The Author's Take on the B-Link PC

As someone who isn't particularly interested in gaming PCs, I was surprised to see a product that caught my attention - the B-Link AMD-based mini PC. The author of this article is an AMD fanboy and wanted to know if the B-Link PC was worth considering as an alternative to Intel's Nuke series. In this article, we'll take a closer look at the B-Link PC and what makes it unique.

Introduction to the B-Link PC

The B-Link PC is a compact media box that's available for purchase at $900. The author of this article purchased one for testing purposes and wanted to share their experience with potential buyers. One of the key features of the B-Link PC is its AMD-based 3550 APU, which is currently the only Nuke competitor on the market.

Bench Testing the B-Link PC

The author performed some basic bench testing on the B-Link PC and was pleased to find that it didn't get excessively hot under a load. In fact, the temperature dropped from around 60 degrees Celsius back down to normal levels once the load was removed. This suggests that the B-Link PC is capable of handling demanding workloads without overheating.

Sound Levels

Another feature that caught the author's attention was the sound level produced by the B-Link PC. In general, it didn't get too loud even when running TV or movie content with music or other audio playing in the background. This is a definite plus for anyone who wants to use their media box without disturbing others.

Drive Configuration

One area where the author was disappointed was with the drive configuration. The B-Link PC came with an 8GB NVMe and a Western Digital Blue laptop hard drive, which is formatted into two separate drives. While this might seem like a nice feature at first glance, it ultimately fell short of expectations.

Availability of NVMe

The one thing that really disappointed the author was the absence of an NVMe drive in the B-Link PC. Despite having two DDR4 slots available for expansion, there was no room for an NVMe drive. This might be a design limitation on the part of the manufacturer, but it's something to keep in mind when considering purchasing this product.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the B-Link PC is a unique and capable media box that offers a compelling alternative to Intel's Nuke series. While there are some drawbacks, such as the lack of an NVMe drive, the author was generally pleased with their experience using this product. If you're in the market for a compact media box with AMD-based performance, the B-Link PC is definitely worth considering.

Resources

For those interested in learning more about the B-Link PC, there are several resources available online. One such resource is Linus Tech Tips, which performed a full teardown and review of the product. A link to this video can be found below.

Linus Tech Tips Review

If you want to get a comprehensive understanding of what the B-Link PC has to offer, it's definitely worth watching Linus Tech Tips' review. In this video, the author performs a thorough walkthrough of the product, including its performance in gaming and other areas. By watching this video, you'll get a much better sense of whether or not the B-Link PC is right for you.

