chris here taking a look at a mini pc that you can buy from banggood it's got an 11th gen core i7
1165 g7 with iris xe graphics the 96 executional units now it's in a very small compact size it
can run three displays at 4k 60 and one of them at 4k 120 hertz because it does support thunderbolt
4 which is great to see around the 600 euro price point but is the mini pc any good that's of course
what i'm here to find out this model does come pre-configured with 16 gigabytes of ram but it's
just a single stick that they have used there are two sodium slots thankfully so we could add more
ram to put it into dual channel at least but the ram spec they went with they kind of cheaped out
a bit because it's not the correct speed it's a little too slow it has a 512 gigabyte sata 3 ssd
and wi-fi ac which can be also upgraded included with our mini pc you'll find a
user manual it's in english in chinese it's very basic just goes over what the ports do really
you'll find a power supply and this one's rated to 65 watts dc plug we do have an hdmi cable eu power
cable some screws for an internal sata 3 drive and for this which is our visa mounting bracket
on the underside of this mini pc you'll find an intake vent we've got four rubber feet
and the fan noise and the thermals i'll let you know later on in this review there are two
mounting point screws there for the visa bracket this is plastic the bottom of it
the lid here too that is made out of plastic for the wireless antenna reception i believe is
why they have done that up the front so the middle around the outside here is brushed it's just an
alloy we've got a power button status led 3.5 millimeter combo jack usb 2 two of them and then
two usb 3s and an exit vent right here so that's where the hot air is being pushed out on the left
side of it and here we do have three displays that it can run which is really good so thunderbolt
4 great to see this here we've got our displayport 1.4 and then hdmi 2.0 now it's an hdmi 2.0 port
unfortunately hdmi 2.1 however i can run 4k 120 hertz with my lg cx oled tv which is good
two usb 3 ports gigabit lan and then i'll power in there are two screws here that if
you undo those you can lift off the top lid and we'll take a look at the internals now
now they did cheap out a little bit with the ram and especially the speed so we've got 16 gigabytes
which is great but it's only 2 66 megahertz and of course this supports 3.2 megahertz and we really
need it to be in dual channel as well so i will swap this out just because i want to see the full
potential of this mini pc but bear that in mind with this review the stats and the benchmarks
and everything you're going to see are going to be in dual channel configuration with the faster
ram because they've completely crippled it here by doing so because the iris xe graphics especially
with the 96 executional units needs dual channel and it needs the proper ram speed which this
simply isn't so that's really poor by them to do this and when they've also installed here
a sata 3 ssd and not an nvme one right here you'll find the wireless antennas and just under this
that is the intel wireless ac 3165 very common it's not a great chipset it used to be good but
we've on wi-fi six-spec now so i would upgrade this with an ax 200 or 201 to give you wi-fi 6 and
bluetooth 5 support this card only has bluetooth 4.2 i believe it is so this will be the ram i'm
using two sticks of 8 gigabytes and it's micron ram and it is rated to the 3 200 megahertz which
is the maximum the chipset supports and because i've got two it's going to be in dual channel
and you can see the sata 3 drive will be installed right here 2.5 inch but we did not get the cable
needed in order to connect it to the motherboard the plug's right there for sata 3 but it's not
included in the box that's another letdown so they've cheaped out on so many things here the ram
the wireless card and not even giving us the cable for a 2.5 inch sata drive and here is
our bias it's not too bad we do get some advanced settings so when you go into it
you'll see right here that we can change at least the power limit not that i would really want to
mess around with this you can set it to 35 this is the only options they give us but it will of
course be louder it's already loud enough as it is and it will generate a lot more heat i always
support that set to when tin i mean you can't change that and then you've got a few other things
that uh you can tweak in here so minus settings not everything because normally you see a lot
more than this if it was completely unlocked would have a huge array of settings that we can tweak
oh and this one here at the top this is handy if you want to dedicate more ram to that iris xc
graphics you could set that to max uh which i won't do i'll just leave it at the default there
and here we are in windows so it just went straight into windows there was no setup to
go through someone's already done that before and i don't particularly like this i like to
go through the setup process and not have it already done i can even see recent files where
the drivers they were installing this from looks like a usb pin drive and of course i can't access
