so chewie has released a value mini pc here that does when you look at the spec sheet seem pretty
good right it's got a ryzen 7 in it it has dual channel ram pcie 3.0 ssd two gigabit lan ports
wi-fi 6e even so it does look really promising doesn't it the lark box x that i have however
there's a couple of things okay that straight away it's a ryzen 7 3750h so it's an old chipset that
they're using an old apu so it's not like it's a ryzen 6000 series not nor that would you would
expect it for this price point of course and it's only eight gigabytes of ram that they give you
and 256 gigabytes of storage included with the lock box x you will find a 65 watt power supply
with a status led it's using the typical dc in that barrel connector we see a lot of our power
cables so obviously i've got the eu power cable you get a product inspection report warranty card
a visa mounting bracket so if you are going to mount this on the back of a monitor for example
then you're going to need that and the four screws and a user manual build of this mini pc
is plastic all around it doesn't feel too bad and they've gone for quite a different look as
you can see the white and black so two usb 3 type a's full spec usb type c here so this is video out
up to 4k 60 3.5 millimeter headphone jack with mic support and then a power button with a status
led and then the back of it here you'll find of course the power plug dc in there to power it all
to gigabit lan ports we have hdmi 2.0 so 4k 60 display port 1.4 4k 60 and another two usb type
as usb 3.0 and this is the exit so all the hot air is going to be pushed out of that chewy branding
and this mesh right here has the fan underneath it a little hard to see but it's just right here
the fan so that's going to suck all that fresh cool air in and then blow it out the back of it
and our underside here this is where you slot it on to that little bracket if you're going to
vesa mount this mini pc looking briefly at the internals so the good news is we do have two
sticks of ram in here so it is in dual channel and it's 2666 megahertz that they're using the ram
but it's only going to support 2.4 gigahertz anyway so it doesn't really matter now you
can upgrade this you could add two sticks of 16 if you wanted 32 gigabytes of ram
files battery right here this is our ssd which is plugged in i'll just remove this now
and we should have a wi-fi card below it and we do so this is also upgradable interchangeable you
can swap it out for something else if you wanted to and they've used the mediatek it's the rz608
first up our bias so this is completely unlocked to us we've got every single option you can think
of in here and like i say in my mini pc reviews just be really careful what you touch in here now
one of the interesting options is this one which is under the amd cbs menu now if you go into nbio
common options you will see that chewy have configured this with a 25 watt power limit now
they've probably done that to keep the thermals in check so that is exactly how i'm going to remove
review it sorry not remove it but if you wanted to you could probably set it here to 54 watts
but beware it will generate more heats consuming more power of course and that's the trade-off the
fan will probably be a lot louder so i'm going to leave everything as is stock here and let's
jump into windows the like box x here does ship out with windows 11 as you can see and it is
all fully activated so you don't need to worry about any problems like that they're not using a
dodgy license or key or digital license okay so that is all good now one of the things i won't
cover in this review because it's very obvious that spreadsheets documents things like that
they are perfectly fine on this machine everything does feel quick and snappy it is not a bad chipset
but yes it's dated now three generations old maximum turbo is 1.4 gigahertz and we do
see it listed here eight times because well it's a quad core chip it does have eight threads in total
though that's why we're seeing it there so the network adapter this realtek is actually quite a
good one it's fast i'm getting about 1.3 gigabit per second transfers it has bluetooth 5 with it
so that's unexpected i probably would have assumed with this kind of mini pc and the price that they
went for wi-fi ac but no we do have wi-fi ax and it's 6e which is really good so here
with the other thing to point out here is that we do have real tech uh sorry intel with the ethernet
so ethernet the lan the two controllers on there uh our gigabit ports and at least we do have that
now if you wanted to set this up as a server or a router or something that's good that we do have
those two ports there so nothing really else here of interest but i'll disk drive too so it's it's a
kingston and this is a pcie 3.0 drive the speeds of it are slow for mvme so a pcie 3.0 drive say
something like a samsung 970 evo would be twice as fast as this but it is at least faster than
sata 3 which is good we're getting a bit of a benefit here normally this price tag most
other manufacturers would use sata3 instead now a couple of benchmarks i wanted to show you just
a few because the power limit that chewy set 25 watts means that it's underperforming and it will
