**Gemini Sauron 4100 Mini PC Review**

Our Gemini Sauron 4100 mini PC is a compact and powerful computing device that offers great performance for everyday tasks, but with some notable limitations. In this review, we'll delve into the features, performance, and potential drawbacks of this mini PC.

**Performance**

The Gemini Sauron 4100's performance is excellent, making it well-suited for light computing tasks such as web browsing, document editing, and video playback. The dual-channel RAM and 12 watts of power limit ensure that the system can handle multiple tasks without significant slowdowns. In our tests, we observed smooth performance in popular applications like Microsoft Office and Google Docs. However, some users may notice a slight lag when switching between pages or documents.

**Thermal Performance**

Unfortunately, the Gemini Sauron 4100's thermal performance is not as impressive. During intense gaming sessions or stress testing, the system temperatures reached up to 99 degrees Celsius, which could pose a risk to long-term reliability. This is particularly concerning given the mini PC's passive cooling design. While the heatsink does an okay job considering the power limit of 12 watts, it's clear that higher power limits will require additional modifications to prevent overheating.

**Power Consumption and Reliability**

The Gemini Sauron 4100's 12-watt power limit is actually a blessing in disguise, as it means the system performs better than others at this power level. However, if you plan to push the hardware to its limits or use it for extended periods, the thermal performance may become an issue. In our testing, we noticed that long periods of intense gaming caused the CPU and GPU to throttle down to prevent overheating.

**Other Features**

The Gemini Sauron 4100 comes with a few notable features that set it apart from other mini PCs. The system has a compact design, making it easy to place on a desk or shelf. It also includes two USB ports, an HDMI port, and a 2.5-inch drive bay for storage expansion.

**Gaming Performance**

The Gemini Sauron 4100 is capable of running older games, including titles like Counter-Strike, at relatively smooth frame rates. However, the performance will dip when playing resource-intensive games or graphics-heavy content. In our tests, we observed frame rates ranging from 45-40 FPS in game modes like smoke and flames.

**Software Experience**

The Gemini Sauron 4100's operating system experience is largely positive. We were able to install Linux distributions such as Mint and Ubuntu without any issues, although some users may encounter problems with touchscreen drivers on certain systems. The Gigabit LAN port works seamlessly, and we did not experience any connectivity issues.

**Conclusion**

The Gemini Sauron 4100 is a solid mini PC that excels in everyday computing tasks but falls short in terms of thermal performance. While it's an excellent option for light computing, older gaming, or as a secondary device, users who plan to push the hardware to its limits may want to consider additional modifications to improve cooling. The compact design and 2.5-inch drive bay are notable features, making this mini PC suitable for small form factor enthusiasts.

