Bee Link's Ser 7 Mini PC Power Supply Could be a Trend Setter
# Article: B-Link Ser7 Mini PC Review: A Deep Dive into Performance, Design, and Features
## Introduction
The B-Link Ser7 Mini PC has been making waves in the compact computing world. Known for its powerful performance and innovative design, this device is a standout in the realm of mini PCs. In this article, we will take an in-depth look at what makes the Ser7 so special, including its hardware specifications, benchmarks, design features, connectivity options, gaming capabilities, driver support, cooling solutions, security features, and more.
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## Hardware Specifications and Features
The B-Link Ser7 is powered by an AMD Ryzen 7 8-core processor, offering impressive horsepower for a Mini PC. It comes with DDR5 5600MHz memory, providing reliable performance for everyday tasks and more demanding applications. The system includes dual M.2 slots, one of which is pre-installed with a Gen 4 SSD, ensuring fast storage capabilities.
The Ser7 is equipped with USBC ports that support both power delivery and DisplayPort functionality. This allows users to connect multiple displays and manage peripheral devices efficiently. Additionally, the device features PCIe connectivity for expandability, making it suitable for various use cases.
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## Benchmarks and Performance
Out of the box, the B-Link Ser7 demonstrates impressive benchmark results. With a single-core score of over 2500 and a multi-core score接近12000 in Geekbench 6.1, this Mini PC is no slouch. It handles everyday tasks like browsing, streaming, and multitasking with ease.
Power consumption is well-managed, with peak draws around 75-100 Watts, which is within the limits of its power brick. The device’s built-in RDNA3 GPU performs admirably for streaming and light gaming, though it may struggle with more demanding titles without a dedicated GPU.
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## Design and Build Quality
The Ser7 boasts a sleek, all-metal design that feels robust and premium. Its compact form factor (approximately 150x100mm) makes it ideal for space-constrained environments. The use of liquid metal cooling ensures effective thermal management, keeping temperatures under control even during intensive workloads.
One notable feature is the proprietary 19V connector, which offers a more stable power delivery compared to traditional barrel connectors. This design choice minimizes electromagnetic interference and supports higher power requirements, making it suitable for demanding applications.
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## Connectivity and Expansion Options
The Ser7 excels in connectivity with its dual USB-C ports, each supporting PCIe tunneling. This allows users to connect high-performance devices like external GPUs or Thunderbolt docks, though some configurations may require additional setup. The inclusion of HDMI and DisplayPort outputs further enhances its versatility for multi-display setups.
For those needing more connectivity options, USBC breakout adapters provide a cost-effective solution to expand USB ports and add network interfaces. This flexibility makes the Ser7 a versatile choice for both home and professional use cases.
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## Gaming and Multimedia Performance
While the built-in RDNA3 GPU is no match for high-end gaming rigs, it holds its own in Esports titles and lighter games. Running AAA games like Shadow of the Tomb Raider at 1080p low settings yields average FPS of around 33, which is respectable for a Mini PC. For better gaming experiences, users may opt for an external GPU solution, though this introduces potential bottlenecks.
Streaming performance is excellent, with hardware-accelerated encode/decode supporting various codecs. This makes the Ser7 a solid choice for content creators and streamers seeking low-latency performance.
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## Driver Support and BIOS Updates
A significant caveat of the B-Link Ser7 (and similar AMD-based Mini PCs) is the lack of comprehensive driver support and BIOS updates. While AMD provides guidelines for manufacturers, not all vendors adhere to them, leading to inconsistent driver availability. This can cause issues with peripherals like fingerprint scanners in some configurations.
Users may need to rely on third-party sources or forums for updated drivers, which can be a hassle. However, B-Link’s support for PCIe tunneling and Thunderbolt connectivity demonstrates their commitment to innovation despite these challenges.
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## Cooling Solutions and Thermal Performance
The Ser7 employs a dual-fan cooling system to manage heat from the CPU and M.2 slots effectively. While this setup works well, it introduces some mechanical complexity. A single fan design could be more efficient in the future, but the current implementation keeps temperatures under 80°C during intensive tasks.
Noise levels are minimal at idle, making the device suitable for quiet environments. Under load, the fans produce a “whoosh” sound rather than a high-pitched whine, which is preferable for most users.
