Chris here back with another mini pc review that has the ryzen 9 5900HX
super potent apu so that does have eight cores 16 threads maximum turbo is 4.6 gigahertz it has
vega integrated graphics and so far this thing is the fastest yet that i have checked out when
it comes to these mini pcs with the integrated graphics that is so this particular model here
from mini's forum is called the elite mini hx90 now it can output four displays at 4k 60 hertz
it's got a lot of ports on here we've got room to add an additional two 2.5 inch say to three
drives it supports mve and this configuration they sent out to me that's why i have it early
has 16 gigabytes of ddr4 ram at 3.2 gigahertz and a 512 gigabyte mvme drive with windows 10 pro
what is in the box so we do have a power supply of course the power of this now this one is 120 watts
rather large as you can see there is a base you can light flat or you can stand it up on this base
now the base is quite solid it's made out of plastic it has rubber on the bottom so it's
not going to slide off a table or anything like that we get some sata 3 connectors to install
two additional 2.5 inch drives if you wanted to do so to expand upon the storage four rubber feet a
euro power cable so if you order for other regions then you'll get either a us a uk australian new
zealand new zealand or euro plug there is a visa mounting bracket and also we do have an hdmi cable
so for the ports on this one we do have a reset here that's for the bias if you do mess up any
of the settings usb 3.1 type a we've got separate audio jacks here so mike in and audio out usb 3.1
type c and the power button with a status led and what i really do like about this mini pc is
four display out options here okay so two display ports and then two hdmis now this is hdmi 2.0 spec
however i am able to run my monitor or should i say my tv which is an lg cx at
4k 120 here it's a desktop with absolutely no problems here the vega graphics can handle that
and here we do have another set of audio jacks which you don't normally see 2.5 gigabit lan
there only the single port and then four usb 3.1 ports here too as well so plenty there
including a kensington lock slot if you were going to use this as a point of sale machine then you
can lock it down and then of course dcn to power all of this which is the standard barrel connector
size that i normally see on gaming laptops and pretty much all of these mini pcs so the top here
we do have a little bit of metal the outside is all plastic this part is plastic and this is all
intake vent the sides are also intake vents big ones too as you can see it's the whole side of it
and ample space to get that airflow going in you can even see the bios battery inside there the
main board and the cooler on this one is quite big that is also on the other side exactly the same so
left and right of it there are no ports just huge vents lastly on the bottom of it we do have some
torx screws that are holding this rear on and the mounting screw points there for the vesa mount so
if you did want to put this on the back of your monitor on your tv you can do that even though
yes it is a rather large mini pc still gets it out of the way it's still small enough and great
if you want just a more streamlined looking setup without having the mini pc sitting on your desk
now the size of torque screw we're talking about here is the t15h so you might have to go to an
electronics store it specializes and say tools and equipment and things and get yourself like
a jewelers set in order to get one of these so the four screws there i'm going to undo these
now which are torqued up nice and tight and we'll take a look at the internals and upgrade options
so the back was a little difficult to pry the lid off but not too bad the top of it however to get
access to that it looks like we've got some screws in here we have to remove and possibly remove the
motherboard here in order to gain access to those components and then the fan for later
for maintenance so 2.5 inch drives if you want to fit one of those then they actually go just
in here you can see so you screw them either side that's why there's only four screws even though
there are two drives so you would think you would need eight screws but no that's just on one side
that you're going to be placing those in so there is a little hook here so it's going to
be either sides just going to hook into that and then you'll be able to fit the two drives there
so you can really increase and expand upon the storage now we've got our pci 3.0 drive right
here mvme this is a kingston one below that if you remove it if you want to upgrade the
wireless card which is intel's ax 200 it's wi-fi 6 bluetooth 5 combo card there you can change that
actually no it was not as hard as i thought it was to pull the whole main board out of it so you can
see our cooler right here and we have two copper thermal transfer pipes there with all the fins
cooling on this one as you see later on is very good considering the power we've got on this one
with this particular eight chord chip and here we are able then to swap out the ram and upgrade it
first up i'll show you our bias so we don't have every single option available to us but
the important ones are there so if you go up here i'll just tell you quickly the power configuration
if you did want to use this as a server or you're going to put it on a switch or something
you can set it to resume on ac failure that's a very handy setting to have so i'm glad that
that is available now all the tweaking settings the ones that you probably want
are all found under amd cbs and this is very easy to go into this and tweak a few things
now the ones that i find the most interesting wolf you will find under this one which is the
nbio common option so when you go into this you see we've got a lot of different options
so options for graphics configuration so you can here decide that you could go and change
it to what they have a game optimized one and this is where you can dedicate more ram
to that vega graphics so if you want to increase it now normally what would happen if you've got