Overall, we're pleased with the Gemini Sauron 4100's performance and value, but would recommend users carefully weigh their needs against its limitations before purchasing.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi guys welcome back to another mini PC review so i've got with me the last year when i like mini pc that i will be reviewing so finished with the gemini late laptops and the tablets so no more of those and this will be the last emulator because let's face it I'm sick of them you're sick of seeing them this one at least does have 8 gigabytes of ddr4 Ram that is configured in dual channel you can add an SSD in this it does have a 2.5 inch Bay which is another positive HDMI to spec it has 2 USB 3 ports two USB to ports micro SD card reader and also VGA if you did want that I think most people would be happy not to have it there and perhaps it's a little bit cheaper or give us a second HDMI to port on there if they could have done that of course so in the box you'll find a visa adapter here so this is just a to screw one here for the top brackets you can put it behind a TV or a monitor our power supply is 12 volts 2 amps now the bottom has these four solid rubber feet here now if you remove the three screws either side here so six in total there is actually a tamper seal over one of them which is really silly so you pull this up and there you can see we can install a 2.5 inch SSD or hard drive so I went even further I don't recommend doing this if you're going to remove the plastic in a plate to and start removing all those other screws then you can actually remove the whole motherboard so you can see it does have a battery right here for the BIOS so again if you needed to reset it I don't see why though you can actually unplug that too as well so here is El Intel wireless the 3165 so that does have dual antenna setup but it's just a one by one diversity antenna with Bluetooth 4.2 so non upgradable here the only components you can upgrade as you see is this right here so el SSD that's the only thing that we can swap out so if you're not happy with the hundred in 80 gigabytes they've given us which you get about 160 or so free first up our buyers so it is completely unlocked here chewy have done a good thing and they normally do this what their tech actually including their laptops so under the Advanced Settings every single option is available to us now under CPU configuration one of the interesting ones here is our power management so this is where you will find the power limits now what they have set Chuy is quite a high power limit here so they're very confident with that bit of aluminium they have for their heatsink to use 12 watts here normally this would be set on auto by most manufacturers and that then goes with Intel's recommended six watts which is a bit lower here so nothing else really of interest I wouldn't mess with any of these settings here you could end up breaking the bios but you can remove the battery or reset it if you did do that so I've got all my files set up right now and I'm not actually using the original SSD I forgot to take a screenshot a screen grab at least or record the speed to get honest so that intel SSD we have the hundred and eighty gigabyte one will get speeds sequential writes actually higher than this one so this Drive I've got in here is 500 gigabytes but just to show you that SATA 3 speeds there as expected and there is no issue with that they are performing as they should now a Windows version that we have with us if I just quickly go into system it's Windows 10 home of course that they are using and no problems you will need to run some updates to get software updates use intel's driver update utility as well to gain the latest graphics and wireless drivers so wanted to show you and demonstrate as I do them out of videos the performance you can expect so a very high encoded 140 megabits per second for K 10 bit HEV C file is decoded natively okay and you'll see the beginning that there are a few stutters but look at that that performance at least here what Cody is excellent net is now 30 frames per second and looking very very smooth there and that's what we want so great performance there from that now I'll Ram just to show you is running and dual channel so this is good as well you'll see here performance I've used up about half of it at the moment so with the eight gigabytes that gives up because that's a little bit of room there to play around with with some multitasking which I'm currently doing I mean I've got steam open I've got Chrome at the moment so performance wise when you take a look at well the wireless Here I am using 5g okay on the 5g band and I'm a good couple of rooms away from the router here and this is to be expected not brilliant speeds for wireless AC with this particular card now if I'm closer to the router then I can expect around 300 maximum sort of tops out at which is not brilliant so use the Gigabit LAN and if you need faster of course for that now I'll get bench five here the score very low because this is low end hardware and you expect this so that's not amazing this is not a mini PC for editing 4k video files or playing triple-a gaming titles of course not but some people don't actually realize that they think for two hundred US dollars you're gonna get something that's got amazing performance each bench for score here like others perhaps a little bit lower here for some reason maybe on the single core score but multi-core score is good and where do you go to the Start menu there's no lag here now often I see this terrible lag what these were specially within single channel configuration and just notice everything seems pretty snappy here with Windows so I'm going to quickly search here with Google and I'll bring up if I can type correctly here Google calm and I'll just do a quick tab test here before we get on to the thermals so I'm gonna search cats that I often search and haven't searched it yet on this particular machine and let's just bring this up oops I didn't want to do that sorry hold down control not shift get it right and you'll see that these thode and pretty quick and the performance of swapping between these tabs all quite good actually for what it is this hardware this actually surprises a lot of people if it oh that's actually faster than my koi 5 that I've got that's four years old or something and you see that look at that loading in relatively quick scrolling performance is still good there and some of these pages look to be still loading because they want me to click over and you'll find that it's not refreshing when you go back to these tabs later on it won't have to refresh so let's get on to other cat looks like my vera almost funny that onto the thermals okay so not great all right it did get a little too hot but it's understandable they're pushing 12 watts for the power limit which is actually double than what most people will use most manufacturers tech sometimes uses 9 watts and some of their tech if I remember correctly there so 99 degrees didn't trigger in a thermal throttling here but I was pushing it very hard over this one hour so this is worst case scenario if you're not pushing it really hard you won't see these kind of temperatures