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## Security Features and Off-Label Uses
The Ser7’s compact size and low power consumption make it ideal for security-conscious applications. Running critical tasks like online banking or tax filing on a separate machine can mitigate risks associated with networked devices. Additionally, the device’s expandability supports off-label uses such as home automation, media servers, and even gaming clusters when paired with external GPUs.
The B-Link Ser7 is also a great candidate for businesses looking to deploy affordable, low-maintenance systems for employees or guests.
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## Future Developments and Final Thoughts
The B-Link Ser7 represents the pinnacle of Mini PC innovation, blending powerful performance with compact design. While issues like driver support and cooling could use improvement, its strengths far outweigh these drawbacks. The device’s ability to handle demanding tasks and integrate with external hardware via PCIe tunneling makes it a standout choice for enthusiasts and professionals alike.
For those seeking a reliable, high-performance Mini PC, the B-Link Ser7 is hard to beat. Its combination of speed, expandability, and affordability positions it as a top contender in its category. Whether you’re streaming, gaming, or running productivity tools, the Ser7 delivers exceptional value for its size.
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## Conclusion
The B-Link Ser7 Mini PC is more than just a compact computing solution; it’s a glimpse into the future of personal technology. With its impressive performance, innovative design, and versatile connectivity options, this device sets a new standard in the Mini PC market. While not perfect, its strengths make it a must-consider option for anyone looking to maximize performance in a small form factor.
If you’re ready to take your computing experience to the next level without compromising on power or flexibility, the B-Link Ser7 is worth every penny.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso you're doing your homework on the Ser 7 or 7 from b-link is it too good to be true it's tiny it's metal it has a proprietary 19 volt connector but there is actually a valid engineering reason you might want this kind of a connector over a barrel connector we'll talk about dual USBC on the back USBC on the front you can do power delivery you can do display port can you do pcie connectivity USB USB USB 2.5 gigabit and it's tiny it's already in A3 it's four nanometers let's take a closer look okay if you've been following the Mini PC craze for the last year or so the 7000 series AMD CPUs are killing it I'm not talking about am5 I'm actually talking about the notebook processors this is a notebook processor not in a notebook juice to the max in terms of power delivery and the more of these that I look at the more impressed that I am this particular model is 7840 eight cores lots of horsepower ddr5 5600 out of the box there's dual m.2 slots in here one's empty one is the built-in OS boot Drive you've got DisplayPort HDMI and USBC now that USBC can also do DisplayPort you just need a USBC to DisplayPort adapter it's the whole tunneling thing so you can run two three displays off of this thing no problem and still have your type A and your type c port at the front as well inside if you pop the bottom off it's super easy upgrade ready there's an m.2 slot here it's not two and a half inch it's m.2 but you can slide your m.2 in pop it in there's an auxiliary fan here for cooling this is dual sodium you don't really want to take it apart much more than this because it's a liquid metal but you can pop the screws off here to replace the m.2 boot drive as well as upgrade the memory configuration if you want our configuration here shipped with 32 gigabytes of memory before we get this thing booted up and running our benchmarks let's take a look at the accessories in the Box first power brick with the funky connector is almost larger than the device itself 19 volts at just over 5 amps it's gonna be north of 100 Watts also in the Box you have a very short HDMI cable and a more reasonable length HDMI cable as well as a Visa mounting adapter bracket so what what it is this metal plate screws into the bottom of the b-link which then screws into the Visa holes in the back of your monitor and then you can mount this thing to the back of a monitor and have an all-in-one type machine this is really cool I've showed this before this is not really anything new what is kind of new from b-link is this sort of round flat connector it could possibly become a standard the reason that a DC barrel adapter like what you have on a laptop is perhaps undesirable is that if you rotate the barrel connection it can uh intermittently have a better or worse connection to the machine in question at lower wattages like a typical laptop wattages it doesn't really matter but more and more laptops demand more power so they end up having more power filter circuitry if you have this kind of a connector or it's not going to move around very much you need less of that kind of filtering circuitry that's really the only thing that I can possibly think of that may be this type of connector makes more sense over the more standard DC Barrel type connector I mean certainly there are laptops that are high wattage that have a barrel top connector but those laptops are probably also built with a power circuit that will deal with the noise induced by rotating the barrel connector in