so it did come with Windows 10 installed I don't
know whether I can trust that it's a legitimate CD key but so far Windows
Update is working it's not saying that it's not a valid key it's activated and
I see no signs of them using hacker or some sort of crack to activate it so it
might come with a full copy of Windows 10 Pro but it's really hard to say
because they advertise it without that now you see installed memory very
strange amount there that is because I ran into problems with those two sticks
that I use it didn't like the Corsair wouldn't boot with the
right that Ram it also I recommend just getting 1600 megahertz RAM stick to that
double data rate three low-power by the way is the one you want to use now why
this strange capacity well I keep the eight that they gave me that came
included and I used one of the four gigabyte sticks at least that is working
for me so that's why it's at 12 there now the device manager just wanted to
point out a couple of things here so Internet the Gigabit Ethernet controller
that's real Tech Wireless is Broadcom in now it's not a very good adapter I'll
show you in just a second the speeds of it are quite poor same goes for the disk
drive the high so to one that their views so their own kind of brand of SSD
and you'll see the performance of that is quite poor so I have run some
benchmarks this is the wireless not very good at all I can get out of other
adapters that are using Wireless in faster speeds than this the uploads
pretty slow there so if I was going to buy this I would try and get the
bare-bones model if you can or swap up that adapter for a much better Intel
wireless AC one then you better push a lot faster speeds through it we're going
to be streaming things like 4k the ethernet of course works just fine
that's not a problem I can get my maximum line speeds out of that here's
the Geekbench fourscore which is quite good you can see how much faster this is
than the Apolo lake or cheery trail atoms a lot faster those ones only get
single core score the Apollo Lake n 3450 cell run that only gets about 1400 you
can see it's almost three times as fast there and in the multi-core score you
get around 4,000 on the m30 450 here is edging towards 8,000 so quite good
performance from the dual core the compute score here another fairly decent
score with the Intel HD 620 graphics now the internal storage it's got a couple
other benchmarks to show you here we can see that it is quite disappointing for
an SSD I would put something like a Samsung 850
Evo in here I mean it's okay those speeds but we can get a lot better with
set of three it's also a shame that it doesn't have PCIe because then you could
put something like a samsung 960 Evo in there and have some super fast SSD
speeds another disappointment as well as the micro so I know the SD card slot
it's only running at USB 2 speeds which I I thought it would because you could
see that was only plugged up to a USB 2 port there and the antutu score here
quite a good score but still not as fast as of course a dedicated GPU now I can
talk a little bit about thermals here after running it for a while you can see
this is why now are pushing it very hard gaming got it up to 72 degrees which is
fine considering that this is passively cooled as you saw in the beginning there
is no fan whatsoever with this hardware and I find that score too that those
temperatures there to be really quite good now does get hot to the touch
I've had my thermal probe here or do some more gaming and I'll keep you
updated on the temperatures there now this is the ninth generation the Intel
HD 620 DP that's got on it and it can natively handle your H 2.65 codecs just
fine and also vp9 not a problem this one here I'm going to play this is 140
megabits per second 4k quite a demanding file now the Apollo Lakes will struggle
with this but as you see here it's perfectly fine you can seek ahead and
there's no stuttering or anything it plays this really well very fluid
so I wouldn't be worried about using this as a media device that it's going
to be able to play these files the highest encoded really you can throw it
it is going to be perfectly fine here so wanted to quickly demonstrate a demo
here of its streaming 4k but for some reason I'm not able to select the 4k
resolution here in YouTube I don't know what is going on that some buzzword
YouTube maybe they've just disabled that and then who knows I don't know why I
cannot do that anyway it will handle 4k streaming perfectly fine you don't get
any drop frames if you're using the ethernet port of course but if you
switch over to that Wireless it will keep up I found as long as your range is
good which is why I don't recommend going with the stock wireless card I
would change that for something else same goes for Chrome you can see it does
drop frames now and then but it's so much better when you're running it on
this cell run n 3450 for example the Apollo likes it continually drop frames
here just at the beginning it dropped a couple and now as you can see it's still
at eight so you can stream 4k in Chrome here it's got the 4k sitting something's
going on with YouTube and edge it won't let me enable that and it just showed