access that or anything so i will probably end up factory resetting this but it is running windows
10 pro windows 11 pro sorry as you can see and it does tell me that it is actually activated so
i don't know whether that's valid or not i have to assume that it is activation does seem to be legit
their activation state with a digital license so i do believe that that should hold up that'll be
fine so apart from that everything seems to be fine here now when you take a look at the
cpu there you're going to see it listed of course eight times because it has eight threads now the
maximum turbo of this is 4.7 and it's a 10 nanometer chip i'll just bring up hw info
i've got here just to show you a little bit more info on this so we have tiger lake graphics which
is great okay that's a very potent integrated gpu there and it has the 96 executional units
but what i'm not too happy about is this it is in fact a a qs so it's a engineering sample a quality
sample and they should not be using this because it's not actually a final version of the chip now
i've encountered no problems with that at least but you could run into problems if they use this
certain early versions especially of the chipsets might not even show up the name
correctly this one is or they might not go up to their correct turbos because they were
early test units engineering samples so not good at all to see that however i can report that the
performance does seem to be fine here you can see it's getting very good scores here so single core
score over 1500 points multi-core score over 5000 there and the ui and everything does feel
very quick and snappy but mind you i am running that ram that i showed you that i installed so 16
gigabytes however in dual channel as it should be most importantly the correct speed 3200
megahertz i've also tested out cinebench here r23 and it is pulling through similar scores
to what we see actually in geekbench five so going over 5000 points for multi-core score
and single core score just over 1400 so it is a powerful chipset that is within this
however the original configuration with only having eight giga 16 gigabytes a single stick
and only 2 66 megahertz will severely affect the performance that's why i've
got the ram and dual channel because i want to see the peak temperatures peak performance too
that we can get out of this chipset now that boot drive is partitioned in dual partition so c drive
and d drive i don't know why they do this it could be if you do a factory reset you're going to still
have your files that you do have on d drive will be intact they won't be wiped out if you do that
it could be their reasoning behind it but i don't particularly like this and the speeds of that
drive well not super quick but for sata 3 it's fine okay they're all right kind of speeds there
but you can use a pcie 3.0 drive if you want it much quicker than this you can use something
like a samsung 970 evo evo plus to get over 3500 megabytes per second sequential reads and writes
one other benchmark too and this is the 3d mark fire strike score so over 4 000 for iris xc
graphics is kind of what i do expect i have seen a little higher so around about 4 500 4 400
but it's not actually too bad here and for integrated graphics believe it or not this
score's not actually bad and how does the core i7 handle something like this which is a jellyfish
4k test file here hevc 10 bit 140 megabits per second initially does one little stutter there uh
that's smooth okay that's not dropping any frames at all this is iris xc it's going to handle this
really well because it has the 96 executional units and of course this is all native decoding
it's been like that for quite some time i think since the 7th gen 4k60 this is
the sony swordsmith file and that is smooth that's looking very good just skippy hit there
and that's playing that back at 60 frames per second as i would expect for iris xc graphics
now multitasking it does handle everything well i won't go into just general kind of use like
documents spreadsheets and things like that but here i do have a spreadsheet open with libreoffice
and even though it's quite a few pages 700 records it's fine okay let's well one page here
it's able to do all those kind of things like like computing i won't cover all of that google
all that runs fine however let's take a look at 4k 60 streaming will it choke doing that in chrome
there we go chrome is open i can hear the fan quite a bit so you might be able to
hear that in the background it is getting a little loud here and a little bit annoying
so this is the one i will test out costa rica that's normally the clip that i test
so i should set these stats on and we'll take a look at this of course in 4k
skippy head and 4k 60 full screen
this should not drop any frames but it is it's constantly dropping frames see that now if you
do the same in edge it won't be as bad so although it looks like it's quite steady it is in fact a
little choppy because look it's 10 20 about 20 frames every second that has dropped from 4k
60. now 4k 30 on the other hand is fine it can handle that streaming without any problems
4k video editing can it do it can it handle it so for basic edits the kind of edits that i do
