Hi guys Chris back here with mini PC's it's been a while since I've looked at
some in the channel and right now I've got with me this is the Intel NUC the
new basic entry-level model from them that is now powered by the Gemini Lake
which is the successor to the Apollo Lake and that's pretty much the reason
why I decided to get this so I can have my first hands-on with the new chipset
so here's a few changes with the Gemini Lake over there Polo Lake it now
supports double data rate for up to 2400 megahertz which is good that's a big
increase over double data rate three 1600 megahertz it's got one megabyte
more of cache on the CPU so instead of the three megabytes cache it now has
four and we also have support for up to 60 Hertz 4k which is great because the
Apollo Lake that was capped at 30 Hertz which was rather laggy if you try to use
that with a 4k monitor in a PC desktop mode there it just wasn't a great
experience and now it's gonna be nice and smooth there with that high refresh
rate so this little PC you can see very tiny it does come with a visa mount so
you could mount it onto the back of the monitor or a TV if you wanted to and if
we have a look at the ports on the back of it first we'll start out with so
we've got 2 USB 3 ports here have optical out which was great to see we
don't often have an optical audio port on many PCs and something if you wanted
to set this up as a media PC it's it's really good to have that option there it
also is a 3.5 millimeter jack as well for your audio out there too and we've
got a vent here you can see at the top so this is where all the heats going to
be coming out it's only a 10 watt processor but it still is actively
cooled now to comment on the fans now at the start of the video that they are
very low the speed that they are run at and you hardly really hear them it's
just a slight little hum and it almost is pretty much off when it's an idle so
you can hardly hear them so it's not gonna bother anyone that's a very quiet
PC this one here I personally don't like fan noise at all it really does bother
me and one of the reasons why I would use a mini PC instead of a desktop PC
for light tasks at least so we've got two HDMI ports on here so you can run
two monitors at 4k 60 Hertz and we also have here you can see two gigabit lan
port too so if you want connect that up tool and then you've got
a list of high-speed port on that so on the right hand side here - we've got a
nother vent this is an intake vent and we have Kensington lock slot and also a
SD card slot there you can see along the front those two little dots there are
jewelry microphones this is another big thumbs up here to have mics on this and
to them they're quite good quality as well and that can be used with Windows
called Tanner for example and you can see another two three USB 3 ports on
there now that one that's orange that's a powered port so if it's in sleep will
stand by you can charge devices with it it also has an IR receiver and the front
along here so you can use an optional remote for it to use it as a media PC
and we do have a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack with microphone support
so overall the build and design of this little meet PC is very good it's very
solid the outside frame that is made out of plastic the top is plastic as well
and we'll have the antennas in there for the wireless AC overall nice little size
good build quality I really do like it now there's a couple of components that
you do need for this so you're gonna need a hard drive and you're also going
to need some RAM and an operating system to install okay let's get this unboxed
so there's the mini PC you can see it is really quite small very small in fact so
that's one bonus thing about these Intel anok's is that they're tiny so you can
actually put this on the back of a monitor or something I don't know where
that has a visa bracket inside here I think it should actually we got some
instruction manuals here just telling you how to get the back off it install
your SSD and your RAM also to Intel Celeron sticker I don't know if you want
to put that on the front of it or not at least they give us that option okay here
is the VESA mount for it so you just need to screw this on and you can have
this mounted to the back of a TV or a monitor if you're gonna use it as a
media PC and in here is the power adapter so that's the UK plug I had to
import this one in because in Spain they're not actually selling it at the
moment it's due to come probably at the end of the month or so some screws here
as well this is for the mounting base a bracket and our power supply so this is
rated to 19 volts just to point out to that there plug is one of those
funny-looking Mickey Mouse ones so these are very easy to source and fine
for example for me a European plug with the same connector so you just need to
screw up these four screws here you can't actually pull them right out
they're designed to stay in there so that's a good design mode they're from
Intel this simply just lifts up and out just like so now you'll see here we have
the tray there for our set of three drives so that's 2.5 inches of course
and the ram has to go in here Oh install that now so you can see there's not a
lot of room in here and actually looking I don't know if they'll be able to fit
an mSATA SSD slot or an m2 is this D slot in here well we have to probably go
somewhere around here unless they could move the SATA 3 port somewhere around
there or would have to lose the SD card reading perhaps for that so the room is
just like your laptop Ram it just clips in now I'm taking a bit of a risk here
because I've got 8 gigabyte RAM - lots of it I'm gonna see if it's going to
actually be able to take 16 gigabytes of RAM so eight and one slot eight and the
other and my SSD has just simply slaughtered here in place there's no
screws or anything it's held in there with this bracket so it's time now to
install the operating system I'll do that off-camera and you're also going to