underperform with all that i'm showing you in this particular review here so this score could
be higher that could be a lot higher again it's because it's limited to 25 watts instead of 35
which would have been ideal now why has chewie done this probably for the fan so fan noise i
can hear a bit comes in cycles on and off a little irritating but if it was at 35 watts
it would be even worse cinebench r23 okay again it should do better than this this chipset can
do better if it's set to 35 watts or if it's set to 54 we'll do even better than that so
underperforming here but for spreadsheets office documents video playback all that kind
of stuff that i'm not going to show you because it's just obvious it does perform really well
how about something demanding then like a 4k video edit here so this is very basic i'm not doing any
fancy transitions layers effects or anything like that or even color grading here it's a simple drag
and drop cut edit and it is fine with the playback resolution here at a quarter i do occasionally see
it dropping a few frames i think the ram and yeah i'll mention it again of course that power limit
is going to be holding this back a little bit but if you wanted to do it on the lock
box x here yes you can do these basic 1080p or 4k even 4k 30 edits on this spec the ryzen 7 3750h
is still a capable chipset even if it is dated and it's just about to finish up now this is
of course the 4k youtube preset and it took one minute and you could say about 32 seconds that's
a lot slower than it normally is with this becca mini pc should be just under a minute
for one minute of 4k footage onto gaming here and sounding like a broken record of course this
is not going to perform as good as it could so limited by that 25 watts it's only clocking up to
megahertz here the vega 10 graphics so it can go a lot higher and as a result i'm getting around
40 frames per second in the car here with gta 5. now the graphics setting i'm running
is medium settings 1080p so of course if you lower it down to 720p or lower the settings you can get
up to and even around 60 frames per second but a little bit disappointing here we'd really like to
see this ship out with at least 35 watts out of the box so that's all i'm going to show you for
gaming just in the interest of keeping this video a little shorter here because we know if i play
any other games the performance will be exactly the same lower than expected now linux if you're
wondering yes it will run on this mini pc but you could run into problems with the mediatek rz608
wi-fi card the drivers for it i had trouble with linux mint now it's a very fast wi-fi card and it
does have bluetooth five and great to see in this and i think for this price point it's good that
they included things like that that you wouldn't actually expect i wouldn't expect to see a wi-fi
6e card in this i wouldn't really expect to see either a pcie 3.0 spec drive from kingston i
thought they would go with a slower sata 3 drive but they didn't there which is good it can run
three 4k monitors which is great there we've got the type c port that supports video out and two
gigabit lan ports again i wouldn't kind of expect that for this price point so those really are the
positives and of course windows 11. now who's it really for i think for people that just want a
mini pc for light workloads that's really all you can expect out of this kind of spec now in 2022
so that would be of course documents spreadsheets internet browsing video playback i didn't feature
or show any hevc 4k playback or vp9 because it's most people know that that actually this spec
of mini pc can do it just fine it'll play back those demanding video files so great as a little
media center media player is able to do that so then that gets onto the things i don't like then
about the lark box x here so there's well a couple of things firstly it doesn't seem to have
the cables included in the box for a sata 3 2.5 inch drive but there's actually plugs on there
for it i can see what looks like power and then the sata 3 cable plug would be there but there's
no way to actually screw in a 2.5 inch drive even though we've got the space for it it looks like it
so that's a little disappointing the other is that power limit that i talked about about i mentioned
maybe 20 times in the video severely reducing the performance of not only the cpu clocks but also
the vega 10 graphics sadly so instead of 35 watts it's just 25 watts and that really did reduce the
performance it can candle a lot better and you can go into the bias and manually override that
power limit as i showed you through those settings but it's not how they've actually configured it
so i've reviewed it as stock as of course now the fan will get a little annoying at times but if you
do increase the power limit expect the fan to be running a lot on high rpms get a little bit more
annoying and the other is the thermals in this which is another positive the thermals are good
it doesn't go over 65 degrees celsius not my unit here with ambient 25 degree temperatures so there
we go now you know the full story of the lark box x from chewie thanks a lot for watching this video