**Mini PC Review: Intel NUC11P57-YA01**

If you're looking for a mini PC that can run Linux, this is an excellent option. The Intel NUC11P57-YA01 is a great choice for those who want decent performance, a quad-core processor, and a compact design. With its recent distro, you won't have any issues with drivers, and the performance is very quick.

One of the standout features of this mini PC is its ability to run Windows smoothly. The Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor provides a significant boost in single-core performance compared to AMD's offerings, such as the Ryzen 5 3400G. This results in faster start-up times, quicker application loading, and snappier overall performance. Even with a fast M.2 NVMe drive, the system feels faster than it should.

However, when it comes to integrated graphics performance, this mini PC falls short. While it can handle video playback and some light gaming without issues, it's not ideal for more demanding games or applications that require high-performance graphics processing.

Another aspect of this mini PC is its thermal design. The factory power limit is set very low, resulting in excellent thermals even during heavy use. The system will turn off the fan to maintain a relatively cool temperature, and when the fan does kick in, it's at a low RPM that produces minimal noise. This is likely due to the efficient cooling system designed specifically for this mini PC.

The thermal design is also put to the test by pushing the power limit up to 45 watts. While this still results in temperatures within a safe range (around 55°C), it's clear that this is the sweet spot for performance and temperature control. Running at higher power limits, even with the same ambient temperature, causes the system to heat up.

One potential drawback of this mini PC is its lack of certain features, such as Thunderbolt 3, which would have likely increased the price point significantly. However, the absence of a USB-C video output is particularly disappointing, as it's a common feature found in many modern devices.

Finally, it's worth noting that while this mini PC comes with a lot of power for its size and price point, you'll still need to factor in additional costs for operating system, RAM, and storage (such as an SSD) if you plan to use it extensively. Despite these limitations, the Intel NUC11P57-YA01 is a great option for those looking for a compact and powerful mini PC that can handle demanding tasks without breaking the bank.

**Specifications**

* Processor: Intel Core i5-1135G7

* RAM: Not included (but recommended)

* Storage: M.2 NVMe drive not included (but recommended)

