this model here the HX 99g still has the Radeon graphics a 6600 M with its eight gigabytes of
ddr6 RAM pretty good very good in fact for 1080p gaming but they've now changed the Apu in it it's
the ryzen 9 6 900hx with a huge amount of cores 8 cores 16 threads it is an absolute monster and it
does turbo up to 4.9 gigahertz but the best thing about it is we get now the 6000 series extras like
ddr5 support PCI 4.0 support and it does also have a course usb4 which a lot of people are after so
that's video out up to 8K 60 from the two type c usb4 ports this model also does include Wi-Fi 6E
so it's pretty much packing everything you'd want in a Mini PC and probably the best so far for 2023
now included with this model from any Forum you'll find our power supply so obviously I've got the EU
one having the EU model if you buy the US model get the US plug of course and here we have our
power supply so it is a very powerful one this is 262 Watts because we have a powerful CPU and GPU
combination within this so they do need that extra wattage compared to some of the other mini pieces
I typically review we have our stand here and yes that does have some real carbon fiber in it screws
for the stand and then part of the stand here as well too this Parts made out of metal and you'll
see those screws within the package or looking at the design of it it's very similar to the other
one that I did review with the 5900 HX apart from this of course now the HX 99g does have the 6000
series from AMD so it is the ryzen 9 6900hx now you can see just in here you look through you'll
see two cooling fans so there's dual fans in it seven copper transfer thermal pipes keeping it
cool and it does have some real carbon fiber in there so it's not like a fake carbon fiber it's
about 70 of these areas been around 30 resin they do claim their minis Forum with it so on
the front you'll see we've got a nice selection of ports in total here there's our power button
this is USB 3.1 Gen 2 type c separate audio jacks USB 3.1 gen 1 and a little reset reset
button within there and then on the back of it uh things get even better here without pause
because we've got two usb4 ports so they support the high data transfer rates but video out too
from them so that is 8k 60 maximum from both of those and then these two HDMI ports while they
are HDMI 2.0 spec and they support 4K 60 which is good with these so that means you can run
four monitors in total with this at 4K 60. that's excellent for this type of Mini PC
this is our power in right here now we've got another two USB 3.1 gen ones and then another
Gen 2 right here usually 3.1 gene2 so plenty of USB type A ports on it along with the type C's
and 2.5 gigabit Lan right here and this is where you'll screw in the brace if you did want to have
it upright instead of just laying it down flat if you did Lay It flat well you see here on the base
two rubber feet it's holding that into place and there is plenty ventil ventilation here on
either side of it you can see some of the cooling fins in there and as I mentioned it does have the
seven transfer heat pipes within it and they're using liquid metal too so I'll be keeping an eye
on The Thermals later on and I'll let you know about the fan noise of the hx99g then if you want
to gain access to the internals very simple you need to remove the rubber feet here now you just
pull up they come off it's not too difficult to do you shouldn't damage anything either
and we've got these four screws which I will undo now so we can gain access to the internals
and once you have done that you don't lift out this area in the middle it looks like it could be
like that no it's in fact this just whole bottom lifts right out like so and here is where you will
find our pcie 4.0 slot so if you want to add your own additional storage this is the easiest and
best way to do that you can upgrade the main drive that it comes with too if you wanted to do so
increase that capacity but this version I've got does have 512 gigabytes of that pcie 4.0 storage
so first up very quickly is our buyer so I wanted to point this out because they do in my reviews
that it is completely unlocked to us very handy to have this and that means advanced settings in
here now you've got settings for a lot of things that will get into you into trouble so I don't
recommend you miss about really with anything unless you know absolutely what you're doing but
I want to go into this one which is AMD CBS there is this here which is SMU common options now this
is where we are able to then jump into the system configuration and what this is is our power limit
for the ryzen 9 6900 HX Now by default using Auto I believe it will be set to 45 Watts but I'm going
to set it to the maximum here 54 just to see what this particular Apu can really do okay in this
system here with a liquid metal and the cooling push it the hardest as possible so that's the
only change I'm going to make there you've got a lot of Handy settings for example this one here
under power configuration if you do intend to run this as a server or you're going to have it on a
switch like a server setup as well or you simply just want it to always be on then you've got your
AC failure resume you can set this to be always on so it'll just always power up or last state
if that suits you better so that is another handy little option there but there's plenty of things