Next Time

That's all for today's article. If you're interested in learning more about the B-Link PC or have any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments below. Don't forget to check out our Amazon link to this amazing power bar, which has been a lifesaver for our studio. Until next time, game over!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enshould probably clean up my room sometimes guess what we have we have a mini pc that dominates the mini pcs and i'm talking like this intel nukery what hey who put this on my desk this isn't about slow that's because we have the b-link gtr by the amd verizon 35-50 and vega 8 graphics just a heads up no nobody gave me one of these and no i didn't get to buy one these things are still sitting at about 900 canadian and they're pretty much the only game in town right now when it comes to an amd ryzen nook style pc now i'm not really knocking on that little intel nuke because that one's actually mine that's right i actually have an intel product back to reality actually i guess that was reality i'd like to talk about this little guy today one told my buddy about it and it's beautifully said unbox it try it out see what i think of it now in this trial i guess i can't really go benching the heck out of it or anything like that but i'll just do a regular everyday user and just use the machine because i don't want to push or hurt someone else's product but i did feel like it was a video i thought this was something to definitely talk about as being the only game in town this b-link this little guy is sporting eight gigs of ram right now from factory a nvme 256 and a one terabyte drive i don't know if the drive is actually a solid state or not i will check that out when we get it up and running but anyway i just wanted to do a quick overview of the unit and what's in the box and then we're gonna do just a quick run of the system to see what it's like overall okay so the front of this system there's two usb 3.0 a usbc headphone jack and you have a clear cmos button and your power button now one other thing that's really cool this has twin microphones it's a mic here and a mic here so what's really cool about that is if you are using it uh for voice control there's mics built in you don't need to have another mic anywhere and i thought that was a really decent add-on on the top it's very nice shiny and i love the logos the holograms or the holographic style tinfoily type of logo and there's actually a fingerprint reader here now during setup of course i won't be using that because this isn't my unit on the sides the venting gr i say five but it could be an s or whatever it's just painted into the grill and that is actually on both sides on the back of course you have your venting system it's quite a decent exhaust on the back here i'm guessing this is probably using some sort of i would say maybe mobile processor could be a desktop processor but i highly doubt it it's a 3550 uh which is not released in any other way other than either oem so it's not a processor we're just gonna walk out and buy which i wish we could because i've seen a review on this by linus tech tips and i think it was actually doing 4k gaming right off the apu which is very impressive now for me this was a box that i would want this is a dream box i guess that i would want behind my television upstairs in the living room and instead i'm going to be using an intel nuke and the reason for that of course is i already own it and this guy is expensive when this gets cheaper more mainstream i'm definitely going to go this route as the video alone is mind blown uh mind blending four more usb 3.0 three 3.0 you have two hdmis a display port uh two network two gigabits which i thought was really cool and of course your power jack so pretty simple uh it's all brushed aluminum the top is more of an acrylic on there i'm very stoked i want to fire this up it even has gt are air venting on the bottom hopefully getting that now on the camera no problem really nice touch i got to say this be link and funny because i never heard of b-link tell of course they built an amd when i look b link up they've been building little mini pcs and stuff for quite a long time in android boxes so i guess they wanted to dabble into the market of stupid fast mini pcs and from what i've seen i think they've actually did that so i'm just going to show what else is in the box so you know what you're getting when you buy the b-link gtr and basically of course you're getting your insta installation manual if you have to add things an instruction manual very very simple i'm going to be honest the box is really nice it's like a hard shell box and this is the part that none of us have seen yet because well it's never been opened or turned on yet so there's a bracket here it looks like one bracket's all is needed that hangs it on the wall this is really cool there's a usb thumb drive in here it looks like it's a well it's got b-link engraved on it but it looks very much like a kingston uh drive of course your power supply which we're gonna need now so 19 volt at three and a half amps to run this guy so it definitely has a bit of power so that's going to be a little bit of horsepower compared to your average laptop it'll be more like your gaming laptop so a gaming laptop would use three and a half to five amps at 19 volts and most other laptops would be about one and a half to two and a half amps depending on the uh processor load so definitely a good direction for me to see there so they give you a long each or a longer hdmi cable and a very short hdmi cable if you are mounting it to your television and you don't no longer want to see it and that is pretty awesome actually i wish i had a short one like that for the intel nook or up this little pc i'm going to use my brand new stand-up power adapter and i'm just gonna leave a amazon link down below if you're looking for a really cool power adapter with five meters of power cord and four usbs that can charge at 2.1 amps yeah i'm plugging this power adapter because our power bar because it's actually really good you have your outlets eight of them all turned the way that your power adapter doesn't take up the next slot brilliant i just wanted to talk about it real quick and let's get back to testing the hardware monitor in the background because i want to know what this thing is going to do heat wise right now we are at a package of 51 as i have been running this for quite a while so there's a little bit of heat going on here yet so let's now do a benchmark let's see what we get out of it let's see what this thing can i just want to see what it does against other systems like hopefully there's a user base that we can uh judge it by i've never even heard of or seen this game before so i really don't know what i'm expecting or is this game kind of cool i have no idea oh headlights star control origins is the benchmark i'm running i just wanted to find something i was trying to find game demos oh for god's sakes you can't find game demos anymore unless i register my steam account or something like that and at that point i would just install a normal game and i just didn't want to have to go