Today i am taking a look here at a mini pc windows 10 pro this one was sent out
to me from banggood it's called the Nvisen mu02 it is powered by the ice lake core i7
g7 that has iris plus graphics this configuration does come with 16 gigabytes of ram 512 gigabyte
ssd and it does have wireless ac unfortunately not a so is it a mini pc that you should consider
for the price tag of about 500 us dollars well not really and you'll find out why in this
review so this is the box it comes in very plain looking and i'll just get this off and we'll take
a look at the contents the mini pc's got a lot of padding around it well packaged and here we have
an hdmi cable 40 watt power supply we've got some screws so there are four there for the mini pc and
then there are two for the visa mounting bracket right here so yes you can install it onto the back
of a monitor or a tv and an eu power cable on the back of the mini pc here you can see we've got an
intake vent for rubber feet and two mounting points there for that bracket when you slot
it onto the back of a monitor so the hot air is sucked in here vented out the side right here this
is all metal around the outside and it's plastic on the back the top of it this is also made out of
plastic it's removable and i'll get into the internals shortly two usb threes two usb 2s
3.5 millimeter headphone jack with mic support status leds and a power button and then along the
back right here we've got displayport so this is 4k 60 max hdmi 2.0 4k 60 max type c is only data
so unfortunately this is not thunderbolt 3 it does not support video and here we have another two usb
3s gigabit lan and our power in so those are the two screws you need to remove if you want to get
access to the internals which i will show you now so that lid was not difficult to remove i did have
to use however pry tool just to get it out of the inside of this so you can see on the reverse of it
it does have these four mounting points here for a sata 3 2.5 inch drive and the cable if we had it
in the box which we do not would connect up right here so there we have our ssd so this is 22 by 80
size it can be replaced there is one more of these on the reverse of the motherboard however to get
to it you need to pull the motherboard right out and right here they have this brace with our
wireless antennas which are on the top and i don't have a screwdriver that can actually get down
right to where i need to get to the screw just in here to remove that in order to flip around the
motherboard which is a shame but if you want to go that far you can install then a sata 322 by 80
drive on the other side so we've just got the single sodium here that they've installed with
16 gigabytes really i think they should have gone with two eight gigabyte sticks which is maybe a
little bit more expensive for them but that would have given us then dual channel much better memory
bandwidth and the wi-fi card if you wanted to put something much better than this one they
include this is wi-fi ac well you can go along and then put a intel ax 200 or 200 in one with
which is wi-fi ax wi-fi 6 with bluetooth 5 would be much better than what they have installed here
so that's under that ssd drive first up i'll buy us here so we have some good news that it's
completely unlocked but i commonly see this with these chinese mini pcs is they give us
all the bios options and settings so we can go in there you can change the power limits you can even
enable the overclocking options well to be able to undervolt it later on with intel's extreme tuning
utility so i'll go into a lot of details here there are pretty much every single setting you
can think of including ram disk configuration is in here uh you also have options later on too that
you can set this so it will power on automatically if it does lose power it will detect that state
power itself up boot order all that can be changed secure boot so in theory this should be able to
run it does have the tpm module in there it should be able to run windows 11 here so let's jump into
windows now here in windows it is running windows 10 pro and it is activated no problems with that
however there are several things that are wrong with this mini pc that i'll be pointing out here
to start with the chip which is the core i7 it's the 1065 g7 this is when intel finally moved over
to 10 nanometers it's not a bad chipset so this is quad core eight threads maximum turbos 3.9
however if you've got a keen eye you would have noticed this that it's a qs that this is actually
a quality sample or engineering sample here that they should not be selling in retail units many
pcs with this now the graphics department has the ice lake uss gt2 64 executional units meaning it's
more potent this is iris plus graphics i'm going to get onto the performance late later on but it
is crippled by the fact that is only running as i showed you just a single slot of ram but not only
that the ram is at 2 66 megahertz and not 3.2 gigahertz which it does actually support this
chipset that it should be running and it is not simply doing that so the geekbench performance as
a result here this is geekbench 5 just in single channel we are missing out on a bit of multi-core
performance here so that is rather low single core scores down a little bit because of the ram speeds
should be faster there the same goes for the internal storage sata 3 only okay and it should be
an nvme drive which is faster so we are capped and limited to sata 3 only speeds
another huge disappointing area here if you look under the device managers the upgradeable
thankfully we can swap it out we can change it is this here so we have realtek wireless ac
and i'm only getting about 300 just over 300 about 315 megabits per second transfers which
are not great so if you swap it out replace it and upgrade it with an intel ax 200 or the 200 in one
wireless card you're going to really improve on those performances get around then about
three point sorry one point three give a gigabit per second transfers and there is
real tech gigabit on board with this as i showed you nothing else a real interest
in here so yes quite a few disappointing things with the configuration with the setup
oh and they did partition the c drive into two partitions as you can see one for windows the
other they're set up for data but it really should be an nvme drive with this okay so i couldn't take
it anymore i had to put the correct spec of ram in this and i ended up putting in 32 gigabytes or two
16 gigabyte ones in this so it's running correctly now at 3.2 gigahertz the ram speed instead of 2.66
which it was before which was just wrong why have they done this i have no idea