16 gigabytes it'll dedicate then 2 gigabytes if you've got 32 it will then dedicate for helping
boost the lower frame rate average and was i've seen that actually in tests that i've done before
but i'm going to keep that just by default okay there audio configuration smu common options is
another interesting one here so we've got fan control you can tweak around with that
if you want to system configuration this one is really interesting so this is where we can adjust
the power limit for that ryzen 9 5900 h so we can set it from the default is 45 watts but we can
stick it on to 54 watts here to boost the performance of all of those eight cores
the trade off is of course we will generate a little bit more heat so the fans will be a
little bit louder as a result so by default it is set on auto and i'm going to actually change this
over to 54 watts i'm curious to see what kind of performance and thermals we will get out of this
so this chip is an absolute monster the ryzen 9 5900 hx it does have eight cores 16 threads
default normal power limit is 45 watts but you can see that that change that i did in the bios
did actually take so the parliament one is now 54 watts 65 for the short burst power limit there and
the ram timing so it is running dual channel 1600 megahertz so that's times two so 3.2 gigahertz in
total uh 22. cl22 is well it's terrible my intel machine that i've got i'm running cl 16 and
i really wish we would be able to tweak these ram timings but anyway the chip here monster it's
seven nanometers maximum turbo is 4.5 which when you think about it with the 8 cores is not bad at
all and i'll get onto the performance figures of this soon a lot of benchmarks gaming performance
thermals and all that of course so just wanted to point out too device manager it is intel
for our lan port there 2.5 gigahertz and intel as well for wi-fi 6 as mentioned
that does have bluetooth 5 support with it now i'm able to achieve my typical
1.3 gigabit transfers with my wi-fi six router so if you've got a fast wi-fi six router then you can
get really good speeds and possibly even better than that out of this so that kingston drive this
particular one i've got is the 512 gigabytes it's pcie 3.0 spec speeds are okay certainly not the
fastest i've seen some drives like the samsung's can achieve 3 000 reads and write sequentials
and well the random 4ks aren't too bad with that cinebench r23 so it runs for 10 minutes
and this is the average score over 12 000 points not the best i've seen for the ryzen 9 5 900 hx
however this is still an impressive score very very good for a mini pc geekbench 5
very good single core score here multi-core score it doesn't actually do as well as some
of the intel's i've seen like the 11 800 h is able to get 8 000 points or even close to 9000 normally
but this benchmark does tend to favor intel this is why we're not getting the same performance like
the other ryzen 9 5900 hx is because of this just single-sided ram okay so what i'm going to do now
is swap it out just for the gaming part here in that 3d mark test with some g-skill rip jaws
and that you can see is double-sided they do have better timings but it will still fall
back unfortunately on cl22 timings instead of this cl 18 that this does support with intel chipsets
now the pc mark benchmark here very good over 6 000 points that's a really strong score for a
mini pc here we have night rate so night rate is underperforming a little bit and
it's due to the ram because it's single rank if it's dual rank which i'll show you soon
does really increase their performance especially with the vega graphics so here is fire strike and
that score again underperforming a little bit then when i swapped out the ram look at the difference
that is the single rank okay right now versus dual rank that's a big step up in performance there
so this then performs more or less exactly like the last mini pc i reviewed with the same exact
chipset and night raid 2 so that performance went right up again with the single rank right there
and then dual rank ram so if you want to step up the performance you want to gain
a little bit extra squeeze the maximum performance out i do recommend changing the ram on the 16
gigabyte version make sure it is dual rank on to video editing now with adobe premiere pro so
i have in the timeline here some 4k 100 megabit files and it's not showing any lag at all now
i've only got the playback resolution to a quarter but even at a half here it runs fine
and you can run this at full and it doesn't seem to drop any frames it doesn't seem to lag at all
and the timeline at least with my basic edits here so this is very very basic uh fine absolutely fine
here so let's have a look at the export speeds and the last mini pc with the same
chipset did this in really record times for me just under 40 seconds so what i do is set it to
the 4k preset right here and one minute of footage and we shall see how long it is going to take here
to export this okay so that one just finished up now and it was about approximately 45 46 seconds
that is slower than the last mini pc i'm not too sure why now it could be to do with ram dedicated
to the vega graphics probably more to do with the ram timings and the ram quality i would
say it must be that on the other mini pc we did have better ram than what is in this one grand
theft auto 5 here and the performance of this for integrated graphics the vega graphics from
amd handling this great so there's some screen tearing because i've got vsync off this is 1080p
the normal settings so in the middle with the traffic density population whatnot as well and it
really does perform well now i've seen the frame rate get up to 100 frames per second too so this
is great and i just get one of my guns out here shotgun and to start randomly causing some havoc
and very very playable so it is not really going to be slowing down at all and this is great at
1080p for integrated graphics it can still do a bit of gaming but i'll get onto a slightly
more demanding game now which is the witcher 3 and we'll see at 1080p how is it going to handle that