you before let's just load in a website now this is tick tablets comma website
of course and it handles this really well super smooth as you'd expect with
that kind of performance we get on the benchmarks there with Geekbench for
really quick this is what this mini PC is ideal for so things like office Lite
Photoshop work you can even do video editing on this it's not really a
problem I say 1080p is going to be fine 4k is a little bit slow now a very quick
look at Cody so this is a media player of course it's very popular play the
same file here of those jellyfish the 4k 140 megabit per second 10 bit
eight point two six five no problems very smooth it's going to handle
everything you throw at it and you've got that space there to add another hard
drive if you want it because we got a 2.5 inch Bay there you could screw on a
2 terabyte drive put all your files on there wouldn't be a problem and very
quickly to touch on Linux and is's Manjaro build number 17 as far as I can
tell everything is working the wireless works is detecting drivers you might
have some problems with I think the audio it seems to like it's not going to
work via HDMI out or I need to configure that but we've got of course the drivers
here that you can install the saying unknown device for the display but you
can see it's working fine and performance here in Firefox I can't see
anything wrong with it so if you want to use this for Linux it
looks like you are definitely in luck with this one ok so we're on a busy
server quite full and we're getting around 50 frames per second which is
really quite decent considering that this is an integrated GPU and it's not
dedicated of course so you can do a few games on the site here
matter to get lucky to stand now
so I think this performance is really quite good so this total here is a
Windows Store game asphalt extreme on the optimal the default setting 1080p
you can see the deep performance so far really quite good
the little stutters are very playable
this one chivalry medieval warfare on the lowest setting oh and I died you see
this one's got playable framerates but it is dipping down a little bit which is
why I'm keeping it on the lowest setting 720p is going to do and this last title
here is League of Legends so on the summoners rift mat 1080p
shooter setting that's on high here as you can see the framerate is keeping
over 60 frames per second so really good performance it's not going to have any
problems the Intel HD 620 playing this now having it look here you can see that
we don't have any thermal throttling and it does hold a reasonably high clock
right there on the GPU but it does dip down to about 800 megahertz and the
maximum picks up to is just over a thousand there so it did get up to 76
degrees is the maximum there I've seen it now I've got my several pro and
feeling it is quite hot to the touch it's forty two point seven degrees right
where the high sotto badge is and touching that yet very hot but I
wouldn't be worried about leaving this on continually because there well it is
fameless' it's dissipating that heat quite well and as soon as you stop doing
anything really demanding like gaming you can see that those temperatures they
have dropped down now already quite quickly and really it's only when you're
gaming is it going to get really hot to the touch and quite warm ok so just to
recap here there positives that it's got quite a bit of power for a fanless mini
PC we've got the i7 7 5000 you in there let's say 2017 chip this is the latest
chip you can get and we can configure it we can customise it we can put more
ramen but that's where we run into the cons here that does give it
us a set of three SSD that has very poor speed that's not really fast as some
other drives for example like the Samsung 850 Evo and then okay they've
given us eight gigabytes of RAM a single sodium which is great that means we can
buy another eight gigabytes put that in and run a dual channel to get more
performance out of there but we're going to have to spend more money the same
goes for the wireless card it's quite a cheap wireless card the Broadcom
Wireless in and it's only of course 2.4 gigahertz the performance of it upload
speeds aren't really fast enough if I was going to be keeping this machine
which I'm not sure I will at this point but I will put a wireless AC definitely
mini PCI card in there and then a Samsung 850 Evo just increases speed and
another 8 gigabytes of RAM so you need to spend additional money on it so it
comes out to be a little expensive the other thing is if you're going to be
gaming on it do expect it to get quite hot to the touch it'll get up to around
43 degrees which is hitting towards the hot side of things but the temperatures
are fine there is no thermal throttling and overall the performance is good now
you can of course add another 2.5 inch drive and there what I sorry I don't
mean another that you can add and expand upon the data so you could put a 2
terabyte drive in there and run this as a media PC or a file storage PC which
would be great a high performance one as long as you connected up of course with
the Ethernet port and not using that slow wireless thanks a lot for watching
this review here and I do hope to see you back in the channel soon