This is b link's new mini s it's a jasper lake mini pc that's aimed at just basic computing
so people that just want well emails documents spreadsheets social media and video playback those
kind of tasks it's actually all right at so it is powered by a celeron in 5095. it's a quad-core
chip maximum turbo is 2.8 gigahertz and it is all running windows 11 of course with this model
now eight gigabytes of ram is not a lot but it should be sufficient for light computing
and it does have a 256 gigabyte sata 3 ssd you can add more storage to this because there is
room even though it's very small and compact as you can see fits in the palm of my hand
a 2.5 inch drive so that could be an ssd or a spindle hard drive with higher capacity say
2 terabytes for your video collection it does have gigabit lan and can run
two 4k monitors it has four usb 3 ports so let you know is it worthwhile considering something so low
powered here but it does have a good price point of course for those that don't want to spend a
lot of money does come in this very small box and you'll see the the mini pc there is just tiny now
they include some screws here for the visa mount bracket we do get two hdmi cables so a longer one
and then a shorter one so the short one you'd use if you're going to be just visa mounting it that's
why they do do that and then this is our power supply here and it is rated to a max of 36 watts
does have a great little compact size as you can see so with ports we've got two usb 3s gigabit lan
two hdmi 2.0 there so that's 4k 60 dcn kensington lock slot and it is actively cooled so a little
fan is going to be pushing the hot air out the back where this little vent is right there so
events on the left vents on the right there is no micro sd card reader with this unfortunately our
sd card reader they've got a little button there to clear the cmos another two usb
3.0 ports and then we've got the combo slot there sorry jack for 3.5 millimeter with our power on
button on the underside there are four rubber feet and if you remove those four screws you can gain
access to the internals a little tip here to get the back off is rather tricky but where these two
holes are that's for the visa mounting bracket simply insert your screwdriver and then pull up
on that and you'll find that that lid will end up coming off now when you open it up be a little bit
careful because there is a ribbon cable attached to it and then you'll see we do have room for
upgrades so we've got only the single slot sodium there so it's only going to be in single channel
unfortunately so yes you could add 16 gigabytes to this to increase the ram capacity you can see this
is where you can add a 2.5 inch drive so that can be a spindle or an ssd if you want a little bit
more speed and it does have a thermal pad on here which connects up to the sata 3 m.2 drive we have
the wi-fi card you can just see it here it's sold it onto the motherboard so there's
no upgrades in that department and it is the intel 3165 so that's wireless ac we don't have
the faster wireless ax with this model so ram can be swapped out ssd can be swapped out and
you can add a 2.5 inch drive not bad but it's just missing that dual channel ram unfortunately
very quickly i'll show you the bios so it is completely unlocked and no it wouldn't normally
be jumping around like this i don't know why it's bouncing up and down that's something to do with
my capture card it doesn't like the resolution of it so everything there is unlocked there's a
lot of settings that you can potentially mess up cause problems that's probably why they do
include that reset the cmos little switch there too that is on it so let's jump into windows
the mini s does have eight gigabytes but you don't get the full eight gigabytes because a tiny bit
is dedicated to the intel uhd graphics and that is the uh 16 executional units that it does have here
with the jasper lake now it is windows 11 pro that it does run now that's a bit of a surprise i was
expecting it to be windows 11 home just because it's a slightly cheaper license there so that's
good in a way now the start menu just bring that up it sometimes can be a little laggy so it's not
a powerhouse of a chipset we already know this it is just for basic computing here basic windows 11
computing like spreadsheets documents very easy kind of stuff here so the ram i just wanted to
check on this to confirm that it is running at uh 2667 megahertz but as i pointed out before when we
looked at the internals it's just the single stick so that means that we are missing out on that dual
channel bandwidth which means that it's not going to be quite as fast as it could be
and the most part that is affected from this is actually the graphics from that uh bandwidth there
so that's just what it is they didn't obviously have room to use that so looking under our
cpu here which is the cellular on the n5095 you can see that is a 15 watt part here
and our power limit level 2 is 30 watts now the bias is completely unlocked you could i believe
go and increase this hopefully that does take may aid in boosting the performance a little
but you will definitely get higher thermals and slightly louder because the fan is going to have
to work a little harder and i'll cover the fan noise in the thermals later on in this review
that ssd you can get reasonable speeds out of it for sata3 i mean it's not too far off from peak
performance which would be 550 reads and right sequentials there and we do have approximately
206 gigabytes free on first boot now remember you can install a 2.5 inch drive so you can install
a spindle one or an ssd to increase the capacity and storage or even swap out this boot drive all
together now other performance figures here i'm not going to go into a lot here just uh geekbench
5 okay so you can see the single core score their multiscore does tell us that this yes is very low
end so it's for basic computing and i really want to stress that this is not for aaa titles
gaming wise it's not editing 4k videos because you will be extremely disappointed it is a well 200
