This window is 11 Mini PC that I'm taking a look at today is the elite mini th80 from Minnie's
Forum now this particular model here has the core i7 it's 11th gen the 11 800h maximum turbo is 4.6
gigahertz does have 8 cores 16 threads it's quite a monster of a chip even though yes 12th
gen they've even stepped things up further across Intel but not bad performance you can get out of
this now the graphics is Intel's UHD for 11th gen sadly it's not packing Iris exe Graphics now you
can get it as a bare bones or this configuration that they did send out to me to review which has
16 gigabytes of RAM and a 512 gigabyte SSD there is room inside to add another nvme it's pcie 4.0
that the slots do support you can run three 4K 60 displays with this it does have Wi-Fi 6E
and even a 2.5 gigabit Lan port in the box you'll find the power supply this is a normal kind of
size it is 90 Watts power supply cable HDMI cable user guide that also does show us how
to upgrade the RAM install another hard drive and then a Visa mounting bracket with screws
different design now from them and it's got a bit of a Mac Mini look to it to me with this silver
now it is plastic and you'll see up the front here we have a full spect type c Port so this
is USB 3.2 but it supports display out so you can actually run three displays 4K 60 Max USB 3.2 Gen
2 3.5 millimeter with microphone support and a status LED and then on this side there's our X
Advanced so this is where all the hot air is going to be pushed out by the fan that's inside there
I'll show you the internals shortly and here on the back we have then an HDMI 2.0 DisplayPort 1.4
so with those two you can run another 4K display two 4K displays there at 60 hertz maximum 2.5
gigabit Lan and then we have you can see more USB 3.2s gn2s lots of them and separate audio
jacks at the back here Kensington lock slot and power in power with a status LED behind it
and then a reset button if you happen to mess up any of the bias settings so that's a CMOS reset
then on the back of it our mounting points there for the Visa mounting bracket and how do you gain
access to the internals well there's this plastic that goes over the top of the underside of it that
does need to be removed there is a little Gap just on this side a little bit hard to see and
this is where you pry it off which is what I'll do now once you remove all of those four screws
you just need to pry up this back cover that's the final step to then gain access to the internals so
you can see our cooler ride here we do have a spare slot now that is pcie 4.0 spec this one
also does support pcie 4.0 so you can use the faster ssds in there m.2 and vme and we've got
right here our wireless card which is Wi-Fi 6E so it's quite cramped there's not really that much
free space in here but unfortunately we can't put in a 2.5 inch Drive which would be cheaper
maybe larger capacity store storage you want to use but it is good that we do at least have that
now if you remove the cooler there are two Ram slots they're a little hard to see but they are
just to the right of the cooler where the fan is so unfortunately the fan assembly is over the top
so you're going to have to remove it and then of course you're going to have to repaste afterwards
because you've moved around the thermal paste now I want to keep the factory paste job intact so my
thermals will be exactly how it is out of the box so I'm not going to go there but at least we can
upgrade the RAM add another SSD and even replace the wireless card if you wanted to do so now the
bias on this particular th80 model is quite locked down to us now we've got CPU configuration but
they're just some very advanced settings that you don't normally need to touch there is no
option here for power limits we cannot under volt and probably the only really interesting thing is
this here so power configuration we do have this AC failure so you can set this when the power goes
off to then just automatically power on when it comes back so you could run this as a server you
could run it on a switch you've got that option to do it and that is really it there's really nothing
else that's interesting in here to be able to tweak you've got your boot order let's move
over to Windows 11 now now this Mini PC does come with 16 gigabytes of RAM it is in dual Channel as
I showed you and it does run at 3.2 gigahertz the correct speed I've already tested and checked it
out with HW info so Windows 11 Pro is the windows 11 Edition you do get with the th80 and the disk
drive that I showed you before 512 gigabytes of storage this is even though it supports the
slot pcie 4.0 this is only a pcie 3.0 drive and it's not a very fast one not really that quick
at all it's a Kingston Drive and if you had say a Samsung 970 Evo or EVO plus whatever you would
get better speeds but you could even install say a Samsung 980 which will be up to 7 000 reads and
writes for sequential if you did want a little bit quicker there now the performance performance here
of the core i7 the 11800h is good it's a very potent it's a fast chip eight cores 16 threads
total maximum turbo is 4.6 gigahertz single core score here looking good for 11th gen I know 12th
gen now is up around say to 16 or 1700 points there multi-core score is a little lower than I
was expecting here with this particular Benchmark and if you take a look at cinebench R23 this at
least does perform around where I've seen other 11 800 H's but I have actually seen better I've
seen better out of MSI laptops I think they've got better or higher power limits and the cooling I
think is being pushed a little bit more so that's why I can squeeze a bit more out but it's not a
bad score it is still very potent for what it is for the size of it good performance out of
it now the chipset just a little more about it here you'll see that it's running into your HD
graphics for 11th gen so it's not Intel's Iris XE so this is a bit of a weakness of a Mini PC
like this because it doesn't have the more potent Graphics it doesn't do too bad as you see later
on with gaming performance and finally I did do a real life here throughput test with the internet
so with the same router the same connection which is gigabit fiber I can get around 920
out of my desktop PC with external antennas which are high gain ones they're very big