okay so this is low settings but it's 1080p normally with integrated graphics i would be
running this 720p and look at the frame rate so we're getting around 40 frames per second this is
playable so it's well similar to what you get with a console right but probably at a slightly higher
view distance better looking visuals here and even around this port area frame rate's going
up a little bit too and this is in the city where it is the most demanding here if you go into the
countryside with this game the frame rate will increase at least another 20 frames per second
or so so excellent performance from the vega graphics i'm impressed i mean this is so far
the most powerful mini pc that i've tested out and well almost exactly the same as the last one
i reviewed with the same chipset but this one is just a fraction better due to the slightly better
thermals lastly just checking out counter strike here this is on the lowest settings but at 1080p
and we're getting well over 100 frames per second and when there are not a lot of teammates
on the screen then it's actually over 200 so yeah you could probably run a high refresh
rate monitor with this and a competitive game like this is pretty good the performance that
i'm getting out of this it really is the best actually for integrated graphics that that i have
seen here in the channel see how long i last out here i didn't even get any killer at all
probably bad time to reload i still got one kill but uh here my team is dominating right here
oh seven health left i am basically gone yep okay but yeah excellent gaming performance for
integrated graphics now the thermals for 37 minutes i've just been non-stop stress testing
it that is including of course cinebench r23 and these thermals are really good so it maxes out at
91 degrees celsius my current ambient temperatures are 25 to 26 degrees and it is pulling here you
can see 50 watts not up to the 54 even though i have 54 set now at the wall i'm seeing an idle
power consumption of six to seven watts which is really good and then a maximum of 69 watts that
is gaming and stress tests and everything that's the peak i'm seeing with this particular unit here
now fan noise is very good on this many pcs so under idle and very light loads you don't even
hear it it ramps right down to a very low rpm that it's almost dead silent which i do love now if you
stress it out which i'm doing right now cinebench r23 or gaming you do hear the fan but compared
to the other mini pcs i've reviewed and the other ryzen 9 5 900 hx mini pc it's actually not bad at
all it's quieter than a gaming laptop has a little bit of a whine noise to it but here is a sample
now i know this question is going to come up so what about that more fine or morphine however
they want to pronounce it mini pc with the same exact chipset that i also reviewed in the channel
this one as you can see is a lot smaller however it is more expensive because this one they sell as
a bare bones okay the hx90 and i don't think they sell this as a bare bones at the moment moment you
need to buy it with 32 gigabytes of ram and with one terabyte drive for about a thousand us dollars
it doesn't have as many ports at the front it's only got three usb 3 ports
the four ports on the rear are usb 2 spec but otherwise very very similar performance
they are using the same chipset and this one does take just a single 2.5 inch drive
in it so those are the real key differences there however fan noise and thermals definitely and even
slightly better performance probably because of the thermals and and the fan and the cooling
the hx90 here is the overall winner so this like the title of this video this is the best now that
i have seen and really good so the pros are the fan noise it's actually very good although when it
is working really hard you hear like a little bit of a whine noise because it's drawing in that air
through around here and it kind of makes a noise when it does that but that's me being a little bit
nitpicky there with it other performance with the vega graphics really good so the best i've seen
for integrated graphics for gaming and then the eight core monster that is that ryzen 9 the 5900h
hx very potent chip we can configure it with this one to 54 watts as i did we can even dedicate
two to four gigabytes okay so 32 gigabytes of ram will allow us to dedicate up to four gigabytes to
the vega graphics which is actually what i did for that gaming test it doesn't really boost the
performance that much so i wouldn't worry about it too much because it is dynamic memory it's
shared and it will just allocate it and scale it up when needed anyway so 2.5 gigabit lan wi-fi
6 ticks lots of boxes this really is the best one yet however there's a couple of
things that i wish were different so although it's great to have the two 2.5 inch drive bays
in there i would have preferred to have another mvme slot that i think would have been better
so one nvme and one 2.5 inch drive bay on here instead of the two we have on here
the other thing is upgrades are i wouldn't say it's super difficult
but not for everyone because you have to pull out the whole motherboard and flip it around to
install the ram even though when you just take off the rear of it you've got access to the 2.5 inch
sata drives and then nvme drive in the wireless card but not for the ram so if you buy the bare
bones version i would actually probably do that and that way make sure you buy 16 or 32 gigabytes
of ram that is dual rank so not just the one side with the chips on the ram because that's why we
are losing about ten percent well eight percent or so performance because of the ram so if you
get and install your own ram then you can get the maximum performance out of this and most people
would actually probably want to do that right when you buy a pc like this you want to get the best
performance possible so that's another common con that it comes with the 16 gigabyte version
single rank memory sodums which are a little cheaper and otherwise this is a fantastic mini pc
here so thank you so much for watching my review here of the elite mini hx90 from minis forum