so yes CERN was not amazing I mean it's doing an okay job the heatsink considering it's 12 watts but if you want to push a higher power limit you're gonna have to do some mods there I think now for like computing so right here just in a spreadsheet that you're able to edit this just fine and I've got a few pages with this one and you're able to do all those edits without seeing any noticeable lag which is good and if I move over to a document as well this one has 82 pages you sometimes see just a little bit of a slowdown then when I went between them but overall again very usable so for light computing that is really all you want to be doing with this particular hardware this is not for anything really heavier than web browsing video documents and some very old gaming so because we have that dual channel RAM and we have the 12 Watts of notice that the performance here with counter-strike wind gaming even though it's an old title frame rate is not too bad so you're seeing it will dip down with things like smoke and flames of course to about 45 40 frames per second but overall pretty playable and a lot better than a typically see work this hardware now I'm probably going to just die here but the point is just to show you that well for health we'll heft there's at least playable what these older titles but that's all you can really expect with the Sauron in 4100 this will not play the latest triple-a titles so I did install will then X mint on this and it runs perfectly fine because we don't have a course a touch screen like all the other tick hopping reviewing with the jiminy Lake see sometimes run into problems in fact all of them didn't have touchscreen drivers and that's my main issue with the mini PC so the worse was working the realtek Gigabit LAN no problems here with that so that is great so in the performance because of that 12 watt power limit that Chui set means that this performs a lot better than others it's got the dual channel Ram as well however it comes with a rather bad trade-off you could say because it's getting up to 99 degrees now originally when I was first testing it out it kind of fooled me and thought hey these thermals are actually good but then it started to game and stress both the GPU and the CPU that's when you notice that it will hit the 99 degrees C so over long periods of doing that if you're going to be always pushing this hardware to 100% it might not be good for long-term reliability because that motherboard is going to be all the time very very hot it's after all passively cooled now I've noticed that to use the thermal pattern there we could remove that thermal pad add a copper shim and some slimmer thermal pads or paste and probably improve upon those thermals that I've done before the issue is the plastic in here is holding that heat within it so for was an all-metal build it would probably run a little bit cooler and if they put a fan on it okay would be even cooler then but I hate fan noise and you don't normally need actually a fan for the saralyn for thousands one hundredths at least so overall HDMI to great to have 2.5 inch drive great to have good performance and where is it not so great well thermals really that's about it thermals it could have a microphone on it and it could have had instead of the VGA port a nother HDMI to which would be great but maybe there's some rare case out there that someone's actually gonna run a CRT monitor and they want the VGA to run old emulators or something then well hey you've got it with this model so thank you so much for watching this review there will be more mini pcs in the channel in the future but no more Gemini likes this as the last year when I like that I will be checking out and really it's about timehi guys welcome back to another mini PC review so i've got with me the last year when i like mini pc that i will be reviewing so finished with the gemini late laptops and the tablets so no more of those and this will be the last emulator because let's face it I'm sick of them you're sick of seeing them this one at least does have 8 gigabytes of ddr4 Ram that is configured in dual channel you can add an SSD in this it does have a 2.5 inch Bay which is another positive HDMI to spec it has 2 USB 3 ports two USB to ports micro SD card reader and also VGA if you did want that I think most people would be happy not to have it there and perhaps it's a little bit cheaper or give us a second HDMI to port on there if they could have done that of course so in the box you'll find a visa adapter here so this is just a to screw one here for the top brackets you can put it behind a TV or a monitor our power supply is 12 volts 2 amps now the bottom has these four solid rubber feet here now if you remove the three screws either side here so six in total there is actually a tamper seal over one of them which is really silly so you pull this up and there you can see we can install a 2.5 inch SSD or hard drive so I went even further I don't recommend doing this if you're going to remove the plastic in a plate to and start removing all those other screws then you can actually remove the whole motherboard so you can see it does have a battery right here for the BIOS so again if you needed to reset it I don't see why though you can actually unplug that too as well so here is El Intel wireless the 3165 so that does have dual antenna setup but it's just a one by one diversity antenna with Bluetooth 4.2 so non upgradable here the only components you can upgrade as you see is this right here so el SSD that's the only thing that we can swap out so if you're not happy with the hundred in 80 gigabytes they've given us which you get about 160 or so free first up our buyers so it is completely unlocked here chewy have done a good thing and they normally do this what their tech actually including their laptops so under the Advanced Settings every single option is available to us now under CPU configuration one of the interesting ones here is our power management so this is where you will find the power limits now what they have set Chuy is quite a high power limit here so they're very confident with that bit of aluminium they have for their heatsink to use 12 watts here normally this would be set on auto by most manufacturers and that then goes with Intel's recommended six watts which is a bit lower here so nothing else really of interest I wouldn't mess with any of these settings here you could end up breaking the bios but you can remove the battery or reset it if you did do that so I've got all my files set up right now and I'm not actually using the original SSD I forgot to take a screenshot a screen grab at least or record the speed to get honest so that intel SSD we have the hundred and eighty gigabyte one will get speeds sequential writes actually higher than this one so this Drive I've got in here is 500 gigabytes but just to show you that SATA 3 speeds there as expected and there is no issue with that they are performing as they should now a Windows version that we have with us if I just quickly go into system it's Windows 10 home of course that they are using and no problems you will need to run some updates to get software updates use intel's driver update utility as well to gain the latest graphics