but with what is built into this particular Mini PC with a plastic body it's doing okay
we're getting around 700 megabits per second maximum that I can pull real world test here
it is approximately a standard room size away the router so I am relatively close to it but
there is part of a wall on the way there so I think it's fearing quite well decent performance
and how will it handles streaming 4K so this is a 4k60 test I'll just open it up I've not run this
before so I want to enable course the stats there and I need to of course make this full screen and
4K but this should not drop any frames and you can see it isn't not even a single frame so it is very
good at streaming 4K content now this is in Chrome it's probably even better in Edge but it's looking
great okay there three drop frames that's it so very good media playback with this th 80 Mini PC
now how would this PC handle then a demanding task like editing 4K video so what I have here is not a
very huge long timeline it's around 10 minutes these are 100 megabit 4K files only 30 frames
per second and the timeline can sometimes look a little bit laggy now I'm only just using the
quarter playback resolution here so if you really have a lot of different layers effects Transitions
and your grading you're going to run into problems it will end up becoming a little bit slow I feel
here you do need a dedicated GPU for anything more than just basic 4K edits then the export times
will they be a lot slower since it doesn't have the iris XE Graphics but just Intel UHD for 11th
gen so what I'm exporting here is the 4K YouTube preset like I always do in my videos it's just
one minute of footage just to gauge how long it would take so start on the timer and then export
I still expect this to be pretty quick and it looks like it is tearing through that with Intel
quick sync normally does help so it doesn't seem to be slowing this down at all I'll skip
ahead now to the final result okay it is about to finish up and that is approximately you could
say around 46 seconds so I've seen faster could be a little quicker and that's probably because
it's only got the 32 executional units with the UHD graphics now as for gaming performance well
it's looking all right you can game this is GTA 5 on the normal settings 1080p I wouldn't put it on
to higher settings because you can see just in the car here that we are looking at only well
scraping 39 frames per second it's just going a little bit over 40 I mean it's okay this kind of
performance so it is playable it's just not as good as Iris XC graphics with this kind of spec
if it did have Iris XE Graphics then we would probably be looking at I would say around 60 70
frames per second so we are definitely missing out on a little bit of that performance because
it's just the UHD Graphics unfortunately no Iris XE as I've mentioned a couple of times now
now a game like The Witcher 3 unfortunately at 1080p it's just not playable you can see we're
getting a frame rate of 20 frames per second this is too choppy to be enjoyable so you're
going to have to lower the resolution down to 720p and the lowest possible settings then it
might be all right for The Witcher 3. then The Thermals it got up to 97 degrees Celsius
it did trigger thermal throttling and the fan noise normally it's okay but if you push it
really hard I have noticed a couple of times it does peak and become quite annoying the fan
it's getting a little loud and you'll hear it at its loudest right now in this sample
foreign ly Linux support this is Linux Manjaro that I'm using right now a live USB pen drive
image and all the drivers do work but I am by the way using the open source drivers it's an
option you do have with Linux Manjaro so the Wi-Fi card is Bluetooth the controls for audio
all of that does seem to be working which is good final verdict then on the elite mini th80 is that
it is a very quick and snappy little mini PC here that runs Windows 11 Pro so if you need
the CPU performance it's got it in this smaller form factor if you're a Windows user however it's
lacking a little in the integrated GPU department so dedicated graphics not here of course not on
board and Intel's UHD graphics for 11th gen is missing a lot of those executional units because
they needed room for the eight cores on this Apu on the chipset here so instead of having ira60
graphics with 96 executional units it's just the 32 so and that is is definitely an area where it
is lacking is the GPU performance so if you're someone that games a lot you're missing out on
a better performance there I would look at a model that has either Vega Graphics like Vega
8 Vega 10 and Iris XC if you really want to be at a game at 1080p with a good frame rate with
older titles now if you tried to play on this model here cyberpunk 2077 forget about it it's
a bit of a slideshow it's gonna be around like 15 frames per second 20 if you lower it to 720p
it just is not performing well at all so 10 frames per second who wants the game like that you can't
it's pretty much impossible the other is the fan noise it can cycle up sometimes a little loud
as I showed you from the sample you heard that well it's a bit noisy there it's definitely not
the quietest Mini PC and then the upgrades is one other area I liked the older design from Minnie's
Forum where you could simply just remove the four screws take the bottom of it off and then you had
access to everything your SSD your RAM now I know they do have that additional m.2 slot which is
great and it's pcie 4.0 spec even better so it's the faster one there but in order to upgrade the
RAM you have to remove the whole cooler where the fan is the ram is directly below that fan which
is a little Annoying there and just to get into it isn't quite as easy so that's another little
minor con there overall it is a very fast little mini PC I like the three displays that you can
run out of it 4K 60 we've got the 2.5 gigabit Lan oh and another Miner as well too is the BIOS is
pretty much locked down on this they don't want us or want us touching power limits at all I can kind
of see why because it got up to 97 degrees Celsius and triggering that fan noise and a little bit of
thermal throttling there so there we go that is the full story of The Minis Forum Elite Mini th80