Hello everyone and welcome to TV Box stop the channel
for the best reviews in TV boxes mini-PCs and accessories.
In today’s video I have a Windows mini-PC from the brand AEROFARA. This is a compact Windows 10
mini-PC that can be upgraded to Windows 11, with some pretty decent specs and a portable design.
It’s called the AEROFARA Aero 2 Pro, and in this review, we’ll examine its hardware and design,
I’ll attempt to upgraded it to Windows 11, And
let’s see what tasks we can perform on its operating system, and if we can do additional
stuff in relation to alternative operating systems such as Android x86 and FydeOS.
So stay tuned.
And welcome back. In this package
contains the Aero 2 Pro mini-PC itself. They have included a very high-quality HDMI cable.
A 12V 2A DC power adapter.
And a user manual that’s in English, Dutch, French, Spanish, and Chinese.
Its body is made of aluminum with the AEROFARA chrome logo to the top.
It has one HDMI 2.1 port, one USB 3.0 port, one RJ-45 gigabit LAN port,
a headphone microphone combination jack, a reset button, and the DC power input to its rear.
To its right it has two more USB 3.0 ports,
a power button, a standard size SD card slot, and the exhaust vent for the internal cooling fan.
On the opposite side it has a VGA display port and the intake vent.
At the front it has a power LED.
And to its base it has a four antiskid rubber pads.
So I’ll just take a moment to set this up and continue.
So I’ve connected the PC to my 4K TV through my capture card,
and during the Windows first startup wizard, I was prompted to upgrade to Windows 11
which is a nice feature instead of having to do it manually via USB.
However it still boots up into Windows 10 and in the background,
Windows updates has it listed as one of the updates.
You simply scroll down until you see the download button and click on it to initiated upgrade.
So this PC has been successfully upgraded to Windows 11, and if I opened its system
information under the about section, here it shows that the model is the Aero 2 Pro.
Its CPU is an Intel Celeron N5105, which is a Jasper Lake quad core CPU and it’s clocked at
2.0 GHz which is its base clock speed. It has a boost clock speed of 2.9 GHz.
It has 8GB of LPDDR4 RAM, and it’s a 64bit operating system.
If you scroll down under product key and activation
it shows that the current version of Windows 11 is activated.
For a bit more detailed information it appears that the AIDA64 extreme app as well as CPU Z
and GPU Z cannot fully detect this PCs chipset.
So I turned to Intel’s product page and other related pages for more information.
Here it shows the Intel Jasper Lake CPU as a base clock speed of
2.0 GHz and a boost clock speed of 2.9 GHz, and overclocking is not allowed.
It GPU is the Intel UHD graphics 24 EUs
Jasper Lake GPU, and it shows that this GPU as a frequency between 450 to 800 MHz.
These are the codecs supported by its hardware, and I see that AV1 decoding
is not supported. However, it does support 4K HDR.
Its RAM type is LPDDR4 RAM with a speed 2933 MHz.
Returning now to AIDA64 extreme and it shows that the audio adapter
is the Intel Jasper Lake point PCH and it supports audio voice and speech.
It comes with a Kimtigo brand 256 GB SSD for its internal system disk.
It shows that it has dual band Wi-Fi from an Intel wireless AC
3165 network adapter, and it has Bluetooth support.
And below here you have Its the bios information. And that’s its system and information.
With this hardware running on Windows 11 you get features
such as 4K 2160p resolution at 60hz with HDR.
You get screen orientation to portrait mode of feature
that is used when applied to it vertical monitor.
It has a night light mode that blocks out the blue light that can be stressful on your eyes.
And you get the dual monitor display via the VGA port.
For audio options via HDMI, you only get 2 channel audio,
but you can get surround sound audio if you connect a 7.1 USB external soundcard.
You can also get audio via Bluetooth when
connected to a Bluetooth speaker or audio receiver.
So this mini-PC with such a small form factor, based on its hardware is more of
a productivity type machine over gaming. This means that it’s ideal for office applications,
browsing the web, streaming videos, and social media.
For productivity type activities you can install Microsoft Office applications,
PDF editing software, and apps used for editing script such as Notepad++.
You can install your favorite antivirus and anti-malware applications.
You can connect a USB WebCam and use social media apps
such as Facebook, Zoom, Skype and WhatsApp web.