need an HDMI cable of course that is not included in the box so no review would
be complete without having to look at the BIOS so it's using internals of
visual bias and there's a lot of settings we can tweak and change in here
now I'll just show you the interesting things here so cooling we can adjust the
fans so if you're not happy with it I mean these fans are very quiet if you
decide that even on the balanced mode I don't like it then you can put it into
the quiet mode of course that will increase your fan noise and if we move
over to power as well there's a couple of interesting settings here so you can
tweak up the package power time window unfortunately we cannot completely
unlock the power limits we're going to need some sort of memory hack in order
to do this like we've done with the Apollo today so you can completely
remove those limits there and that it just use as much power as it wants
boosting mostly the GPU performance you've got boot menu here as well and
really everything else you'd expect from a bias which is quite good but we can of
course adjust that power limit or disable it'll be really nice if Intel
would let us do that but I guess they want to lock down the chipset so before
I get onto the general performances wanted to point out a few
things with the chipset so it's running a cell rom J 4005 it's dual core dual
thread and the graphics is integrated so this is intel's you HD graphics 600
basically the same exact GPU as the Apollo X GPU however because the Rams
faster we've got double data rate for 2400 megahertz that should boost the
performance of it and right here you can see maximum turbo of this chipset this
is one of the improvements of the new Germany Lake is the higher clocks so
this goes up to 2.7 gigahertz maximum turbo there boost that it can get up to
now if I have a look at the CPU information right over here you can see
that there is an unlimited power limit max but the power limit one is 12 Watts
hopefully we can override this for an increased performance it probably would
help the GPU clock up and boost and turbo higher as well but that is
currently set we cannot change there to increase it the time I've extended to
128 seconds now moving over to Microsoft's edge here we have a look at
the performance of a couple of synthetic benchmarks I ran so this first one here
is a skeet bench for CPU test and the single core score here 2018 now that's
an improvement over the Apollo Lake quite a decent improvement there it's up
around about 500 600 points over the previous generation but the multi-core
score here not so great so it's only because it's a dual core really if this
was a quad core expect somewhere around 5500 something like that and so go for
that Pentium J 5500 version if you want better performance and quad core of
course here is the OpenCL score so not a wonderful score here it's a very weak
GPU so 8000 156 is a slight increase over the Apollo Lakes now whenever look
at each performance we're scrolling very smooth and it does run really good so
clicking on anything it's pretty much very quick to load up the pages and no
issues there so you have a look at now home performance so scrolling and chrome
is not quite as fast but it's still idea what's fine I feel that must be will be
happy with this so now let's have a look at 4k performance streaming via YouTube
here so I've got it running in 4k it's just one of my reviews right here this
is the xiaomi redmi note 5 and will enable the stats of course we need dos
so you can see it's dropping a few frames here but overall reasonably
smooth just not as good as edge still so if you do this an edge you won't see so
many dropped frames the performance is a little bit better so we'll get out of
that and a lot of people have asked me in my previous mini pc tests is to check
out spreadsheet performance so i've got one here loaded in and I find that
spreadsheets gonna be fine but I do have an SSD so the SSD is
definitely going to improve the performance when it comes to searches of
really large Excel spreadsheets and things like that so if you're using a
hard drive expect slow performance but I found this to be fine so for basic tasks
like those basic spreadsheets I'm using OpenOffice at the moment because it's
free it's gonna work fine and same goes for dock eating editing so the document
right here that meditating find the performance I mean it's not nothing
Stella it's not super quick you do see a little bit of lag and started with some
images and other things but overall not bad performance and I think most people
will be happy with that right there I'm also going to try streaming sorry not
streaming but running a quite a demanding file here so this is an HEV
codec tin bit and the bit rate is 180 so let's get this open see how long it
takes to open up few seconds a little bit of stutter in the beginning but once
it's over that you can see now very smooth for this kind of bitrate 4k it's
impressive now a lot of people do ask things like
HD audio pass over does it have it yes does it support HDR no so if you want to
run HDR files on your HDR TV it's not gonna work I mean I can eat it up to my
LG TV and no you can't get the HDR on here unfortunate I think because this is
basic model why Intel have that disabled there which
is not great so Photoshop yes you can do minor edits now if you're gonna have a
lot of layers you're gonna be adding lots and lots of different images and
filters and tweaks and things expect slow down do you need a lot of patience
when applying different filters but overall it's not too bad the performance
you can get out of this and lastly Cody go into this as well
we'll check out performance of that same file let's play that one again so a
little bit of started just there in the beginning but this is actually playing
it quicker and a lot better than just running it off Windows who knows the
player I have in there now this is actually running from that SD card slot
so not bad not bad performance so as a media player this is going to be perfect
