I have with me here a mini PC it's from a company that's called Pepper Jobs
you've probably never heard of them neither had I until they reached out and
said to me hey do you want to review our new Gemini Lake mini PC now this is
called the GLK - UC2x it's a bit of a mouthful and it is powered by the
Celeron N 4100 and the good thing about this PC and why it is interesting and
why you decided yeah I will check it out I'll review it for you is because this
one has some upgrade abilities we've got our SODIMM slots on there two of them it
comes pre-configured with only four gigabytes which is not a lot ideally I'd
like to see at least eight gigabytes and even better would be dual channel it's
just got the single stick in there so you can add an additional four gigabytes
it will even run up to 16 gigabytes even though that is not actually officially
supported it says like eight gigabytes max but it does work and I'll show you
that later on working so this mini PC also has our three display outs on it
you can add your own set of three SSD in it and you can even change the wireless
card so plenty of upgrade ability it's actively cooled so there's a little fan
in there so let's check it out inside the box you will find our power supply
which is rated to twelve volts three amps output it does have three
interchangeable heads so one for the UK one for the US one for Europe an HDMI
cable and a Quick Start Guide so the mini PC here is made entirely of plastic
so a full plastic build their events around the side we've got the Pepper
Jobs logo on the top and it's a quality plastic they have used there's nothing
wrong with this build quality ports on the mini PC is one ear that it really
excels here so we have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack with mic support we've
got USB 3.1 this of course does support power delivery so you can power this
whole mini PC just off Type C it does support 4k and also HDMI 2.0 a that's 4k
60 Hertz and then mini display out Gigabit LAN and in DC and for power on
the right you'll find an exit vent here so yes it is actively cooled with a
little fan inside I'll give you a sample of the fan noise later on and thermals
of course in this review so this means we can increase the power limit because
it's got a fan or normally the Geminoid Lake the N fourth
is passively cold so it doesn't even have any fans but here it does there's a
button there for a reset if you happen to mess up one of the settings in the
BIOS and then a Kensington lock slot and then finally the front or the left side
depending on the way you look at it we've got a power on button micro SD
card here 2 USB 3 ports a type-c USB 3 so this is just data only and then
lastly my favorite part here so there's two little hatches on the back here one
for RAM so you can upgrade the RAM it comes with 4 gigabytes of double data
rate for 2400 pre-installed so you can put an additional 4 in there to make it
8 and in dual channel we can add a 20 to 80 SATA 3 SSD and even a wireless card
is upgradeable here you just need to unglue with those antennas are and you
could swap that over for an even faster in Tower 9000 series one if you wanted
to so it's really good to see all this upgrade ability because normally the
wireless card definitely is not upgradable and most of these many pieces
of I pieces I review have a course the RAM soldered onto the motherboard now it
does look to have two mounting supports you can see one here and one here
probably for a visa mount bracket but unfortunately that's not included in the
Box it must be an optional accessory so here is our BIOS just wanted to show you
that you can install 16 gigabytes of RAM even though the manual will say 8
gigabytes maximum support even Intel say that was their Intel nook that I
reviewed but it does work and it is running at 2.4 gigahertz and we do have
a few settings in here so if you go into the advanced menu we've got CPU
configuration where we can tweak the power limit this is the TDP unlocker
by default it's on 10 but I'm gonna set this to 12 but will increase the
temperatures a little bit but in my testing it's going to be actually fine
you might get a little bit more fan noise and if you go over to the hardware
monitor right here we can also adjust a few settings with the fan so by default
it's on balance you can set that on to silence so the fan will try not to come
on as much high performance and just full-on mode there if you were going to
be just constantly gaming on or doing something like that
not that you probably would with this spec anyway so you can adjust a couple
of the settings here that when the fan actually comes on
when you want it to go on to the full mode which is a hundred percent and
that's when it gets a little bit loud that's when it hits 80 degrees which
doesn't happen often when you first power it on you get the selection screen
and just wanted to show you this that it does have a lotta languages here covered
so we've got English German Spanish French Chinese Dutch and Russian so the
mini PC is running Windows 10 Pro so you can see it's not the latest version 1803
so you need to run Windows Update obviously to get that all up-to-date
with everything now I have installed a 512 gigabyte SSD and that works just
fine with the proper speeds that you would expect and here is the C Drive so
you get 36 point 5 gigabytes free so here is our CPU it's the Intel Celeron