* Graphics: Integrated Intel UHD 630 graphics

* Power Limit: Up to 45 watts

* Thermal Design: Excellent thermals even during heavy use

* Noise Level: Low RPM fan noise when running

* Dimensions: Compact and lightweight design

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enanother mini pc review from me so this time i am switching back again to intel i've looked a lot at amd mini pcs and this is a 10th gen one here that you can pick up from banggood which is where i ordered it now this model sells for about 300 us dollars it is a bare bones and it is really identical exactly the same as the 8th gen model i reviewed however the difference being this has a newer chipset in it so higher clocks on this one with the core i7 it is the 1051 0u turbo's up to 4.9 gigahertz it's a quad core but with the eight threads so similar there being a quad core like the amd's and it has intel's integrated graphics which is uhd not as powerful as the vega 8 graphics that i have been looking at here so this model very small and compact as you can see great good size it supports nvme drives and also 2.5 inch sata three drives as well you can install within this even though it is quite small so my time testing it out it has a very very good fan profile on this the fan noise is great for the kind of performance that this gets and you can actually tweak it up a little bit the power limits to gain some additional performance which i will talk about and show you in this in-depth review here of a core i7 mini pc that sells for about 310 or so us dollars bare bones by the way so we do need to install some ram and an ssd which i'll show you now so in the box you'll find our main power cable here it is an eu-1 and it does use that universal what i call the mickey mouse connector you see what i mean it looks like a mickey mouse kind of head there so very easy to source a replacement we have a user manual and some rubber feet right here and some screws too for securing the 2.5 inch drive into place and another two screws the silver ones for the actual case housing now the power supply this one is from a known brand delta electronics it's 40 watts and i really do like the size of this one it is tiny as you can see very very small all right so installing our components is easy this being a bare bones means it has no ram and it has no ssd or operating system of course so what i'm going to do is put the ram so i've got two sticks of ddr4 266 megahertz they are 16 gigabytes each so 32 in total here very easy to install so sodium ram simply just line it up and push it into place and then push it down that clips it in and you hear like a click noise and that means that ram is secured there and our ssd so you can either install a set of three m.2 car but it's got to be the 2280 size or mvme which i'm going to use so nvme drives of course much faster this one here is is a sabrent and this one has reads over 3000 megabytes per second and plenty of storage for all my files and things to use for my reviews so you simply just screw that into place again very very easy to do most people should not have a problem with this now there is a second solution of course for storage as well if you wanted more space then you can install say a cheaper but larger capacity spindle hard drive but here i do have just to show you a samsung 850 evo ssd so the plug is right here you simply plug that into the motherboard which is located just here so once that is done you put all the lid back make sure you don't have that cable snagged up lid goes in and then you screw those two screws in the side and you're done so if you missed the video of the first one that i reviewed which looks identical to this but the components inside are different while the chipset so this has the 8565u that's a core i7 8th gen and now we've got the 10th gen in here which is the 1051 0u slightly faster but really it's the same and especially when you see the benchmarks later on they're almost identical in performance so 2 usb 2 2 usb 3 headphone jack with mic support 2 status leds power button here if we take a look at the left side this is the exit vent now both sides have this plastic strip here and the wireless antenna is located just behind that for optimum placement so the signal passing through the plastic is much better than metal that is why they do this and then most of the ports here are on the back so we've got gigabit lan here that's power n2 of course usb 3 two of them and we've got hdmi 2 spec a display port which is 1.4 and type c so just like the first model i looked at the type c port is only usb data and that is it okay it doesn't support a video out and not on my unit right here which is a shame this is one of the cons it would have been nice to be able to have video out on this and even thunderbolt would have been better of course now these two holes right there are for the screws once you put the components inside you then add the two screws there that i showed you with the contents of the box locking everything into place and i quickly show you the underside here so this is our intake vent and then we've got these slots or marks there where we place the four rubber feet on the bottom so the fan is actually right here you can just see it underneath blowing that hot here then out this side here that i showed you before well that's actually an intake it's that side the left side where the hot air comes out now if you remove the four screws on the motherboard you can pull it right out so for maintenance if you wanted to clean this fan if it was full of dust you can do this which is good or you wanted to re-paste it now i'm going to keep the thermal paste that they have used i'm not going to go there because i want to keep it all stock for my review now it's quite a large copper pad that it does have so the cpu is just over here and you can see they've used two millimeter thick copper right there which is good to see so they haven't just gone with a little bit of alloy to keep it cool no proper copper there that's great so the build quality of it is not bad at all this motherboard has got a lot on such a small little motherboard and you'll see here too that if you did run into trouble that you needed to reset the bios or it wouldn't boot you somehow bricked the bios uh you've got a plug right here so this one's for the cpu fan and we've got plug just there which is for that bios battery which is here so if you unplug that that will then reset the bios here we have our bias now so there are a few interesting settings in here we can tweak it's not 100 locked down to us but we don't have any power limit options here in the bias at least with this one so interesting settings to show you is this one okay so we have got under boot order strangely enough is the auto power on so if you do intend to run this as a server or you want it to automatically power itself back on if you did lose power then you simply enable that so that is good to have that option there under advanced there are a few interesting