yes it's able to handle this but remember i'm running this ram the 16 gigabytes in dual channel
at the well the speed that you should be running them at which is 3200 megahertz
so the timeline with the playback resolution set to a quarter from the 4k with these 4k 100 megabit
clips is okay it's sometimes a little bit laggy but overall you can yes do an edit like this
basic edits and 1080p will be absolutely fine with adobe premiere pro so what i'll do now is
test out our export times so this is to go over to the export uk sorry youtube preset and that's
down here 4k all right and i'll set now one minute of footage we'll see how long it's going to take
start on the export and then start on the timer there's a little bit of a delay there
and it looks like it is going to take under one minute we'll skip ahead and i'll show
you the end result but this is quite quick i mean we've got iris xc graphics within 96
executional units that really helps out all right it has just a few seconds left now and
you'll see that most of the work is the iris xc graphics doing all the heavy lifting there
at 96 load and it's going to disappear alright you can say because i took two seconds or so
to get over to the timer about 52 seconds for one minute of 4k footage that's good anything
that's under a minute i think is great it's not the fastest i've seen but it's still not bad
now for gaming performance this is gta 5 which yes there's an old title and i do have it set to 1080p
on what i would call the medium settings so that's the traffic and population density in the middle
so i could lower it down even further and we're looking around 40 frames per second so with
the iris xc graphics i've certainly seen a lot better so why is it not performing as it could
well that's because we do end up running into some thermal throttling that's taking place and that is
affecting the performance lowering down the clocks a little bit and lastly for my game test this
is the witcher 3 the wild hunt and i've got it set on low settings 720p is the resolution
and it's playable just you can see some tearing a little bit of lag at times now i'm in the city
which is worst case scenario really with a lot of npcs around a lot to render out in the countryside
you'll get a high frame rate around 50 frames per second average at the moment it's struggling to
get over 40 but yes it is playable and that's the main thing and good for integrated graphics
it could perform a little better again i just think there's a bit of throttling going on and
finally our thermal so i can see why it does throttle in games because this happens it
will peak at 97 degrees celsius around 95 that's triggering thermal throttling it lowers down the
clocks affecting the performance and the fan noise well it does get a little loud that's another one
of the cons with this mini pc is the fan noise can be just annoying at times cycling on and off it's
on most of the time the fan it's only when you're just doing barely anything that it's very low and
you can hardly hear it but it never lasts for long then it comes on again now power use at the wall
with my wall meter i am seeing about 62.5 watts maximum and then an idle of around 8 to 9 watts
and linux yes it can run linux i did a quick install and tested it out you'd be able to boot
it up just fine and everything does seem to work and it's using an older wi-fi chip and this so
all up it's a bit of a disappointing model they cheaped out on the parts they put slower-spec'd
ram in which is 2666 megahertz not 3.2 gigahertz so they use the slower speed it's only in single
channel and they should already put two sticks of eight gigabytes in this dual channel and of course
the correct spec of ram to get the performance i did show you in this review so bear that in
mind that if you get one of these it's going to perform or underperform and not be anywhere near
what i showed you i just showed you the potential that this does have at least so banggood should
be selling this as i believe a bare bones model so you can put your own ram in it and your own ssd it
does support pcie 3.0 spec at least nvme so we can have a faster ssd now there was no cable either
for the safer 3 2.5 inch drive bay so i don't know where to get that from i guess maybe
hunt it down on aliexpress if you wanted to run a secondary drive in this and the wireless card
is only wi-fi five-spec it should be wi-fi six so you can also upgrade that the intel ax 200 or
ax-201 cards do sell for around about 15 us dollars maybe even cheaper than that so
it's a quick and very easy upgrade to swap it over and plug in the antennas with it the fan noise is
another con there too it can get a little bit loud as we saw so it has potential it
is a very fast mini pc from what i've shown you it's just really the way they've configured it
is not good they cut some corners there so i hope to see banggood listing this a little bit cheaper
but as a bare bones model i think would be best for everyone or just sell it with the correct
spec of ram and two sticks of ram in it would be ideal so thanks a lot for watching my review here
of the mu05 it's from a brand called envision and you can pick it up from
banggood for around about 600 euros at the time of this video