its connector which is the thing that happens so I guess okay maybe this will become a standard maybe not I don't know but as a backup plan it does do USBC power delivery all right in terms of Baseline benchmarks out of the box ddr5600 it's okay means it's going to be stable but it's unremarkable memory timings so we're talking about a latency of about 91 nanoseconds for many PCs this is great but think about an am5 tuned desktop your latency at this point from the very latest Giza is going to be more along the lines of 60 70 nanoseconds it's a pretty significant savings but most of the time you really only benefit from the dramatically faster memory when everything else in the system is also dramatically faster there's no dedicated GPU here you're relying on the built-in Apu rdna3 which is no slouch it's great for streaming it's got built-in uh Hardware encode decode for a bunch of different codecs it can work I would like to see something faster in terms of timing but it is what it is it's also 5620 not 5600 which tells me that b-link has Juiced things just a little bit that is very very slight overclock but it doesn't seem to sacrifice stability in the least this is also an ipu configured for 45 Watts they're a kilowatt meter here we're seeing Peak power draws of about 75 Watts for desktop type tasks when you're doing desktop and type and gaming type workloads with a fully loaded configuration you can exceed 100 Watts as reported by the kilowatt which makes sense and is well within the parameters of what our power brick and the power delivery system can deliver so nothing unusual there our cpu-z single and multi-core score of course is pretty respectable eight cores 16 threads 32 gigabytes of ddr5 memory this is an extremely impressive little platform this actually will run circles around two three year old full desktop systems all but the the the highest end Enthusiast desktops from a few years ago a business class desktop from two or three years ago this is this is considerably faster and it's going to feel faster just because of the single course scores I mean okay awesome the built-in SSD is nothing to write home about it's the crucial P3 ct-1000 P3 ssd8 it's the OEM name for their Gen 4 one terabyte pretty decent SSD it's not going to set the world on fire but it is faster than the fastest gen 3 drives so about five gigabytes per second read speed again entirely respectable pretty awesome that it's a Gen 4 drive this SSD uses the Faison ps5021 e21t 4 channel controller it's a micron 176 layer SSD there they do something interesting here with 64 megabytes of of memory like most of the time the memory is not actually a cache but there is 64 megabytes of SLC like cash it's a special sauce thing that feistin and Micron have done to make everything go faster that said this is a this is a qlc SSD which means that the rights will quench fairly quickly so if you're doing something like a memory card offload and you're offloading more than say 100 gigabytes of pictures at a time you know you're going to copy it to your computer and you're going to do some image processing and then copy it to a Nas kind of thing you will quench the right cache on the SSD if it's more than a little bit full more than 20 or 30 percent full with that kind of an operation so basically the Fuller the drive is the slower it gets and you're going to notice more because this is a qlc drive rather than a TLC Drive there's nothing wrong with it it's just that if you're thinking wow my drive's 80 full and I'm noticing that it's seems like it's slowed down that's not just you it's just how those drives work to be more precise than that though this drive is one of the best in its class of affordable ssds I didn't cut any Corners the quality of the nand is good and all of those so as a drive in a productivity machine it's a perfectly reasonable logical Choice it's just there are much higher end systems so if you're even if you're thinking about buying this as like an Esports thing I'm gonna play Esports games I mean for reads yeah that kind of stuff is basically okay but if you're constantly cycling through games in your steam Library might be worth getting that second SSD crucial says that the right speed of this drive is going to be up to about five gigabytes per second like the read speed but real world after I've cycled this drive with you know basically filling it up and emptying it and filling it up and emptying it about three times well our right speed is down to about 3.5 gigabytes per second and this is at 60 capacity so it's not terrible it's just okay our geekbench scores very very impressive this is geekbench 6.1 so we're looking at over 2500 for our single core score and that means we're we're at almost 12 000 points for our multi-core score and keep in mind this is a system that is running at a TDP of 45 Watts about 100 Watts from the wall or less in almost all scenarios shadow of the Tomb Raider is basically a pretty good stand-in for AAA ish games 1080p low average FPS 33 not bad not bad for an APU if you drop down to 720 or you use upscaling technology like FSR you can achieve 4550 FPS with a freesync monitor it's actually playable I'd still rather stream from a better gaming machine though oh and one last note in case you're annoyed by the lack of USB or other ports on a Mini PC like this don't forget there are inexpensive USBC breakout adapters these are usually used with laptops they often have pass-through power delivery can give you a second Network Port can give you a ton of extra type A ports