settings well the best one that i have discovered and seen here is ram disk configuration so if you want to make yourself a ram disk you can do this with this particular bios which is great to have on a mini pc and then we do have uh under here there's a few other little settings that we could possibly tweak if you want to do that but no power limit settings unfortunately in the bios here so i have windows all set up with the up-to-date drivers and i used intel's driver update utility as well to get the latest graphics and wireless drivers so the wireless card on this particular model is the wireless ac 3165 it is not really that fast maximum transfers of 330 megabits per second install the intel ax200 to get much much quicker speeds and we've got really tech gigabit land on this too as well so what am i showing you here this is intel's extreme tuning utility highly recommend installing an older version or you do that little hack so you can get it to run on the comet lake which this particular chipset is and you'll see here that you can do a little bit of tweaking so with our core voltage this is recommended with a lot of these intel since the kb lake definitely the cable 8 cable like r and then this one all the same architecture 14 nanometers is to do this so you want to just undervolt a little bit it helps boost our performance so you see also power limits so stock this is actually set to 18 watts okay 18 watts is the power level limit level one and then power another level two is set to 25 watts and that limits our performance so when i was stress testing it you get a maximum turbo on all fours cores of just two gigahertz because the whole time it's power limit it's rotten you can see right now it's power limit throttling this is normal for this type of chip remember it is actually 15 watts but we can run a higher power limit if you do that and then the 45 that i'm currently running you're able to get then 3.2 to 3.3 gigahertz across all four cores the trade-off is higher temperatures so it will get up then to about 89 degrees and it's still fine the fan runs a little bit more but it is well worth it so i'll show you the kind of difference you can expect too as well with that so cinebench stock okay you get 515 and that's with the 18 watt power limit that is also with no under volting and what happens when you're under volt and the power limit increase boosts it right up okay to 713 cb and still only getting up to about 89 degrees which is fine and the coolers handling that extra power so well and this means it's actually performance very similar then to the last mini pc i reviewed which was the ryzen 5 3550h powered one also quad core but it's 65 watts sorry 45 watts that particular chip and so it's good performance here now cinebench what about r20 um no actual difference here stock came out to be faster i don't really know why at 16 20 points and then with it at a 45 watt limit 1600 so that didn't make any difference really at all for that now the internal storage if you're wondering just how fast that sabrin is is it running at pci times for the slot definitely is okay so we're getting very good speeds as you can see it's going to vary depending on what kind of drive you install but i highly recommend go with the save and go with the samsung you know get those maximum speeds if you are going to go mvme that is with your main drive with your operating system the other things to point out too that okay cinebench scores this is sorry geekbench geekbench 4 very very good single core score here so this is why windows to me on the amd's feels a little bit slower because it has a lower single core score it has lower turbos and the short boosts that windows loves for performance does make it feel just quite a bit more snappier compared to the amd's that i typically review and then when you have a look at geekbench 5 score again it's quite good the single core score this is with an undervolt only not touching the power limits with this now compares how does that compare actually to the last mini pc the amdr one i reviewed you can see that there is a big difference here between that one that quad core the ryzen 5 the 3500 h compared to what we are running now so that is why i'm talking about that difference you can actually see and feel how much faster windows is when the single core scores are so much higher there and that's the geekbench 5 score that last mini pc i reviewed the amd one it's still good but intel definitely does perform better with this type of benchmark so overall performance wise they're very very snappy now i won't show you spreadsheets docs and things like that because it is just so quick there's really no point in me doing that but i will just demonstrate the playback here for 4k files now youtube 4k streams perfectly fine there's no dropped frames but what about demanding file jellyfish 140 megabits per second hevc 10 a bit stuttery to begin with and then it is really smooth so that performance very very good not a problem with this demanding file uh what about hdr now i don't seem to have hdr with this particular model the output from the display 4k 60hz so it's hdmi 2 but i don't seem to have hdi even though my monitor supports it it's showing that it doesn't windows drivers issue perhaps or it just is not going to support it but that playback very very good really quick smooth and not a problem so anything you throw at this mini pc it handles it really well it is very very quick feels so snappy and fast and to also point out there's no problems with the usb ports on this one i know the eighth generation model i looked at it needed a bias update some of the units to access drives external hard drives via the usb 3 ports but this no not a problem so i've got a four terabyte drive here and it's working just off the ports power alone you don't need a second cable or anything as it should works just fine transfers uh about a hundred or so megabytes per second which is really this fastest it can do being a spindle hard drive and our audio latency this is with latency monitor so the highest measured interrupt to process latency is well not quite as good as some of the amd mini pcs i've been reviewing in the channel here so if you're gonna be using this for real-time audio you might actually be better off with one of those amd ones the ones i've reviewed that have the ryzen 5's in them for example and onto 4k video editing now here with adobe premiere pro 2020 so the timeline in the beginning when you first load it up is very very slow with our resolution on playback here set it half it is fast it's smooth this is about the same as the other mini pcs i'm looking at with the amd's on full definitely there so they're comfortable it seems to be fine there as well and let's just go back to one there's some different areas here in the timeline and that's and basically just can seem sometimes a little bit slow with that and they definitely deliver but even at full it's running pretty good okay it's not too bad now ideally