in there that you can tweak you can change then here in Windows I wanted to point out that it is
running Windows 11 Pro the version that we do get with it so that's great and of course you need to
run Windows updates the key is valid okay it's a digital version that's been used there activated
State no problems you won't run into any issues with that like you could with some of those other
brands but not with minis Forum at all so just a couple of things to point out in the device
manager and that is that our disk drive that say Kingston it's pcie 4.0 spec and the speeds yes do
surpass pcie 3 2.0 ssds but it is not particularly fast what I've seen now was say the Samsung 980
Pros is 7 000 reads and writes and slightly faster randoms but it's still decent speeds and of course
you could replace it upgrade it if you wanted to do so you've got that freedom there the wireless
card that it comes with this it does support Wi-Fi 6E and it is a mediatek one no it's not
um mediatek or real Tech that we normally get but mediatek yes they do make these chips and
it's quite a good one our processor the Apu of course listed there 16 times it does have
eight cores maximum turbo is 4.9 gigahertz it is very potent I won't show you the general kind of
performance here but I want to mention that just it does not lag everything is lazing fast really
quick within windows and I'll just show you some of the benchmarks that you can compare with your
own systems if you download this cinebench R23 you can run it on your own hardware and see how it is
so for the single core score here just over 1500 points that is very good and over 13 there I do
have it remember with the power limit that I set in the bias of 54 Watts there which uh is aiding
that to so it can hold a slightly higher turbo there just a few other benchmarks here again
you can download and run these on your own Hardware this is now the new geekbench six
Benchmark so they've changed a bit the scoring has changed it's slightly higher than what it
was before but this is still an excellent result for the ryzen 9 the 6900 h x uh excellent there
and then on the GPU side of things with that radon RX 6600m you can see that it
can do reasonably well this is faster than into integrated Graphics here so fire strike score
and just pause these if you want to see in a little bit more detail the CPU scores there too
as well and then time spies so fast for the size of Mini PC I still wish it shipped with the 6700m
from AMD for the graphics which is quite a bit better than this but I can't complain for the fan
noise we have the cooling and it is really quite a performer here for such a small sized Mini PC
as for video playback if you throw some hevc files at it vp9 the Radeon handles it just fine
so you might see an initial little stutter the first couple of seconds because of windows it's
more of a Windows bug you will see some drop frames once it stabilizes everything is good
and this does include 4K 60 HDR Clips they don't seem to drop any frames so as a media playback
machine all the video files you throw at high bit rates High resolutions will be decoded just
fine no problems on the hx99g and the same goes for 4K streaming this is within YouTube using
Chrome here by the way and you can see that it is decoding this using the vp9 codec and
it occasionally drops frames here and there at the start it dropped a few but because it's 60
frames per second there's one or two frames it was dropping you didn't actually see at all and
now that is really stable so it can handle the 4K streaming decoding this with no issues even
using Chrome thanks to the dedicated graphics the dedicated GPU with its eight gigabytes of ddr6 RAM
and if you were wondering about the USB 4 ports how are the transfer speeds so I have an external
pcie 3 drive connected up that is not at the full USB 3 or Thunderbolt 4 kind of speeds that it can
do but this is looking very good the kind of speeds I'm able to achieve here well over 700
megabytes per second on average and this is about the max that this particular external hard drive
can do and I've had a thunderbolt 4-1 then of course it will be a lot faster but no issues
really quick just to move data around thanks to the USB 4.0 type c ports then if you plan to edit
videos with this it's going to work out quite well because we have the dedicated graphics and it's a
dedicated eight gigabytes of ddr6 RAM that it has this performance is very good so I'm using now the
2023 version here of the Adobe Premiere Pro and I can see that running this at the half preview is
dropping a few frames you can see my face there was a little bit choppy the playback now it's
looking good there does not seem to be dropping frames and just moving around here in the timeline
with a very simple edit here of some 4K 100 megabit files their performance is good so I could
happily edit one of my reviews on this about 10 15 minutes long um it would not be too bothersome
and laggy so much better than integrated Graphics of course so the export times for 4K I will give
you those now let's go into here and Export this particular clip now but only one minute just to
time the performance so I do have in the middle there you can see the YouTube 4K preset and it
is if I just move this out of the way there you can see one minute of footage exactly so
