This tiny mini pc that I'm looking at is Geekom's mini air 11. now it does run windows
11 pro probably where it gets its name from and it is a mini pc intended for light computing because
it is only powered by the intel celeron n5095 now that particular chip does have four cores
it has a maximum turbo of 2.9 gigahertz intel's uhd graphics and we've got mini display out and
hdmi both of them do run 4k 60 so you can run two monitors from this we've got two type-c ports
usb ports on it gigabit lan and wi-fi ac it does have eight gigabytes of ram which is ddr4 almost
at 3 000 megahertz and a 256 gigabyte ssd it's a sata 3 one and what is in the box with the mini
air 11 well we have this a thank you card you do not often see that from brands there is a
pouch here for the mini pc so you can transport it around without getting it damaged you don't
normally see this either we have our power supply so it's a very small unit now this is not a high
wattage system but you can see that is up to 65 watts which is more than adequate for the chipset
that we do have with this which is quite low powered so they've included a mini display port to
hdmi which is good if you didn't have that you've just got hdmi we've got an hdmi cable and we have
some screws here so that is for the visa mounting bracket so you can put it on the back of a monitor
and we have a little instruction leaflet here and the bracket so there is a quick little guide
visa mounting bracket our power supply cable which is the eu one and if you did need to
source a different cable for whatever reason and you just need to look for this style of
plug which is very common which is the mickey mouse style plug that i call it because it well
you can see it looks a little bit like a mickey mouse face the mini air 11 does have a very small
compact size you can see it's not that high at all so we've got our apparel and button status led
these four little holes at the front are microphones we've got a 3.5 millimeter combo jack
right here usb 3.2 gen 2 this one the faster speed and then this is just data only this type c port
it's unfortunately not supporting video out and i didn't really expect it with this spec of mini pc
so we do have the exit vent here so all the hot air is going to be pushed out of this at the back
gigabit lan display port hdmi 2.0 and then we have a gen 2 again usb 3.2 gen2 and then usb 3.2 gen1
here for the two usb ports this is of course the power in so nice compact size yet we still do have
on this side here which is the left a kensington lock slot if you needed to lock it down if it's a
point of sale machine and then over here a full size sd card reader it's only usb 2 speeds it's
not ultra high speed unfortunately then along the top we've got the gcom branding intel inside logo
and because it does have the antennas below this this material they have used is plastic the
outside is plastic but we do have on the bottom of it metal right here so those are the two mounting
points for the vesa mount bracket if you're going to put it on the back of a monitor to gain access
to the internals you just need to screw out these four screws with the rubber feet so very
similar to the intel designs as you can see here we've just got this single stick of sodium ram
so that means that we're not running dual channel it's only in single channel but what i will do is
add another stick of 8 gigabytes to give us 16 in total but then it will run in dual channel to then
check out the maximum performance you can achieve from this particular model here with the celeron
5095 the n5095 so the wireless card that is soldered onto the motherboard cannot be upgraded
and our ssd right here does have this a heat sink with a thermal pad which is good to see you
don't normally see brands even bothering about the thermals of the ssds but they have done so
here getcom the wireless card is wi-fi ac so it is an intel 7265 so unfortunately we don't have
wi-fi ax i would have preferred the intel ax 200 or 201 which is of course a lot faster than this
then taking a look at the bios you can see that it is pretty much completely locked down to us
there are no advanced settings unfortunately so we cannot tweak or change power limits with this the
mini air 11 is running the ram now angel channel so my performance figures i'm going to show you
and then later on gaming and other things will be slightly better because of the benefit of having
dual channel ram versus single you just gain a little bit more speed it performs a little better
and i have double the ram which will help out but on eight gigabytes for light computing it stood
still should run fine without any issues so the chipset is that in 50 95 it's a 15 watt part and
it's a quad core there's no multi-threading with this so it's just the four cores you can see there
that the ram confirming that it is running in dual channel with hw info here up to a maximum speed of
2933 megahertz so if you do get one of these and you don't put the extra stick of eight
gigabytes of ram in then you won't quite get the performance figures that i will be showing you
now graphics that is the uhd graphics jasper graphics which has 16 executional units it's a
little bit better than previous generations which is great to see like the gemini lake
and i'll be going over that later on as well as our thermal so far the fan noise is excellent and
how is general performance so when you bring up the start menu it will occasionally show a
little bit of lag i mean it's not too bad the way this is popping up now i am running right now 4k
60. i've got the scaling up a little bit higher so we can see everything a little better and it
seems to be handling the 4k fine now one synthetic benchmark here that i will show you this geekbench
5. now you can install this on your own hardware run the test compare it to this result perhaps
your current hardware could actually be more powerful than what this is so it is low end i
need to stress that that this is designed for uh low power but also just light workloads so 655
single core score and then multi-core score just over 2000. now i have seen a little bit better
with this result here there weren't any updates going on in the background so i'm not too sure why
but i could run this maybe another two or three times and i could get better scores there but it's
just to give you an idea here on the general performance which i'll show you now so it is
really designed for things like this you want to run documents this is libreoffice it is a free
application i'll just get rid of that load this up and you can see load time not too bad