with editing 4k video i do highly recommend that you at least have a dedicated gpu it just makes things so much quicker but we'll have a look at the export times now we'll do my one minute of footage okay and we'll see how long it takes because this should be okay the last amd i looked at was just over a minute which is actually a bit slower than i expected so start then export and it should rip through this that seems to be taking a bit longer as well it seems recent adobe updates have slowed their performance down i don't know why this is jumping all over the place because i've seen it do it this similar kind of spec in 22 seconds and this is looking like it's going to be over a minute now as well so why are they doing this adobe i don't know and i have got it all set to use the gpu too as well for the rendering you can see that the gpu our uhd graphics here is at 100 and the cpu is about 50. but we'll see how long it is okay it's about to finish there we go so that was about a one minute and five seconds which is actually a little bit slower than the last amd and that makes that last amd look good so why on earth has our time gone over double now with recent updates from adobe i do not know it's just the way their program is and it's it's poor to see this hopefully they will have a new patch that improves the performance again like it used to be because before it was so so quick you can see there's the file there on the desktop and it should be flawless without any glitches okay see there are no no problems with that so grand theft auto 5 so i have it set on lowest possible settings but it is 1080p and really this game i think should be run at 720p now you're probably seeing the frame rate is much better than i expected for intel integrated uhd graphics and that is because remember i am actually running 45 watt power limit here so yes the thermals are getting oh just touch 90 degrees it's getting quite hot now but it's not too bad when you touch it it's just peaking now at 90 and some people might not be happy with us actually just hit 91 so it is getting a little hot so performance wise 30 frames per second it's borderline kind of not really playable a bit too laggy for my liking what would happen now if i set it to the stock power limit so let's have a look at the difference going from 45 watts down to the max 25 or the 18 that it lets us have out of the box now the frame rate you can see 20 frames per second 19. this is too laggy and we're hitting that 18 watt limit there and that's severely affecting the performance i mean we're losing like about an average of about what seven eight frames per second just because of the power limit but look at the thermals the thermals then will max out in the mid 70s that's the kind of thermals you're always going to see with this mini pc even when gaming pushing it hard video editing if you keep the stock power limit always be in the mid 70s but when you push it up to 45 that's when you reach 90. so thermals are actually quite good now i will drop it down to 720p and we'll take a look at how it performs then 720p at stock and 45 watt power limits so we're getting approximately 33 34 frames per second now 720p at 18 watts which is making this game now a little more playable but it's still got a lot of tearing look at that when you look around that's still way too slow so now i'm going to adjust that power limit put it back up to 45 wow i mean look at those temperatures 67 70 degrees very very good but let's see it now at 45 so now at 720p with that 45 watt power limit increase power limit the frame rate's much better but it's still underperforming really compared to the amd vega 8 integrated graphics is so much quicker and better at handling even this game so if you intend the game with this one here definitely keep it to 720p and just use a power limit that you're happy with so you don't have to use 45 watts you can use 35 and that will keep the temperatures a little bit lower because it still is peaking to 90 degrees here now on to a little bit of gaming so this is counter strike global offensive and i've got it set to all the lowest possible settings but 1080p and i don't have the typical overlay because well it treats that as say cheating but i'm getting around 70 frames per second so this is not quite as good as the vega 8 graphics which i was seeing around 90 to 100 frames per second so vega 8 definitely performs a little bit better and if you need that integrated graphics performance then that's probably why you would opt then for the amd's just to try and get a little bit better performance so i'm just going to run out here and probably die straight away see if i can get any kills no there's no one actually around here well okay there we go there we go in shot out already and i don't even know where the hell they're shooting at me ah from behind thermals now so this unit is very good if you keep the stock power limits okay so the 18 watt stock power limit with the 25 power limit level 2 you will see maximum temperatures of just about the mid 70s that's it it will not go over that's stressing out both the gpu and the cpu so excellent cooling on this one the fan is also very quiet most of the time only under load you will just hear it a little bit and then it disappears it goes away it's a very good fan profiles so temperatures when i took the lid off i ran it with the lid on of course but when i took it off and had a look at the vrms they get up to about 55 degrees under load so yes they are quite hot to the touch but that's a very good temperature i've seen v vrms get up to 70 degrees even 80 degrees on some of the mini pcs i've reviewed they do get very very hot but here they don't now when you increase the power limits then you'll see as i pointed out a maximum temperature of about 90 degrees peak and you sometimes see them the vrm's getting up to about 65 degrees almost towards 70. a lot hotter now the power use i'm talking about stock here okay stock power use idle is a little bit higher than i expected about 14 watts sometimes around 13 and under max load with again the stock power limits it's about 33 watts which is very good for max load because it is limited of course with that lower power limit so very good fan noise on this but here is a quick sample at 100 load stock that is and just very briefly here to point out that if you do intend to run linux on this that yes it will run and you will have no issues with drivers as long as you use a recent distro and the performance of it is very very quick so this is a great mini pc for linux users and maybe you could even use this for hackintosh but i don't think the wireless card's compatible you'll have to use a real tech one and there's gonna be a lot of work arounds and things but i don't get into hackintosh personally in this channel for well for legal reasons so all up this is a great mini pc if you want some decent performance you want a quad core and you want something that is very small and compact yet you can still squeeze