severely crippling it the performance as you see now look at this difference with geekbench
five so we've gone from like 900 single core score to 2 000 under 3 000 for multi-core score
right out there now so this has definitely boosted the performance now general kind of work
i'm talking spreadsheets docs that sort of thing it's really fast on this machine here with those
four cores and the eight threads this thing is no slouch so it plays every single video file
just fine there too with native vp9 hevc support and i'll just go into a demo clip
right here and just to demonstrate this one's quite a demanding file that i have here and
it runs fine you can see really smooth not a problem remember from now on i'm going to actually
be running the two sticks of ram which this should really have at the correct 3.2 gigahertz
editing video now so this is from 4k clips in adobe premiere pro here they are demanding files
because it's 4k 100 megabit per second quality that i recorded uh back when i was in my other
studio now the timeline here with the quarter playback is okay it seems to play back with 30
frames per second which is what i recorded in and sometimes just skipping ahead i've noticed that it
can be a little bit slow there i would certainly not run it anything under really half that if
it's the full resolution the full 4k there i think it's going to be just a little bit too choppy now
export times for one minute of footage exported to the youtube preset it should take around about
50 seconds or under now the last mini pc that had intel that i reviewed which has the core i
580 259u did it in 44 seconds so we'll see how long it's going to take here so this is now the
youtube preset here 4k which i've just selected and i'll make this now one minute of footage
start on my time and export with about a second delay it should not take long
at all to get through this especially now it's running dual channel ram at the correct speed
okay so it is about to finish up you can see there that it is the iris plus graphics doing most of
the heavy lifting so once this bar disappears it's 99 at the moment there we go so about one
minute and 20 you could say roughly 26 25 seconds there is actually a lot slower than i expected
considering it does have the iris plus graphics and the faster ram and my gta 5 tsp for gaming
so this is 1080p normal settings you can see the frame rate not so good down to 25 24 frames per
second looking around here it feels choppy it feels laggy now if i was to lower settings which
are just normal for pedestrian density in the view distance everything's on normal and the textures
if i lower it down a lot to 720p yes it will be a little bit better now considering the fact with
amd's many pcs they many many pieces i've been reviewing in the channel they're getting double
this frame right here and intel's new iris xe graphics is going to be about 50 45 frames
per second with these exact same settings 1080p so really not great gaming performance
now in 2021 even with such an old title but the last one i'll look at is counter
strike we'll see how well that is going to run with their setup and now dual channel memory
and this performance here with counter strike 1080p lowest possible settings
um yeah not that great around close to 160 frames per second but i have seen it dip into the 30s
so this really is not ideal now with the smoke and the flash bang i am probably going to be dead no
there's someone there with a pistol oh there he is oh okay not a good frame rate that was quite a bit
of lag just then so these guys are going to come around the corner and that whoop oh yeah that's
laggy okay i managed to get one kill that's a bit of a freak event there that hardly ever happens
with me playing this game and they never play it anyway where's this guy oh this is teammate okay
that's probably the longest i've lasted in my videos for at least months on end okay so i
won't bother boring you with my bad gameplay but you can see that yeah a few old titles like games
like this one on the side sure that's fine but really for gaming this is not the mini pc for it
now it's not all bad news it does not thermal throttle the mini pc i've been testing it out
pushing it hard benchmarking a little bit of gaming it will however get up to 85 degrees
but the fans tend to save it now you can tweak in the bios settings
the fan settings themselves okay if you're not too happy with the way it sounds it's like a loud
ultrabook it's normally constantly on the fan and it does ramp up quite quickly but it also
ramps down quickly the fan rpm so then you don't hear it too much with light
loads but when you're editing video or gaming it does get a little bit noisy
so linux support not a problem on this because it's using well older gen chip and the wireless
card and everything i didn't have any issues running linux mint on this one so i'm disappointed
i think it has the potential but of course they put only a single sodium of ram but the wrong
speck of ram it should be 3.2 gigahertz but they use 2 66 they use the cheap real tech wireless ac
card instead of intel ax 200 which we should have in 2021 in all mini pcs as a base as pretty much
standard there and then just a says 3 ssd they did not use a faster mv me1 but i can confirm
the slot in this does support an nvme drive so to get the full potential out of this mini pc
you need to really get rid of all the components they installed install your own wireless card your
own ram and your own nvme ssd say something like a samsung 970 evo plus and then you can get the best
out of it so the value for money for the 500 us dollars approximately they are charging for this
with coupons that is with the coupon discount it is simply not worth it it should not have
those components and then there is the question of why is it using an engineering sample chip
at least in my unit right here it's a qs one so it's like a quality sample it's a test one
they give out a handout to manufacturers to test first before using the final product i mean there
is nothing wrong with this chipset it functions just fine the thermals are okay fan noise is
similar to say an ultrabook it has potential but yes truly a disappointing one here so now and then
some of these review units i do accept will turn out to be lemons like this one well the components
are lemon so you've got better options from amd some of those amd mini pcs i have looked at
and even the ones that are older the 8th gen the 8259 umini pcs i've actually got another
one up and coming in the channel do perform or are better specs than this one right here