in 4100 I'll reviewed a lot of them now maximum turbo is 2.4 gigahertz and if
you are over just a single thread then it's going to be 2.3 and it will hold
this mini PC 2.3 on all 4 cores which is really good and if we have a look now at
our wireless it's the internal wireless AC 30 165 maximum throughput is about
390 megabits per second and the graphics is handled by integrated graphics which
is Intel's you HD graphics 600 I've tested it 4k 60 Hertz working from the
HDMI port and also tested it working via the mini DisplayPort as well 60 Hertz no
problem there which is great now we'll take a look at a couple of benchmarks so
this is the open CL score which of course is the GPU it's not bad for this
chip set and the Geekbench full score here so it is on par with other tech
I've reviewed with the Gemini Lake cell run-in 4100 there's no real change here
because if you have a look at the benchmark I did just recently with the
tick last f7 plus and that one gets a slightly lower single core score but the
multi-core score they're more or less the same so that's fine and then we have
a look at the emmc it's a Sanders they've gone with 64 gigabytes and the
speeds are very good here for this type of drive it's probably in fact one of
the highest I have seen junior performance of this many PC considering
the spec is very good but remember I am running now 16 gigabytes
Braham and in dual-channel if you put a tin and it's dual-channel you can expect
the same kind of performance here but the more ram of course the more you can
multitask so right now I'm going to play a very demanding file here this is a
hundred and 40 megabits per second 4k and you can see that that loads up very
quick just skip ahead no problems with that in fact this is decoding this
natively of course with the GPU if you have a look now at the performance and
just bring this up right now that it shouldn't be taxing it too much although
the CPU is being pushed a little bit hard here for some reason by the system
but that is all pretty normal and that runs it really well and if we take a
look now at YouTube let's just load in the YouTube page run a 4k video ok and
it's just trying to find the 4k demo
bring that up and this will stream it perfectly fine here I'm just gonna meet
this sound for copyright reasons and it's to set this now to 4k it's already
on 4k to drop frames at the start but it's going to be able to keep up with
this no problem and I haven't noticed any issues with the wireless antenna
this is probably the reason why they decided to go with a plastic housing on
this mini PC it doesn't inhibit the signal reception whatsoever you can see
that's keeping up fine would help if I push play and that is working as you can
see so 4k streaming not a problem here so close that down I have got in the
background you can see here Photoshop you able to do basic edits you can even
encode video but I would stick to 1080p and be prepared for some very lengthy
encoding times as well with that I've got Cody here to open that up
spreadsheets Docs and things like that performance is going to be just fine for
that and you can see Cody is right here so
what I'll do is just find the video and pull this off the internal sorry the
removable disk I put in here so this is off the SD card slots a little bit
slower and just find under my demo clips right here load this up and actually
that popped in way faster than I expected it to and you can see
the frames per second though that is playing out so no problems with that
Cody's Hamnet really good now I'm going to do my little chrome multi tape
performance test here so I'm just gonna do anything random let's just type and
dogs here and start just open now a huge amount of tabs getting them all to open
up in the background you'll see how things perform how long this is going to
take to load up so I'm just going along and opening up every single thing here I
can find and we'll see just how well this performs to me it seems like an
older generation Core i5 like about the fourth or fifth gen when you're doing
these kind of tests here and okay core i3 really so let's hello these are
all open done let's see that seems to be loading up pretty fast and no problems
here really switching between things still got a lot of stuff loading and of
course and really this performance I do find to be really good considering that
this is just a of course very low spec quad core here and that is pretty good
not bad at all that performance you can see scrolling performance very smooth
they're fluid and let's bring that back so that YouTube videos well that's
playing there in the background and that all seems to be really good so the
performance I find it really doesn't feel like a Sauron in 4100 especially
with the 16 gigabytes of RAM that I have installed and running in dual channel
and looking at gaming performance now so this is League of Legends which I test
all the time on this kind of hardware and this is performing really well I've
got five other BOTS and we've got a frame rate of normally over 60 frames
per second here which is really good so it's very smooth playable this is on the
medium graphics setting so if you increase it
of course the frame rates going to drop down a little bit there but overall this
is probably one of the better performances actually I've seen of this
hardware and this game
now taking a look at Counter Strike global Offensive you can see that we're