in and fit a 2.5 inch drive in this one as i showed you now thermals if you keep the factory power limit absolutely top excellent thermals on this so it will turn off the fan and it'll be silent for quite some time and then okay the fan comes on a little bit but low rpms that you can barely even hear it now my unit i think has a very good thermal job that's been done on it from the factory if you have a slightly higher fan noise i would recommend if your game of course do it is re-paste it but i haven't replaced it or touched this one it's just been reviewed out of the box so it gets yes up to about 55 degrees when pushed hard internally which is actually very good the little cooler on there does a good job of pushing that heat out that's why we're getting that good fan noise as well from it now if you want to gain the additional performance i showed you push up the power limit but it will get hot then that's the trade-off pushing 45 watts maybe a little bit too much for some people so in my ambient temperatures here of 25 degrees it would hit 90 91 degrees celsius which is getting yeah a little too hot so run it at 35 watts and you still gain a very good balance between thermals and power so very quick just running windows if you intend to run windows and you don't really care too much about integrated graphics performance then this one is faster than the amd's i have reviewed i cannot deny it it just feels so much snappier and quicker windows 10. why is that that's because of this single core performance the short burst performance on this model here the 10th gen intel feels a lot faster than even the ryzen 5 the 3400g that i reviewed that was overclockable this even feels faster it's just the start menu loading applications everything pops up so much quicker even if i was using the same fast mvm drive it's always going to be the case there now when it came to the integrated graphics performance that's its area of weakness so it's okay very good at playing say vp9 codex atv 10 bit files 4k no problem but gaming gaming not as good as the vega 8 graphics so that's one area so if you need that integrated graphics performance with a mini pc take a look at one of the amd's that i have reviewed in the channel but if you're after all just very good performance for quite a good price point on this then this is one to go for now nothing is perfect of course so there are some areas where this is a little disappointing so that is well no type c video output the type c port on the back is just data only which is disappointing i would have liked to have seen thunderbolt of course but thunderbolt 3 would have pushed this price up a lot and the licensing for it maybe they couldn't even got it from intel so that's why it doesn't it doesn't have it of course and then well why is the visa bracket not in the box yet again the last model with the 8th gen chip in it didn't have the visa bracket so that's annoying i mean we need it to mount it on the back of a tv mount it on the back of a monitor it's kind of the point of these mini pcs to get them out of the way too so lots of power when you look at it when you actually test it and run it out a lot of power but bear in mind it is of course bare bones so you need to supply and factor in you need ram and you need an ssd operating system on top of that 310 usso this one does sell for so comes recommended but of course bear in mind those little cons here but very good little mini pc here really do like this one thank you so much for watching and yes there will be more mini pc reviews in the channel i intend to review some more intel's and yes some more amd's up and coming later onanother mini pc review from me so this time i am switching back again to intel i've looked a lot at amd mini pcs and this is a 10th gen one here that you can pick up from banggood which is where i ordered it now this model sells for about 300 us dollars it is a bare bones and it is really identical exactly the same as the 8th gen model i reviewed however the difference being this has a newer chipset in it so higher clocks on this one with the core i7 it is the 1051 0u turbo's up to 4.9 gigahertz it's a quad core but with the eight threads so similar there being a quad core like the amd's and it has intel's integrated graphics which is uhd not as powerful as the vega 8 graphics that i have been looking at here so this model very small and compact as you can see great good size it supports nvme drives and also 2.5 inch sata three drives as well you can install within this even though it is quite small so my time testing it out it has a very very good fan profile on this the fan noise is great for the kind of performance that this gets and you can actually tweak it up a little bit the power limits to gain some additional performance which i will talk about and show you in this in-depth review here of a core i7 mini pc that sells for about 310 or so us dollars bare bones by the way so we do need to install some ram and an ssd which i'll show you now so in the box you'll find our main power cable here it is an eu-1 and it does use that universal what i call the mickey mouse connector you see what i mean it looks like a mickey mouse kind of head there so very easy to source a replacement we have a user manual and some rubber feet right here and some screws too for securing the 2.5 inch drive into place and another two screws the silver ones for the actual case housing now the power supply this one is from a known brand delta electronics it's 40 watts and i really do like the size of this one it is tiny as you can see very very small all right so installing our components is easy this being a bare bones means it has no ram and it has no ssd or operating system of course so what i'm going to do is put the ram so i've got two sticks of ddr4 266 megahertz they are 16 gigabytes each so 32 in total here very easy to install so sodium ram simply just line it up and push it into place and then push it down that clips it in and you hear like a click noise and that means that ram is secured there and our ssd so you can either install a set of three m.2 car but it's got to be the 2280 size or mvme which i'm going to use so nvme drives of course much faster this one here is is a sabrent and this one has reads over 3000 megabytes per second and plenty of storage for all my files and things to use for my reviews so you simply just screw that into place again very very easy to do most people should not have a problem with this now there is a second solution of course for storage as well if you wanted more space then you can install say a cheaper but larger capacity spindle hard drive but here i do have just to show you a samsung 850 evo ssd so the plug is right here you simply plug that into the motherboard which is located just here so once that is done you put all the lid back make sure you don't have that cable snagged up lid goes in and then you screw those two screws in the side and you're done so if you missed the video of the first one that i