through all that so i just want to see how this thing runs what the heat is like i mean as far as running the system is running phenomenal at right now the fans are pushing max right now and i gotta say still kind of coolish to the touch there's warm air coming out for sure um it's still fairly quiet so if you're putting this behind your tv or on the wall and hidden you wouldn't even hear it especially over a show or anything where you got your volume up anyway it is very quiet i mean listen it's the only thing running in this room so at that point i would say you know what yes the nuke is probably a little quieter but the nuke doesn't have the video card that this has so i can't really fault it for having a little bit of airflow noise and and it's very little very acceptable okay so average frame rates we're getting 24.9 frames per second average minimum frame rates was 20.9 average max was 28.6 now i don't know what to compare this to so what i'm going to do i'm going to submit the results here and see if i can get something oops um main menu well that's me using it jump oh there's a creature what the blazes is that okay so the key here was just to heat the unit up i want to see what happens when it get pushed a little and we have pushed it so uh again i don't know if this was a good test of this unit it's saying right here the frames per second is about 23 or so and i don't know we are on 1080p at highest settings so i mean it is what it is um i really wish i could try it out on something else but it's not a gaming unit it's not meant to be a gaming unit in fact i had to name it truck because it's actually being installed in my buddy's truck tomorrow that's why i had to get some video shot today and uh anyway let's go check and see our heat situation so we only hit a max temp of 60 degrees as a package and i think that is actually really acceptable the fans have already stopped we are down to 42 degrees so it's doing a great job of taking that heat and driving it at the back now keep in mind this unit is based on a mobile unit for sure it's an apu uh it's the 3550 i believe it comes up as a u um which is definitely mobile and the vega 8 graphics i mean you are going to be able to play games there's absolutely no doubt in my mind you're going to play games for sure and in a bench test of course they're pushing it at the max possibility and all i wanted to do was heat the unit up overall it's 8 giga ram i would probably do an upgrade on that and i think my buddy is going to so it's 8 giga ddr4 it has a 256 nvme and the drive the one terabyte is split up in half and i was very disappointed especially at the 900 price point to find out it's actually a wd blue drive 5400 rpm laptop drive that disgusted me a little and i mean easy change we all know that you're buying the unit you can easily change that it was like a sixty dollar drive it was mediocre at best but it is a data drive what do you expect from it in his case he's not going to care he'll never use more than the nvme anyway but i just wanted to give you my thoughts on that i think the machine overall runs decently cool it's very very quiet so we're looking at a unit now that you would run as a car pc a media box that kind of thing and it would do that job extremely well and if you're doing light gaming like fortnite or anything like that i think you'll be fine i i really believe that this would do some decent light gaming you know maybe a wireless controller or whatever or doing some of the side scrollers or that kind of thing but light gaming is what i'm going to say this was not for me to tell you to go and play games on this don't get me wrong this was a media box at best very well priced one at 900 bucks for what you get and we're gonna see more this is the introduction this is the whole you know b-link put out a product that's an amd based nuke no one else has yet at least that i know of if they have comment down below because at this point i have not seen any others but anyway it was just an overall i just want to show you what is out there amd does have a really nice box right now well b link has it and the 3550 apu is actually pretty darn good you can go check out linus tech tips i'll leave a link down below for that just because he did a full on teardown and testing gaming everything and that would be your review on the product by any means it wasn't a benchmark this was not meant to be a benchmark i'm not telling you to buy this based on gaming performance all i was trying to do was let you know that there is an answer to intel's nuke and yes it is about double the size as the intel nukes are pretty small and my nuke will be running my television soon now what it is it is a performer in the nuke market so if i had to take or want especially an amd lover if you're looking for an amd nuke you now have it so basically what i wanted to know was how hot does it get under a bench load and now i know it hit about 60 degrees max and then cut right back down so what i was looking for there was sound and it did not get that loud so if you're watching tv or a movie especially a movie you've got your music up or whatever there's no way in the world you're going to hear this thing run even at tv at normal levels it's just not that loud so i just wanted to give you a full on one eight gig 256 nvme and the very sad western digital blue laptop hard drive at 5400 rpm formatted into partitioned i should say into two different drives that's the disappointment there at 900 bucks i expected to actually see a nvme in there but at the same time maybe the design doesn't allow or room for it there are two ddr4 slots so you can actually add another slot that is not an issue as my buddy's going to do for sure before he puts it in his truck so anyway guys it was just something out there it's finally an amd mini pc that we can all go wow that is really nice it's finally here i'm going to have a link to linus tech tips in this video down below and the reason for that is he did a full-on teardown review gamed and did everything on it so therefore you can get what you would expect out of it as far as performance gaming and so on if that is what you're looking for i was looking for an alternative to an intel nuke being an amd fanboy wanting to know is it loud does it work well what are we getting and now i know i'm very happy with it maybe one day somebody will want my nuke and say hey i'll give you all kinds of crazy money for it and i'll be like yay and i'll be able to afford to buy one of these bad boys so unfortunately until then i have an intel in my house that is right oh well anyway guys until next time i'll leave an amazon link to this pc if you are looking for this pc also i will leave an amazon link for this amazing power bar just because it is everything i was looking for when it came to running a power bar in my studio and not giving me any grief and i used it throughout this video it works perfectly fine and a link down below for that and the b-link and linus tech tips because you need to watch that video and if you're not a fan of linus or you haven't ever watched them might as well become another 11 million whatever point guy and just seven until next time game over you