us dollar or so many pcs you can only expect so much now the performance of playback of demanding
video files let's have a look at that because windows can be very funny even on core i7 machines
sometimes get a few stutters in the beginning so this one is 4k 60 frames per second you can see
it is slow to load in and it is dropping frames now that should be running a little bit faster
but now it's picking up okay there we go oh and there's some big stutters there as well so
it's not too happy about that one it's just finding it too demanding 60 frames per
second the same goes for streaming youtube 4k 60 you're going to drop frames there but what about
4k 10 bit hevc now this is native decoding the initial stutters which always seem to happen with
windows and then it's fine okay so it can play these files at 4k 30 but 4k 16 no doesn't like
it continuing on with that topic of 4k video this is youtube here and i'm going to attempt to stream
just some 4k 30 frames per second so let's enable our stats here now you're probably gonna see some
dropped frames because my connection is quite poor and as it's running uh buffer health is actually
okay at the moment and it is continue just dropping a few frames there and here and there
but will it still be viewable that's the main thing of course that we want so you can see there
it is noticeable i can see those drop frames there my buffer health is about to run out too
so not amazing performance there but i guess you could call that it's kind of watchable but it's
just those occasional just dropped frames causing a little few little stutters in there which is a
little annoying when it comes to streaming with youtube chrome performance so it's something that
a lot of people do ask me on these lower spec of mini pcs or tablets or laptops that i review with
jasper lake uh so i'm just gonna search here cats and we'll see how long it takes to open up you can
see i have to accept all of this first because i actually have not run this and nothing is going
to be cached now i don't want to go too crazy here but i will open up quite a few tabs and we'll see
how is it going to perform now memory i still have quite a bit left so that's okay with the eight
gigabytes you can generally normally run about 10 to 15 tabs or so uh the only thing is that when
you do open up a lot as you see now it is starting to affect the performance now the cpu is not at
100 yet with its quad cores maximum turbo is 2.8 but it's getting very close so it is slowing down
a little now and i'll just swap between these tabs because they are going to take a while to load
okay so that one the scrolling is fine but there we go we're peaking now at cpu performance at 100
so swapping between these tabs the ones that uh have loaded in here you can see um
it's not too fast but there is a noticeable bit of delay between them so that's a very light page
there so wikipedia and let's go through some of these others okay that's still loading in there
github that's easy enough so it's all right so once you just go to normal kind of reading pace
and having a lot of different tabs open for these kind of light tasks it is find this spec so you'll
you'll not really have too much of an issue it's just when you really push it hard decide to open
up like 30 25 20 10 15 tabs you can run into the memory restrictions especially with chrome here
and onto our gaming performance so this is counter strike and we'll take a look at the
dust 2 map here now i've got it set to 720p lowest possible settings and we'll see if it's
actually going to be playable or not okay so we're looking around 30 frames per second just at 720p
here uh probably with smoke grenades and whatnot action going on screen and flame grenade like now
yeah it is dipping down a little bit so not amazing it's gone under 30 frames per second
now so i'm just going to charge any enemies charge in and yeah probably just die straight away but
that's not the idea my gameplay is just take a quick there we go did try to take a quick look at
the performance there so you can see that uh for these older titles you're gonna get just at 720p
just over 30 frames per second but you probably actually want to run something like 800 times
600 and really just stick to these older titles that's all that's going to be playable on this
intel uhd graphics and really quick here because it is shaking up and down with my capture card
so linux mint i did test it out everything does work but for some reason i can't seem to change
to a higher resolution so a little bit of tweaking needed but you shouldn't have any issues running
linux on this type of mini pc and what about our thermals then so it did reach 87 degrees celsius
that little fan in it is quite hard to hear most of the time so you really need to put your air up
to it and oh okay yeah you can hear there's a fan in there so good fan noise and it doesn't run into
thermal throttling because of that fan it's only a 15 watt part but if it was passively cooled it
would overheat so it does offer i think for the price the basic computing needs that most people
will be after for things like of course like chrome checking your emails video playback youtube
maybe a bit of netflix things like that basic kind of computing needs this is what a spec like this
is perfectly fine for and if you wanted to use it as a video media player kind of system then
it will be okay for that as well too there were the native playback of vp9 and hevc however it
didn't like 4k 60 streaming or playback it was choppy so i don't really really recommend it for
that because it's not ideal performance there so there's really only one thing i can fault
for the price that this does sell for and that is that it's only running single channel ram
so they didn't have enough space inside here to have this two sodium slots which would have been
ideal if we could add another stick that would have been perfect there but sadly we don't but
we do have the option to add more storage with that 2.5 inch bay which is really good to see so
thank you so much for watching my review here of blinx mini s an affordable windows 11 pro mini pc