reviewed which looks identical to this but the components inside are different while the chipset so this has the 8565u that's a core i7 8th gen and now we've got the 10th gen in here which is the 1051 0u slightly faster but really it's the same and especially when you see the benchmarks later on they're almost identical in performance so 2 usb 2 2 usb 3 headphone jack with mic support 2 status leds power button here if we take a look at the left side this is the exit vent now both sides have this plastic strip here and the wireless antenna is located just behind that for optimum placement so the signal passing through the plastic is much better than metal that is why they do this and then most of the ports here are on the back so we've got gigabit lan here that's power n2 of course usb 3 two of them and we've got hdmi 2 spec a display port which is 1.4 and type c so just like the first model i looked at the type c port is only usb data and that is it okay it doesn't support a video out and not on my unit right here which is a shame this is one of the cons it would have been nice to be able to have video out on this and even thunderbolt would have been better of course now these two holes right there are for the screws once you put the components inside you then add the two screws there that i showed you with the contents of the box locking everything into place and i quickly show you the underside here so this is our intake vent and then we've got these slots or marks there where we place the four rubber feet on the bottom so the fan is actually right here you can just see it underneath blowing that hot here then out this side here that i showed you before well that's actually an intake it's that side the left side where the hot air comes out now if you remove the four screws on the motherboard you can pull it right out so for maintenance if you wanted to clean this fan if it was full of dust you can do this which is good or you wanted to re-paste it now i'm going to keep the thermal paste that they have used i'm not going to go there because i want to keep it all stock for my review now it's quite a large copper pad that it does have so the cpu is just over here and you can see they've used two millimeter thick copper right there which is good to see so they haven't just gone with a little bit of alloy to keep it cool no proper copper there that's great so the build quality of it is not bad at all this motherboard has got a lot on such a small little motherboard and you'll see here too that if you did run into trouble that you needed to reset the bios or it wouldn't boot you somehow bricked the bios uh you've got a plug right here so this one's for the cpu fan and we've got plug just there which is for that bios battery which is here so if you unplug that that will then reset the bios here we have our bias now so there are a few interesting settings in here we can tweak it's not 100 locked down to us but we don't have any power limit options here in the bias at least with this one so interesting settings to show you is this one okay so we have got under boot order strangely enough is the auto power on so if you do intend to run this as a server or you want it to automatically power itself back on if you did lose power then you simply enable that so that is good to have that option there under advanced there are a few interesting settings well the best one that i have discovered and seen here is ram disk configuration so if you want to make yourself a ram disk you can do this with this particular bios which is great to have on a mini pc and then we do have uh under here there's a few other little settings that we could possibly tweak if you want to do that but no power limit settings unfortunately in the bios here so i have windows all set up with the up-to-date drivers and i used intel's driver update utility as well to get the latest graphics and wireless drivers so the wireless card on this particular model is the wireless ac 3165 it is not really that fast maximum transfers of 330 megabits per second install the intel ax200 to get much much quicker speeds and we've got really tech gigabit land on this too as well so what am i showing you here this is intel's extreme tuning utility highly recommend installing an older version or you do that little hack so you can get it to run on the comet lake which this particular chipset is and you'll see here that you can do a little bit of tweaking so with our core voltage this is recommended with a lot of these intel since the kb lake definitely the cable 8 cable like r and then this one all the same architecture 14 nanometers is to do this so you want to just undervolt a little bit it helps boost our performance so you see also power limits so stock this is actually set to 18 watts okay 18 watts is the power level limit level one and then power another level two is set to 25 watts and that limits our performance so when i was stress testing it you get a maximum turbo on all fours cores of just two gigahertz because the whole time it's power limit it's rotten you can see right now it's power limit throttling this is normal for this type of chip remember it is actually 15 watts but we can run a higher power limit if you do that and then the 45 that i'm currently running you're able to get then 3.2 to 3.3 gigahertz across all four cores the trade-off is higher temperatures so it will get up then to about 89 degrees and it's still fine the fan runs a little bit more but it is well worth it so i'll show you the kind of difference you can expect too as well with that so cinebench stock okay you get 515 and that's with the 18 watt power limit that is also with no under volting and what happens when you're under volt and the power limit increase boosts it right up okay to 713 cb and still only getting up to about 89 degrees which is fine and the coolers handling that extra power so well and this means it's actually performance very similar then to the last mini pc i reviewed which was the ryzen 5 3550h powered one also quad core but it's 65 watts sorry 45 watts that particular chip and so it's good performance here now cinebench what about r20 um no actual difference here stock came out to be faster i don't really know why at 16 20 points and then with it at a 45 watt limit 1600 so that didn't make any difference really at all for that now the internal storage if you're wondering just how fast that sabrin is is it running at pci times for the slot definitely is okay so we're getting very good speeds as you can see it's going to vary depending on what kind of drive you install but i highly recommend go with the save and go with the samsung you know get those maximum speeds if you are going to go mvme that is with your main drive with your operating system the other things to point out too that okay cinebench scores this is sorry geekbench geekbench 4 very very good single core score here so this is why windows to me on the amd's feels a little bit slower because it has a lower single core score it