USBC 10 gigabit to a bunch of these or even a thunderbolt dock will work with this so you've got a lot of options to add yet more connectivity if you don't have enough USB ports or other connections depending on what you're looking for I mean I'm connecting my HDMI monitor through the USBC Port plus also extra type a USB etc etc now you wouldn't want to do this with a gaming display or a high refresh display but if it's a secondary or an informational monitor this is fine and you've got the onboard display port full size and the onboard HDMI but I just wanted to show you that you can get these in all kinds of different port configurations so no matter what sort of weird thing you're looking to do you can do it through the USB type-c connections so rdna3 for gaming it's weird if it's in a portable or a handheld it's really good if it's in a desktop Mini PC it's really good as long as you're sticking to Esports titles or older games I mean you can get 30-ish FPS in pubg at 1080p on low and other games it's not bad but I would still prefer a different Mini PC that has a built-in dedicated GPU even if it's weak if that makes sense because even a built-in week dedicated GPU is still going to be better than an APU but for steam streaming from another gaming machine this is very good very low latency Hardware decode all the Fixins can work well this is a parent's machine grandparents machine friend of the family guest room computer some computer that's dedicated for a specific task then that works really well also these machines have gotten so cheap for things like paying your taxes and online banking and that sort of thing as a security measure having an entirely separate machine for that makes a lot of sense maybe not one that's nice you can get a lesser model that's way less expensive and use that for your online banking and paying your taxes and anything that's critically important and only that and having that level of separation is really really nice from a security perspective having a machine that's you know not networked are only very lightly networked for your password manager or like the the password managers password manager where only certain passwords are stored for certain critically important things this is the world that we are living in now like I say this machines may be a little too nice to do that with but if you think in those terms and you can start to think how can fill your life with lots and lots of mini PCS for off-label uses things like running home assistant or a Home Server or something like that you should take a look at this machine's big brother from b-link which has dual two and a half gig it's physically a little larger a little bit more connectivity a little bit more horsepower it's Juiced a little more in terms of power I think something like that for the higher end would uh probably interest you or at least be worth a look the only real dark side of these mini PCS especially the AMD mini PCS based around the 7000 series CPUs is there's this kind of no man's land with driver support and bios updates virtually none of the many PC vendors provide you know an updated bios after the fact or at least historical track record for the 6000 and so far the 7000 series apus from AMD is that you're basically on your own it sort of puts AMD in a tough spot is AMD going to chase down how all the different people that build with this build and then provide a unified driver they've kind of painted themselves into a corner AMD is going to get the reputation hit I think because you can't just go to amd's website and download the drivers for these and it's kind of true with laptops as well if you have a 7840 or a 78 well it's pretty much any 77 000 series mobile driver it's very hit and miss as to whether you can download the file from amd's website and have it not wreck everything that's not specific to b-link that's true of many but not all 7000 series system drivers I think AMD probably has some guidelines for how you should implement the 7000 series chip and if you stick to that then their drivers will work but if you don't then the drivers will kind of work but they potentially will break things on the system for example on the the bigger brother system of this the fingerprint scanner sort of gets wrecked if you install the AMD website version but you can download the drivers from b-link so it's weird it's a weird situation in terms of what is and is not supported that's really the darkest thing about these I like the cooling Solution on this with the liquid metal the worst temperatures that we saw were under 80 degrees C which is well below I mean in laptops it's going to be a sub-optimal cooling situation blah blah blah for the cooling that this chip was designed for this is more than adequate Cooling at arm's length the noise that this thing makes at idle and on the desktop is below the noise floor of my uh my studio not really super professional audio testing environment subjectively at arm's length when this thing is running Full Tilt 3D Mark you know maxing out the GPU and the CPU it is audible but it's more of a whoosh sound than a than a whiny sound I prefer the whoosh sound to the whiny sound and tuning the fans is it's not always tricky I would like to see the design evolve into a single fan design having the fan in the bottom and the top is a little annoying because there's you know you've doubled the chances that you might have some mechanical problem at some point in the future but the fan in the bottom is designed to overcome the fact that well ddr5 memory