getting a very good frame rate here considering this is low settings 720p
and normally on something to take I review it's much lower than this this is
about around 30 frames per second so the performs it's really good because of the
12 watt TDP I have set there of course
and I am dead in our Grand Theft Auto this is running an 800 x 600 about 30
frames per second it does dip down to about 21 when is a lot going on screen
so it's just playable you have to keep it on the lower settings and it is good
to see this hardware such low in hardware able to run a demanding game
like this but you can see now that framerate see about 20 to 21 frames per
second when there is a lot on screen and lookie now and i'll thermals so water to
get up to the graphics up to 68 degrees it's pulling around almost 11 watts so
from the wall that'll probably be about 12 or 13 and the cpu got up to a maximum
of 76 so this is really good and you can see there is no thermal throttling here
whatsoever now if i touch it it's a little warm to the touch it's
approximately about 31 degrees 30 degrees and that is mostly where the
exhaust vent is and where that heats being pushed out of course by the fan
fan noise very very hard to actually pick up on my microphone it's quite low
you barely ever hear it on the hundred percent effect I don't think I've heard
it no it hasn't come on yet at a hundred percent because it hasn't reached eighty
degrees my ambient room temperature right now is 25 degrees so if you're in
a hot climate you're at 35 degrees or something then do expect more fan noise
and it will probably reach up to eighty degrees then and now I've just been
testing out Linux and good news is everything is working so it works fine
with the Intel Wireless 3165 chipset bluetooth is working and you can see
I've just loaded in my website here that loaded up really quick no problems with
that and I believe that this would be a great little media PC and even perhaps
a low-end silver or file server alright so there's a lot to like about this mini
PC I love the fact that we can upgrade the RAM it's a little disappointing that
it ships with the 4 gigabytes but I guess paper jobs they want us to have
some upgrade ability options here so we can add an another stick of 4 gigabytes
if you wanted and even add 8 gigabytes as I did to around 12 gigabytes of RAM
and even 16 even though it's not officially supported when you look at
the news and manual inside the box it says 8 gigabytes max but in my testing
from previous mini Peas like many PCs like the Intel and notes you can run the
16 there and it will use all of that RAM just fine if you decide to multitask
really heavily so the fan in here does make a little bit of noise it's not
completely silent but when it's on the lowest setting you don't really hear it
unless you write up really close I mean you're going to put your ear down to it
you can hear it if it's a completely silent room and especially when it's on
the hundred percent mode when you're doing something like gaming it's great
to have options in the BIOS that we can tweak of course the power limit I
increased it to our 12 Watts that boosts a performance and even on the default
teen WAP setting it will hold a turbo of 2.3 that I've seen when I've done my
copper heatsink mods and power limit mods on other Gemini Lake tech for
example the laptops or review like the lab book SC and the tick last f7 plus so
the performance is very good thermals are good and I do like the fact that we
can run up to three displays with us and we get the 4k 60 Hertz there which is
great as well because 4k in 30 Hertz if you've ever run a desktop like that it's
free choppy its leggy and not really good so plenty of upgrade ability even
the wireless card so if you're not happy with the performance of the Intel 31 65
and my testing the range seems fine it's not the fastest you're gonna get a
maximum throughput of about 390 megabits per second possibly 400 depending on how
far away you are of course to your router there and you're not have you
were there because we've got Gigabit LAN but you can upgrade that wireless card
which is something you don't normally get so really when it comes to cons with
this I'd have to mention just the fair noise if you want a completely silent
machine it's not really bothersome phone noise but it is there of course and the
other thing so it does not have a built-in microphone with it
and you get it it ships with only the four
gigabytes of RAM and just single channel configurations so what having better if
they'd put dual channel or perhaps hopefully in the future there will give
us an 8 gigabyte option now this has not been released just yet and the pricing
we're not too sure at the moment but it's looking like it's going to be
around about 280 or 300 us there so it is a little bit expensive I hope that
their price is going to be adjusted later in the future because it's very
close to the likes of the Intel nukes that I have reviewed of course you need
to factor in more ram with those and your drive you do at least have 64
gigabytes out of the box to start with with us and you can put it later and
expand that with an SSD so overall it is a very good mini PC one of the best
gemini lakes that i have looked at and thank you so much for watching this
review and please do like and subscribe for more up and coming videos bye for
now