has lower turbos and the short boosts that windows loves for performance does make it feel just quite a bit more snappier compared to the amd's that i typically review and then when you have a look at geekbench 5 score again it's quite good the single core score this is with an undervolt only not touching the power limits with this now compares how does that compare actually to the last mini pc the amdr one i reviewed you can see that there is a big difference here between that one that quad core the ryzen 5 the 3500 h compared to what we are running now so that is why i'm talking about that difference you can actually see and feel how much faster windows is when the single core scores are so much higher there and that's the geekbench 5 score that last mini pc i reviewed the amd one it's still good but intel definitely does perform better with this type of benchmark so overall performance wise they're very very snappy now i won't show you spreadsheets docs and things like that because it is just so quick there's really no point in me doing that but i will just demonstrate the playback here for 4k files now youtube 4k streams perfectly fine there's no dropped frames but what about demanding file jellyfish 140 megabits per second hevc 10 a bit stuttery to begin with and then it is really smooth so that performance very very good not a problem with this demanding file uh what about hdr now i don't seem to have hdr with this particular model the output from the display 4k 60hz so it's hdmi 2 but i don't seem to have hdi even though my monitor supports it it's showing that it doesn't windows drivers issue perhaps or it just is not going to support it but that playback very very good really quick smooth and not a problem so anything you throw at this mini pc it handles it really well it is very very quick feels so snappy and fast and to also point out there's no problems with the usb ports on this one i know the eighth generation model i looked at it needed a bias update some of the units to access drives external hard drives via the usb 3 ports but this no not a problem so i've got a four terabyte drive here and it's working just off the ports power alone you don't need a second cable or anything as it should works just fine transfers uh about a hundred or so megabytes per second which is really this fastest it can do being a spindle hard drive and our audio latency this is with latency monitor so the highest measured interrupt to process latency is well not quite as good as some of the amd mini pcs i've been reviewing in the channel here so if you're gonna be using this for real-time audio you might actually be better off with one of those amd ones the ones i've reviewed that have the ryzen 5's in them for example and onto 4k video editing now here with adobe premiere pro 2020 so the timeline in the beginning when you first load it up is very very slow with our resolution on playback here set it half it is fast it's smooth this is about the same as the other mini pcs i'm looking at with the amd's on full definitely there so they're comfortable it seems to be fine there as well and let's just go back to one there's some different areas here in the timeline and that's and basically just can seem sometimes a little bit slow with that and they definitely deliver but even at full it's running pretty good okay it's not too bad now ideally with editing 4k video i do highly recommend that you at least have a dedicated gpu it just makes things so much quicker but we'll have a look at the export times now we'll do my one minute of footage okay and we'll see how long it takes because this should be okay the last amd i looked at was just over a minute which is actually a bit slower than i expected so start then export and it should rip through this that seems to be taking a bit longer as well it seems recent adobe updates have slowed their performance down i don't know why this is jumping all over the place because i've seen it do it this similar kind of spec in 22 seconds and this is looking like it's going to be over a minute now as well so why are they doing this adobe i don't know and i have got it all set to use the gpu too as well for the rendering you can see that the gpu our uhd graphics here is at 100 and the cpu is about 50. but we'll see how long it is okay it's about to finish there we go so that was about a one minute and five seconds which is actually a little bit slower than the last amd and that makes that last amd look good so why on earth has our time gone over double now with recent updates from adobe i do not know it's just the way their program is and it's it's poor to see this hopefully they will have a new patch that improves the performance again like it used to be because before it was so so quick you can see there's the file there on the desktop and it should be flawless without any glitches okay see there are no no problems with that so grand theft auto 5 so i have it set on lowest possible settings but it is 1080p and really this game i think should be run at 720p now you're probably seeing the frame rate is much better than i expected for intel integrated uhd graphics and that is because remember i am actually running 45 watt power limit here so yes the thermals are getting oh just touch 90 degrees it's getting quite hot now but it's not too bad when you touch it it's just peaking now at 90 and some people might not be happy with us actually just hit 91 so it is getting a little hot so performance wise 30 frames per second it's borderline kind of not really playable a bit too laggy for my liking what would happen now if i set it to the stock power limit so let's have a look at the difference going from 45 watts down to the max 25 or the 18 that it lets us have out of the box now the frame rate you can see 20 frames per second 19. this is too laggy and we're hitting that 18 watt limit there and that's severely affecting the performance i mean we're losing like about an average of about what seven eight frames per second just because of the power limit but look at the thermals the thermals then will max out in the mid 70s that's the kind of thermals you're always going to see with this mini pc even when gaming pushing it hard video editing if you keep the stock power limit always be in the mid 70s but when you push it up to 45 that's when you reach 90. so thermals are actually quite good now i will drop it down to 720p and we'll take a look at how it performs then 720p at stock and 45 watt power limits so we're getting approximately 33 34 frames per second now 720p at 18 watts which is making this game now a little more playable but it's still got a lot of tearing look at that when you look around that's still way too slow so now i'm going to adjust that power limit put it back up to 45 wow i mean look at those temperatures 67 70 degrees very very good but let's see it now at 45 so now at 720p with that 45 watt power limit increase power limit the frame rate's much better but it's still underperforming really compared to the