For streaming you get 4K 2160p resolution on YouTube, and on streaming apps such as
Netflix and Amazon prime video you get HD and 4K quality with HDCP protection.
It’s also showing that it can play Dolby Atmos I will test for that in a moment.
For 4K video playback I must admit that I am impressed with the playback performance of
this mini-PC. Usually mini-PCs this size would struggle to play my list of 4K
videos even with special apps such as the VLC player.
To my surprise using the default movie and TV player it played all my 4K HDR videos smoothly.
There is also an auto HDR feature in the display settings so it activates only when needed.
When I placed it to my 7.1 audio receiver, I was very surprised
to see that it produced all the surround sound the formats including Dolby TrueHD.
Just watch as I play my list of videos with surround sound formats.
Here I am playing a Netflix video with Dolby Atmos
through the receiver, and it also shows that the video plays in ultra HD 4K.
So this confirms that the Aero 2 Pro can produce Dolby Atmos, DTS X, DTS HD-MA,
Dolby surround, and Dolby TrueHD. It also has HDCP 2.2 protection and can
play all premium movie services in HD and 4K with surround sound audio.
Its GPU is powerful enough to render graphics from some large games at low to medium settings
safely without overheating due to its internal cooling fan. This is destiny 2,
a 79GB game from the steam platform and it plays on low and medium graphics settings.
This is a much smaller game from the Microsoft store and as you can see it
played smoothly without issues. So this demonstrates the power of this mini-PC.
Let’s now take a look at some benchmarks and where it places on my ranking chart.
In the Novabench benchmark app that measures RAM and internal storage read and write speeds
the Aero 2 Pro has a RAM copy speed of
14,948 MB/s. It internal storage has a read speed of 378 MB/s and a write speed of 105.
To measure its Wi-Fi and Ethernet LAN speeds it shows that based on my Internet speed of 250Mbps,
the 5GHz band and the LAN port achieved 100% of my bandwidth. The 2.4GHz band achieved only 20%.
In the Geekbench 5 CPU benchmark it scored 633 single-core, and 1885 multi-core.
In the PC version of the Antutu benchmark it scored 222,475.
In the 3DMark graphics benchmark it scored 32,274 in the ice storm extreme test.
6326 in the cloud gate test. And a 349 in the time spy test.
And in the PC Mark 10 comprehensive benchmark it scored 2409. This is the score that I use
to place boxes on my ranking chart and let’s now see where it places.
So the scores are in and the Aero 2 Pro is at position number three
in reference the PC Mark 10 benchmark scores,
which is a great achievement for this compact many PC compared to some bigger models.
You can view this chart on my blog in full spreadsheet format way you can maximize it
and compare various benchmark scores and features. See the link in the description below this video.
For alternative operating systems was able to run the latest version of Android 12 x86 snow
cone version via live CD only, as the bios blocks you from installing on a partition of
its internal storage, or on a separate USB or SD card. It’s a fully operational in live CD,
with full access to the Google play store, it has CPU clock speed at 2.9 GHz,
with 64bit architecture, and it also has some surround sound audio decoders which is a first.
The downside with running live CD is that you cannot save your installed apps and
data once you restart. This because you cannot install grub to its bios.
With FydeOS the situation is even worse where not only that you can’t install onto a separate drive
via USB or SD card, if you boot in to life mode directly from the installation Disk
you cannot access the Android subsystem so in my opinion it’s absolutely useless.
Returning now to Windows. For those who were wondering if you can run the PlayStation 2
emulator on this mini-PC. Please be informed that the emulator installs but its rendering
performance is not very good as you can see from this demonstration of Devil May Cry 2.
In summary the Aero 2 Pro is a surprisingly efficient mini-PC
with many positive features compared to other top models.
The one major sore point for me is the fact that it does not allow you to install grub
so that you can install alternative operating systems such as Android x86 and FydeOS.
Other than that this would’ve been a more complete high performance mini-PC.
And with that said this brings the curtains down on today’s review. Special thanks goes out to
the AEROFARA brand on Amazon for sending a sample of their product for review.
If you would like to check out this mini-PC I placed a link in the description
where you can find it on Amazon and AliExpress.
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being selected by sponsors to send their products for review. And for that I’m forever grateful.
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