I'll start that timer like I always do with my tests and Export and it is absolutely tearing
through this as expected having this combination combination of the dedicated GPU so most of the
work's been done by the Apu and our Graphics very little here unlike the Intel systems that it does
use the quick sync but with AMD it doesn't so I expect this to be a bit slower than normal
but you know what that was not slow at all the newer versions of Adobe Premiere Pro have taken
advantage of AMD side of things too so you could say with my little delay there there's always a
bit of a delay for me hitting the start and then the timer here about 23 seconds for one minute
of 4K footage encoded to that YouTube preset is a very very good result there so it is blazing quick
to me and video editing just simple edits 1080p certainly going to be no issues 4K maybe with
the timeline when you start to add more filters Transitions and things you probably want to lower
back uh lower down that resolution when it comes to the playback just use like half or quarter at
least not full and you should be fine to do this then to answer that question can it game well of
course it can with the dedicated GPU the eight gigabytes of RAM that it's got the 6600m has
enough performance to run here cyberpunk on the low preset mind you but at 1080p with a very very
playable frame rate of approximately around 100 most of the time it is over a hundred dipping down
just a little bit there sometimes with these NPCs and things that are looking very good so it is a
Mini PC that can more than game it's very good compared to some of the others that I do review
which only have of course integrated Graphics this is the difference I mean the dedicated graphics
then The Witcher 3 here this is with the new 35 gigabyte update and I do have it set to 4K
resolution medium settings because that means the ray tracing is of course off if you've got
it on then it will uh pretty much kill that frame rate completely which by the way as you can see is
not amazing it's only around 40 frames per second not even that oh there we go 40 41. uh looking a
little laggy and I would not actually recommend gaming with this particular GPU at 4K with a
demanding game like The Witcher here at least it has the really old title you could game at 4K say
like Counter-Strike Half-Life 2 or something like that would be just fine but what I'll do now is
I'll lower the resolution then we'll see how this game performs see now this is looking a lot better
we're getting over 100 frames per second so very similar to what I got with cyberpunk 2077 down
to 75 70s so this is why I think it's more of a 1080p gaming Mini PC than 1440p or 4K I just
don't really recommend with this GPU but it's looking good running well and if you do intend
the game yeah as mentioned just stick to 1080P and then tweak around your settings this is still the
medium settings you could probably lower it or increase it if you want it to look a little bit
better if you don't mind gaming at say 60 frames per second okay so the fan noise and The Thermals
are excellent on this Mini PC very good this is a area that I can really highly recommend this
mini pc4 it's just how quiet it runs and how cool it runs pushing it really hard now this is gaming
full-on this is all those Benchmark stress tests cinebench R23 everything I was doing the GPU got
to about 80 degrees the Apu got to around 80 degrees Celsius ambient 10 temperatures
are currently 23 degrees got AC on at the moment some Heating and then the fan well this is what
it sounds like if you're gaming this is the only time you really hear it and it's still very quiet
so this is maximum load now you're going to listen to Gaming With The Witcher 3 or cyberpunk 2077.
so what it boils down to is many Forum have done it yet again their Neptune HX 99g is yet again
one of the best mini PCS that I have covered and probably for 2023 so far this is the best there
is an amazing amount of performance in such a small package here now added to the fact that
we've got the ddr5 ram we have pcie 4.0 support and of course the USB 4.0 type c ports on this it
just gives us pallinear power plenty of options there with ports too because it's not just type
c there's a lot of tape type A's on this too or the USB 3.1 gen twos and then the Gen ones
which is good to see we can add additional storage it's only one extra slot for your PCA E3 and four
ssds unfortunately no 2.5 inch drive support with this is the only real downside a second
one is that there is no Visa Mount support for this so on the back of it it doesn't have the
that setup that you normally have with other mini PCS where you could then put
the bracket on it mount it behind a monitor or a TV unfortunately that's not there but
unlike by bios they're they're crazy for good performance dedicated GPU I would love to see
however from them and perhaps a 6700 M dedicated GPU version would be nice but as it stands it is
a really good Mini PC and perhaps yes a tad a little expense of what it is but if you want
that fantastic fan noise fantastic performance all those ports on it all the options even Wi-Fi
6E this is really the one to go for I feel when it comes to Windows 11 Pro many PCs with 6000
series from AMD and dedicated graphics not just integrated like all those other models