and you're able to do basic edits and things of course with documents it's really fine for that
it can handle that kind of workload and a bit of multitasking there too well especially now
because i do have the 16 gigabytes of ram so with spreadsheets again similar kind of thing
that you the larger the spreadsheet you may notice a little bit of slowdown there i'll just put this
always on the top and we'll keep this open here so i can keep an eye on the performance if it's going
to be really stressed out so you can see scrolling here not really too bad it's getting the cpu up to
about 30 so that's fine not really a high workload at all for it so basic things they're good
what about demanding video files i always test out these ones here because they well they are
just that demanding 4k 10 bit now normally you can see it hits 100 there does a bit of a stutter and
then the playback is smooth and fine so that's looking actually really good uh the heavy load
that's being pulled here will most of the heavy duty stuff is of course being done by that
decoded by the uhd graphics it's native to coding vp9 hevc so yes it can play those files there is
a 4k file that i do have that is 60 frames per second which should be a little more demanding
sorry double click that again here we go and that looks to be loading in good it looks like it has
yeah it's dropping frames there so at the start definitely not too happy with 60 frames per second
but now it's good oh but still dropping frames still slowing down there so yes i think 4k 60
just a little bit too demanding you can see the uhd graphics is hitting 100 so you really want
to stick to 4k 30 maximum with this if you're going to be using it as a media playback device
now that ssd just how fast is it it's not too bad but it is only a sata 3 drive so we don't have
pcie 3.0 support here but those speeds they're good for sata 3 and you get around 205 gigabytes
on first boot of free storage then 4k streaming here i do not have a very
good internet connection this is youtube with chrome and i'm testing 4k 30 frames per second
i've got a bit of buffer health here so it is steadily dropping frames you can see every second
it's dropping between one okay look it's steadied out there we go 207 not dropping any frames
but the problem is my buffer health that's going to run out and then it just yeah it starts to
drop huge amounts of frames so if you've got a good internet connection which i currently don't
have uh you should be able to get away with 4k 30 just fine about 4k 60 frames per second
streaming no you get a lot of drop frames so i don't recommend that again stick to 4k
30 with this spec what about gaming can it game a little well yes this is an old title here counter
strike source and it's set to 720p lowest possible settings it's playable we're getting around 50
frames per second over 40. it does sometimes dip down to about 30 but this is really good it's what
you want and i'm just going to charge in here and probably die but this performance yes aided by the
fact that i'm running dual channel ram and it has maxed out the uhd graphics you can see that it is
98 the whole time so that's what's holding us up here but at 720p
it's all right you could probably lower the resolution down of course and get an
even better frame rate but for the spec of mini pc just these older titles so very old games low
settings low resolution and you should have a playable frame rate over 30 frames per second
now this mini pc does have one thing that is really good fantastic even that is the thermal
so you can see that we have hit here a maximum of 72 degrees celsius the fan noise is there but
it's pretty much non-existent it just cycles on and off but it's so quiet you can barely hear it
now if you have it set up that it's using the visa mount bracket on the back of the monitor
you probably won't hear it at all this thing is really quiet and that is a definite big positive
and a reason to get a mini pc like this how about our linux support so i normally boot a linux mint
pen drive that's a live image one and it works on other mini pcs but for some reason with this
it wouldn't show up in the bias so that's using the three usb ports on the back and then the two
at the front trying those it just wouldn't show up in the bias for some reason so there's something
holding back i don't think it was secure boot because that didn't seem to be i didn't have it
enabled there so not too sure what was going on there with just trying to boot linux images
so the good about this mini pc is thermals very good fan noise barely hear it it does have plenty
of ports on it two type c ports and we've got usb 3.2 gen 2 ports the faster ports which is good
it can run two displays at 4k 60 it even has an sd card reader on it but that sd card slot there
is only usb 2 speeds unfortunately so it's not an ultra high speed one but hey it's still good to
have that option and we do have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack at the front with it we've got four
microphones built into it if you needed that so the cons for me are that it doesn't have intel's
ax 201 wi-fi six card that would have been great if it had it would get faster transfer
speeds but also bluetooth 5.2 it's got wi-fi ac in it and it's of course not upgradable
the configuration of it out of the box with memory is just the single stick of eight gigabytes of ram
so that does mean it's very easy to add another eight to give it dual channel and 16 gigabytes but
that's an additional cost if you intend to just run it as is in single channel we are missing
out on a little bit of performance the other for me is that there is no room for any additional
storage so if you had a two terabyte spindle 2.5 inch hard drive that you wanted to open this up
install it into it unfortunately because it is so small so thin there is no room to add an
additional 2.5 inch drive and we just got the single m.2 sata 3 in this as well but price wise
i think it's not bad for an affordable windows 11 mini pc for of course as i stressed just basic
computing needs so documents spreadsheets media playback as long as it's 4k 30 max 4k60 depending
on the bitrate and the codec used may have some problems and then 4k 30 streaming not a problem
4k 60 frames per second and youtube using chrome as i showed you did end up dropping a few frames
which is kind of normal for the uhd graphics and the limited power that this does have at only
15 watts so thank you so much for watching my review here of the geek com mini ear 11.