this system I feel for people adequate power and performance for that and your
basic light PC tasks in nothing too demanding so I'm doing an extreme
multitasking test here at the moment I've got an installation of fortnight
going on in the background I'm trying to own install open office at the same time
I've got Photoshop trying to be installed Chrome's open with a few tabs
I'm pushing this well beyond its limits it's only a dual-core CPU and you can
see the whole time CPU is maxed out at 100% and it's not actually holding out
too bad I mean it's doing all right yeah if we swap over tabs here in chrome you
can see there's quite a delay there that's pretty slow scrolling down that
is a little choppy there and I'll just go back to ticked Albert's comm actually
that scrolling speeds alright considering that I'm really asking far
too much way too much of this tiny little dual-core CPU now on to the fun
part of the review let's have a look at gaming performance so I did try to run
fortnight and no it just will not load if it's games launcher just quits it
quits when it realizes that it's got a super weak GPU with integrated graphics
and not if it games does not want you to have 5 frames per second trying to play
this so what I'm going to do is run some lighter titles so this is one here from
the Windows Play Store Dungeon Hunter 5
so you can see like titles like this that its handling fine I mean even the
Apollo late can play this game perfectly fine with playable framerates
next up is a game benchmark so this is Resident Evil 5 I'm going to run it with
these settings here so 720p should be playable at least worth the a jiminy
lake here
so there we go the result is twenty seven point five frames per second
average meaning that this game is going to be playable it's an older title so
not too bad this is an increase of about four frames per second average over the
Apollo Lake in thirty four fifty so this is 720p Counter Strike global Offensive
on the lowest settings and this is actually doing a little bit better than
the Apollo lakes if you want an improved framerate then of course lower the
resolution down to something like 800 x 600 and yes I'm really bad at this game
I just can't aim at all so there are quite a few
stutters as you can see but overall this is a step up from the Apollo eight which
is great to see probably aided by the fact that the RAM is just quite a bit
faster really aiding that GPU and finally testing out League of Legends
here so this is 1080p on the medium to high setting and we're hovering around
50 frames per second sometimes up to sixty with Peaks up in the seventies
even so this is not bad at all this is an improvement over the Apollo take in
thirty four fifty about twenty percent improvement so it's not a lot expect
better performance of course out of the Pentium terminal a which is that quad
core version the J 5005 so what about the thermals this is really important is
it overheating no I haven't seen it go over 75 degrees Celsius at the moment
you can see the maximum was 73 this is only 25 minutes of gaming but I have run
it for hours on end and yet 75 is the maximum now to comment on the fan noise
it's not bad at all when it's been playing the game at the moment you can
hear it it's a slight little hum but it's not an irritating fan noise at all
it's very docile it doesn't have a high pitched whine or anything so it's not
gonna bother most people and especially if you're running this in a TV cam
little behind a TV you are not even going to hear this fan at all on idle
its barely audible you have to put your ear up to it to actually hear that the
fan is working so good thermals good fan noise as well pretty pretty much overall
plea the thermal performance and quickly
taking a look at Linux support so I'm running here Linux Manjaro no issues
everything is running the performance is perfectly fine the ports of working
bluetooth wireless you name it everything seems to be just fine here
alright so overall who is this little mini PC for well if you've watched
through the video clearly it's not for people that want and demand the best
performance because it's gonna let you down it's not a powerhouse of a mini PC
this is good for light tasso browsing video playback a media PC light tasks
really is it all I would task this thing with you don't want to be editing videos
on this and you don't definitely want to be trying to gain much on this light
older titles okay yeah you can play a few games on as you saw from my examples
there so that is fine so what I do like about this PC
obviously the form factor very nice and small we've got some options on here
with plenty of USB ports to HDMI up to 4k 60 head ports on there are really
good the agent of my to spec so you can run two monitors but that would probably
be a little bit slower depending on what you're doing so if you gonna do a lot of
heavy multitasking again it's gonna really be taxed with that so you
probably better off to go for the quad-core version which is hopefully
gonna be out in about a month's time I may be checking that one out that's the
Pentium silver the Germany lake and I think that's the J 5005 and yeah that
has a turbo of 2.8 gigahertz so slightly faster but the main differences it's got
four cores with four three its instead of just the two cores in to threats that
this one has it's kind of limiting the performance there so sumos a good fan
noise it's really good it's very low you basically don't even hear it at all
there wasn't really a me a point of me giving you a sample in fact I recorded a
sample but you could hardly even hear the fan so I cut that out of the Edit
and the end there so overall I can recommend it for a light to us but for
heavy use no go for something like a core i5 8250 new mini PC I will actually
be reviewing one of those ones from Aliexpress soon in the channel so hope
to see you back then thanks a lot for watching this review if you liked it
please give a thumbs up and also subscribe to the channel bye for now