amd vega 8 integrated graphics is so much quicker and better at handling even this game so if you intend the game with this one here definitely keep it to 720p and just use a power limit that you're happy with so you don't have to use 45 watts you can use 35 and that will keep the temperatures a little bit lower because it still is peaking to 90 degrees here now on to a little bit of gaming so this is counter strike global offensive and i've got it set to all the lowest possible settings but 1080p and i don't have the typical overlay because well it treats that as say cheating but i'm getting around 70 frames per second so this is not quite as good as the vega 8 graphics which i was seeing around 90 to 100 frames per second so vega 8 definitely performs a little bit better and if you need that integrated graphics performance then that's probably why you would opt then for the amd's just to try and get a little bit better performance so i'm just going to run out here and probably die straight away see if i can get any kills no there's no one actually around here well okay there we go there we go in shot out already and i don't even know where the hell they're shooting at me ah from behind thermals now so this unit is very good if you keep the stock power limits okay so the 18 watt stock power limit with the 25 power limit level 2 you will see maximum temperatures of just about the mid 70s that's it it will not go over that's stressing out both the gpu and the cpu so excellent cooling on this one the fan is also very quiet most of the time only under load you will just hear it a little bit and then it disappears it goes away it's a very good fan profiles so temperatures when i took the lid off i ran it with the lid on of course but when i took it off and had a look at the vrms they get up to about 55 degrees under load so yes they are quite hot to the touch but that's a very good temperature i've seen v vrms get up to 70 degrees even 80 degrees on some of the mini pcs i've reviewed they do get very very hot but here they don't now when you increase the power limits then you'll see as i pointed out a maximum temperature of about 90 degrees peak and you sometimes see them the vrm's getting up to about 65 degrees almost towards 70. a lot hotter now the power use i'm talking about stock here okay stock power use idle is a little bit higher than i expected about 14 watts sometimes around 13 and under max load with again the stock power limits it's about 33 watts which is very good for max load because it is limited of course with that lower power limit so very good fan noise on this but here is a quick sample at 100 load stock that is and just very briefly here to point out that if you do intend to run linux on this that yes it will run and you will have no issues with drivers as long as you use a recent distro and the performance of it is very very quick so this is a great mini pc for linux users and maybe you could even use this for hackintosh but i don't think the wireless card's compatible you'll have to use a real tech one and there's gonna be a lot of work arounds and things but i don't get into hackintosh personally in this channel for well for legal reasons so all up this is a great mini pc if you want some decent performance you want a quad core and you want something that is very small and compact yet you can still squeeze in and fit a 2.5 inch drive in this one as i showed you now thermals if you keep the factory power limit absolutely top excellent thermals on this so it will turn off the fan and it'll be silent for quite some time and then okay the fan comes on a little bit but low rpms that you can barely even hear it now my unit i think has a very good thermal job that's been done on it from the factory if you have a slightly higher fan noise i would recommend if your game of course do it is re-paste it but i haven't replaced it or touched this one it's just been reviewed out of the box so it gets yes up to about 55 degrees when pushed hard internally which is actually very good the little cooler on there does a good job of pushing that heat out that's why we're getting that good fan noise as well from it now if you want to gain the additional performance i showed you push up the power limit but it will get hot then that's the trade-off pushing 45 watts maybe a little bit too much for some people so in my ambient temperatures here of 25 degrees it would hit 90 91 degrees celsius which is getting yeah a little too hot so run it at 35 watts and you still gain a very good balance between thermals and power so very quick just running windows if you intend to run windows and you don't really care too much about integrated graphics performance then this one is faster than the amd's i have reviewed i cannot deny it it just feels so much snappier and quicker windows 10. why is that that's because of this single core performance the short burst performance on this model here the 10th gen intel feels a lot faster than even the ryzen 5 the 3400g that i reviewed that was overclockable this even feels faster it's just the start menu loading applications everything pops up so much quicker even if i was using the same fast mvm drive it's always going to be the case there now when it came to the integrated graphics performance that's its area of weakness so it's okay very good at playing say vp9 codex atv 10 bit files 4k no problem but gaming gaming not as good as the vega 8 graphics so that's one area so if you need that integrated graphics performance with a mini pc take a look at one of the amd's that i have reviewed in the channel but if you're after all just very good performance for quite a good price point on this then this is one to go for now nothing is perfect of course so there are some areas where this is a little disappointing so that is well no type c video output the type c port on the back is just data only which is disappointing i would have liked to have seen thunderbolt of course but thunderbolt 3 would have pushed this price up a lot and the licensing for it maybe they couldn't even got it from intel so that's why it doesn't it doesn't have it of course and then well why is the visa bracket not in the box yet again the last model with the 8th gen chip in it didn't have the visa bracket so that's annoying i mean we need it to mount it on the back of a tv mount it on the back of a monitor it's kind of the point of these mini pcs to get them out of the way too so lots of power when you look at it when you actually test it and run it out a lot of power but bear in mind it is of course bare bones so you need to supply and factor in you need ram and you need an ssd operating system on top of that 310 usso this one does sell for so comes recommended but of course bear in mind those little cons here but very good little mini pc here really do like this one thank you so much for watching and yes there will be more mini pc reviews in the channel i intend to review some more intel's and yes some more amd's up and coming later on\n"