and wireless drivers so wanted to show you and demonstrate as I do them out of videos the performance you can expect so a very high encoded 140 megabits per second for K 10 bit HEV C file is decoded natively okay and you'll see the beginning that there are a few stutters but look at that that performance at least here what Cody is excellent net is now 30 frames per second and looking very very smooth there and that's what we want so great performance there from that now I'll Ram just to show you is running and dual channel so this is good as well you'll see here performance I've used up about half of it at the moment so with the eight gigabytes that gives up because that's a little bit of room there to play around with with some multitasking which I'm currently doing I mean I've got steam open I've got Chrome at the moment so performance wise when you take a look at well the wireless Here I am using 5g okay on the 5g band and I'm a good couple of rooms away from the router here and this is to be expected not brilliant speeds for wireless AC with this particular card now if I'm closer to the router then I can expect around 300 maximum sort of tops out at which is not brilliant so use the Gigabit LAN and if you need faster of course for that now I'll get bench five here the score very low because this is low end hardware and you expect this so that's not amazing this is not a mini PC for editing 4k video files or playing triple-a gaming titles of course not but some people don't actually realize that they think for two hundred US dollars you're gonna get something that's got amazing performance each bench for score here like others perhaps a little bit lower here for some reason maybe on the single core score but multi-core score is good and where do you go to the Start menu there's no lag here now often I see this terrible lag what these were specially within single channel configuration and just notice everything seems pretty snappy here with Windows so I'm going to quickly search here with Google and I'll bring up if I can type correctly here Google calm and I'll just do a quick tab test here before we get on to the thermals so I'm gonna search cats that I often search and haven't searched it yet on this particular machine and let's just bring this up oops I didn't want to do that sorry hold down control not shift get it right and you'll see that these thode and pretty quick and the performance of swapping between these tabs all quite good actually for what it is this hardware this actually surprises a lot of people if it oh that's actually faster than my koi 5 that I've got that's four years old or something and you see that look at that loading in relatively quick scrolling performance is still good there and some of these pages look to be still loading because they want me to click over and you'll find that it's not refreshing when you go back to these tabs later on it won't have to refresh so let's get on to other cat looks like my vera almost funny that onto the thermals okay so not great all right it did get a little too hot but it's understandable they're pushing 12 watts for the power limit which is actually double than what most people will use most manufacturers tech sometimes uses 9 watts and some of their tech if I remember correctly there so 99 degrees didn't trigger in a thermal throttling here but I was pushing it very hard over this one hour so this is worst case scenario if you're not pushing it really hard you won't see these kind of temperatures so yes CERN was not amazing I mean it's doing an okay job the heatsink considering it's 12 watts but if you want to push a higher power limit you're gonna have to do some mods there I think now for like computing so right here just in a spreadsheet that you're able to edit this just fine and I've got a few pages with this one and you're able to do all those edits without seeing any noticeable lag which is good and if I move over to a document as well this one has 82 pages you sometimes see just a little bit of a slowdown then when I went between them but overall again very usable so for light computing that is really all you want to be doing with this particular hardware this is not for anything really heavier than web browsing video documents and some very old gaming so because we have that dual channel RAM and we have the 12 Watts of notice that the performance here with counter-strike wind gaming even though it's an old title frame rate is not too bad so you're seeing it will dip down with things like smoke and flames of course to about 45 40 frames per second but overall pretty playable and a lot better than a typically see work this hardware now I'm probably going to just die here but the point is just to show you that well for health we'll heft there's at least playable what these older titles but that's all you can really expect with the Sauron in 4100 this will not play the latest triple-a titles so I did install will then X mint on this and it runs perfectly fine because we don't have a course a touch screen like all the other tick hopping reviewing with the jiminy Lake see sometimes run into problems in fact all of them didn't have touchscreen drivers and that's my main issue with the mini PC so the worse was working the realtek Gigabit LAN no problems here with that so that is great so in the performance because of that 12 watt power limit that Chui set means that this performs a lot better than others it's got the dual channel Ram as well however it comes with a rather bad trade-off you could say because it's getting up to 99 degrees now originally when I was first testing it out it kind of fooled me and thought hey these thermals are actually good but then it started to game and stress both the GPU and the CPU that's when you notice that it will hit the 99 degrees C so over long periods of doing that if you're going to be always pushing this hardware to 100% it might not be good for long-term reliability because that motherboard is going to be all the time very very hot it's after all passively cooled now I've noticed that to use the thermal pattern there we could remove that thermal pad add a copper shim and some slimmer thermal pads or paste and probably improve upon those thermals that I've done before the issue is the plastic in here is holding that heat within it so for was an all-metal build it would probably run a little bit cooler and if they put a fan on it okay would be even cooler then but I hate fan noise and you don't normally need actually a fan for the saralyn for thousands one hundredths at least so overall HDMI to great to have 2.5 inch drive great to have good performance and where is it not so great well thermals really that's about it thermals it could have a microphone on it and it could have had instead of the VGA port a nother HDMI to which would be great but maybe there's some rare case out there that someone's actually gonna run a CRT monitor and they want the VGA to run old emulators or something then well hey you've got it with this model so thank you so much for watching this review there will be more mini pcs in the channel in the future but no more Gemini likes this as the last year when I like that I will be checking out and really it's about time\n"