In this video i'm reviewing a brand here that i've not covered before MINIX and this here is
the ngc-5 it's a windows 10 mini pc powered by the core i5 82 79u now the 8279u does have four
cores eight threads maximum turbo is 4.1 gigahertz and it is powered with also iris plus 655 graphics
a 28 watt part performance even though it's 8th gen is very similar to the 11th gen the 1165 g7
only slightly slower it does come with 8 gigabytes of ram 256 gigabytes of storage
dual lan ports on it wi-fi ac sd card reader and you can even install if you wanted to a nano sim
and a modem in this model here so i'll show you the internals the thermals the performance and
exactly what you can expect here out of the NGC 5. so in the box you'll find our power supply which
is rated to 90 watts we have a user manual which is in various different languages two external
antennas hdmi cable include a visa bracket for mounting it on the back of a tv or a monitor
and we do get this some extra little screws in here there is an adapter for optical audio out
so the mini pc has a nice more compact size it's not very high you can see we have a kensington
lock slot this is the exit vent for the fan so the hot air will be pushed out from this side
reset button and that is the two connectors there for the external antennas for our wireless on the
back of it here we've got a lot of port so it does support three displays out at
4k60 so displayport hdmi and then type c video out we've got two usb 3.1 ports right here two
two gigabit lans this is our power in intake vent right here and then on this side we do have
optical audio out okay and also 3.5 million millimeter with microphone support this is
our micro sd card another two usb 3s and we have a com port right here which you don't normally see
the top of the neo ngc 5 you'll find the MINIX branding and then the underside of it right here
just got a few stickers serial numbers and whatnot and there is this little hatch here so that's an
easy access hatch just two screws to remove and you can gain access to the mv emmy drive
in here which is 256 gigabytes if that was not enough you could then swap that out and put up
to two terabytes in there you can see that's the little plastic hatch that just goes over the top
what i'll do now is i'll open it up and i'll show you how we can add more ram because this only
comes with eight gigabytes you would probably want to add another eight so we can have dual channel
for best performance and 16 gigabytes in total we have four rubber feet on the underside here
you just need to peel them off and they're using adhesive there there's no damage to them at all
and then simply four screws and then the bottom will lift right off and we can see now the cooling
fan right there and it does have a thermal copper transfer pipe in there and then in order to access
our ram you do need to flip around the motherboard the good thing is that there is a sim slot right
here so it will take a nano sim and you can then slot in a modem so if you did need that extra
you're able to do that we don't often see this option in many pcs so two sodium slots here i
will be adding another eight gigabytes of ram to give us the 16 in total just so it's in dual
channel so we can see what the maximum performance that is possible out of this particular mini pc
we do have our wireless card right here which is also upgradable you could change this and
swap it out if you needed to first up our bios so we do have a few advanced settings in here
okay that you can change and tweak but really not a lot okay so it's quite a lockdown
bios here cpu configuration you can just disable or enable the turbo of course that's on by default
and power settings not a lot in here so you cannot actually change the power limits for this
chip you'd have to use intel's extreme tuning utility for that if you wanted to tweak it
now this is an interesting one which is the restore ac power loss so you can turn that
on if you're going to be running this as a server or on a switch or a router that's very handy to
have so when it loses power it can automatically power itself back on as soon as it detects that
power there so let's jump into windows now okay so this mini pc does come with windows 10 pro it
is slightly dated the version there but that's normal you have to run windows update so i did
install that extra 8 gigabytes of ram so i've got 16 in total we do lose out on a little bit because
it's dedicating some of that to that iris plus graphics there now general performance i won't
go over documents spreadsheets and things like that it's very very good this is a capable even
though it's an older chipset now capable quad core with the eight threads so maximum turbo is up to
4.1 gigahertz it's a 28 watt part so it's coffee lake u and there's the iris plus 655 so that is
why it is a little bit more potent so it's not as good as what we now have of course with the iris
xe graphics which is the latest one but for a couple of generations ago this was not bad at all
it was quite a good one so we do have with this 48 executional cores and the performance geekbench
five here almost eleven hundred points for single core score and over four thousand seems uh pretty
standard there for the type of chip and this one is okay with the 8279 u and just another thing to
point out too that we've got those two gigabit lan ports on board but the wireless card which
thankfully is upgradable now i would swap this out with an intel ax 200 or 201 this one here is the
dual band wireless ac 3168 it's not that quick and you can get around 300 megabits per second
transfers with it but the newer cards the ax 200 and 201 for example i'm able to achieve about 1.3
gigabits per second so those are very very quick wireless range and reception i must
comment on is very very good very strong because of those external antennas they're just so much
better than the internal ones and they've got a lot more gain to them so that definitely is
a benefit there we're gaining from this mini pc and here's our internal storage so the mvme drive
is well it's not the fastest but it's certainly better than sata 3 which would be capping at about
550 megabytes reads and writes for sequentials that is and there you can see much better so it is
quite quick it does not hold up the system at all and overall system performance is excellent with
this so just going into very quickly to show you that with the file manager here that windows does
have about 200 gigabytes free on first boot and you can of course easily upgrade this drive
one thing the irs 655 plus graphics is good at is video playback this is a very demanding
file which i do test out in all my videos with mini pcs and that's 140 megabits per second 4k
10 bit hevc and you see a few little stutters in the beginning and once going it is smooth
and doesn't then drop any frames now i will test out another clip here which is a hdr one here
from sony and that's just fine that runs again without dropping any frames there so vp9 codec
support hevc is going to be able to run it just fine natively with the iris 655 plus
and spreadsheet performance i do have a very very large one open here sorry this is a document
and it's fine okay so the really large ones and including spreadsheets not a problem they're
editing them you can do all of that and it doesn't lag out without any problems and our cinebench
score so we get just over 3700 points now that score is actually very good because the 11th
gen 1165 g7 will just get slightly over this so really there's not much of a difference going from
the 14 nanometers now to the 10 nanometers on the 11th gen this 8th gen is very very
similar in terms of performance right here with cinebench and then the single core score of just
over 1 000 points and then our thermals when you do push it really hard something like exporting
video or gaming or cinebench it does peak at 88 degrees celsius now my ambient room temperatures
are approximately 24 degrees celsius so it does get a little warm it does trigger then thermal
throttling but only when you do something really demanding now the fan noise you do hear it ramp
up it does get a little loud there it's not the quietest mini pc i have tested out but when you're
just doing something that's light light tasks and things it doesn't make a lot of noise and the fan
seems to almost pretty much turn off and it's just occasionally on and cycling there power use you
can see well it gets up to a 30 watts there just was stress testing it right now with benchmarks
and it will at the wall end up using about 47 watts is what i have seen at peak at so far
and onto 4k video editing so these clips here are 4k hundred megabits per second once from
my sony a6300 back then when i recorded this clip now the timeline here runs fine with a
quarter playback resolution it does not drop any frames it doesn't seem laggy but on full
full here i've noticed it seemed to be at times a little choppy but it's not actually
too bad but do remember i'm running this in dual channel now if you were running this with the
stock configuration as you get out of the box with only eight gigabytes of ram and in single channel
the performance would not be as good as this but you can see dragging along the timeline here
that's very fast and does perform well better than other mini pcs i've looked at that don't
have the iris 655 plus graphics but how does it export will it be as fast as others let's find
out now export the 4k youtube preset here one minute footage and we'll see how long it takes
so there we go one minute bring up my little timer here so start on the timer export
and it should get through this quite quickly and as you can see it is powering ahead so
it should be just over a minute all right here we go about to finish up
so we're looking at approximately you could say one minute and nine seconds for one minute of
the 4k youtube preset they're exporting it and can it gain well this is gta 5 and i have it set
on normal settings not the lowest 1080p and we're getting around 40 sometimes frames per second mid
as you can see right now mid 30s so it is okay for older titles you can just play these games
so this is a step up from the typical uhd graphics that would normally have this being the iris
655 plus certainly does perform a little bit better so if i just get out of the car here
frame rate should increase you can see it's now around the 40s when you're outside so that's good
and overall it will be playable just not an amazing frame rate but let's have a
look at an even lighter title and that is counter-strike that i often test out
so we get a relatively good frame rate here for integrated graphics around 100 frames
per second it does dip down to sometimes 40 when there's a lot going on we've got smoke on screen
a lot of different characters there so this is just a plot so very easy kill for me there now
this was the iris xe graphics new architecture then of course we would be looking at probably
about 120 frames per second a lot better frame rate still for iris 655 plus this isn't bad and
it's over 60 frames per second i am running low settings however and 1080p is the resolution and
when it comes to the windows 11 requirements this mini pc does support it so you can happily install
that if you wanted to do so i'm still waiting for it to mature a little bit more so we do
have the tpm 2.0 that it needs secure boot and of course the spec of this mini pc is enough to run
windows 11. and then on linux support so it will run linux this unit here without a problem
and it does have of course the dated wireless chip in it so drivers is not going to be an issue
8th gen as well no problems with that so we'll also run windows 11 it meets all the requirements
from windows 11 to be able to upgrade to it and install it so that is good it's got the secure
boot on there so everything's fine with that so what do i like about this mini pc performance wise
with the second slot of ram installed so it's in dual channel as i tested it out
it will perform very similar to an 11th gen which is the 1165 g7 chip so that's great
very close to that kind of performance here with the cinebench scores that i was getting there and
i showed you however it just comes with that eight gigabytes of ram i really believe this should ship
with two sticks of eight gigabytes giving us 16 gigabytes in total but most importantly
dual channel ram configuration so we can get that maximum performance that i showed you
in this video so you can run three displays at 4k 60 that's another positive we can upgrade the ssd
you can swap out that wi-fi card so if you're not happy with the wi-fi ax which sorry ac
which i'm not i would change it for wi-fi ax 200 or ax-201 from intel which does have
bluetooth 5 support with it and much better speeds and much better throughput so we've got two two
gigabit lan ports on there which is great we even have a nano sim slot on the motherboard and room
there to install a modem if you wanted to set up and run that this is one of very few mini pcs
that i've seen that do have that it ships with windows 10 pro a valid license fan noise is
okay but when you push it hard you certainly do hear it like most many pcs around
it does use up to about 45 watts or it can pick up at total and gets up to about 88 degrees as
i have shown you we'll peek at that once the fans kick in at the full rpn it does lower down
a little bit so there we go that is the ngc-5 from MINIX thank you so much for watching this review