even a 5600 is going to run pretty toasty and we've also got one perhaps two m.2 in here and there's not enough passive airflow from the top fan cooling the CPU sucking air in through the bottom in order to be able to cool the one or two m.2 plus your ddr5 so I get why it was just ah let's add another second fan to deal with this I think probably a smarter motherboard design in the future or maybe this is an AMD engineering thing that they could do a larger slower fan that cools everything in the top probably makes more sense than two smaller fans just engineering 101 I don't think it's terrible it's just something to keep in mind but in terms of performance and where we are I can't believe how fast the mini PCS are in general and I can't believe that we're at a point where 8 12 14 cores in many PCs depending on whether you swing you know team blue or team red as this one is is kind of the norm but as we've seen from Modern game releases and modern application releases basically everything these days can use six eight cores no problem six eight cores for just desktop mundane uses a lot of browser tabs switching back and forth between applications 32 gigabytes of memory it's where we are in 2023 and even more than eight cores might be nice but these eight cores are generally faster than the 12 and 14 core things that are available uh from from Intel so this is going to perform better this 7000 series mobile Apu that this is based around generally will perform better and especially it performs better in the 45 ish watt power envelope now 45 watt TDP power draw at the wall 100 Watts worst case scenario 75 Watts nominal ah it's just it just depends on how you count that number you know me off label uses okay pcie tunneling as it's called in the AMD platform means that we may be able to plug in a thunderbolt dock Thunderbolt confirmed working oh I'm sorry I'm sorry pcie tunneling confirmed working what this means is that yes you could upgrade your GPU keep in mind it's limited to pcie3 four lanes so you're not going to upgrade it much you really shouldn't use an external GPU anything faster than like an RX 6600 7600 Maybe you're going to pretty severely bottleneck through that connection but it is an option for the home lab use case use a thunderbolt 10 gigabit network card or use the Thunderbolt port for a direct crossover connection as we recently did in my video except that the Thunderbolt net driver is not quite complete on the AMD side you'll have to patch the module you can come to the Forum get that up and running but it does work you just gotta add some devices to your table of stuff that Thunderbolt net runs over you got to be careful on the AMD platforms too because not necessarily every USBC Port is capable of Thunderbolt tunneling I think strictly speaking the platform only supports two such ports it didn't like it when I switched to the other rear USBC port and said there wasn't enough resources in the system so I'm going to reboot and see if that works and of course Windows update and much to my surprise the second usb-c port on the rear does also function for pcie tunneling however it was a weird and quirky experience sometimes in the second USB port when you were rebooting the machine it would just hang on a black screen and sometimes when shutting it down it would just hang on a black screen it didn't do that with no with the external GPU enclosure not attached to the system and I think but I'm not sure this is down to the Thunderbolt security model so in the old days you would just plug something in and it could do whatever it needed to do and it turns out that wasn't great from a security standpoint because if you plugged in a malicious device it could steal memory from the host computer including encryption keys and everything else Under the Sun that it shouldn't have access to so later versions of Thunderbolt eventually sort of kind of implemented security and that I don't think has been super bug free on any platform and I think that when the system boots with a thunderbolt pcie tunneling device attached to it uh it doesn't always get the security settings right it always seems to work better plugging it in after the fact and letting Windows find it that said there is an app in the uh Microsoft store called Thunderbolt control center although if you search for it on an unsupported system it goes to Great Links to hide it from you and if you just use Google instead and install it that way then you can install it from the Microsoft App Store this is by the way why it has like a one one and a half star rating because the Microsoft app store is absolutely worthless and has a bunch of garbage applications on it in addition to applications that are actually useful what this Intel utility does is it lets you set the security settings normally this is only for an Intel platform but I thought hey let's give it a try on the AMD platform turns out not really a thing the b-link BIOS doesn't expose the settings for pcie tunneling security there should be a bio setting that just says yeah let's go with the no security option it doesn't give you the option and the AMD utilities for the platform for PCI tunneling to do that also not done yet supposed to be plug and play it can be Plug and Play If you're willing to be a little experimental but you can use an external GPU dock if you're willing for it to be slightly Rough Around the Edges but it can work and more importantly two ports so if you're willing to get your hands dirty on the Linux side of things you can build a three node cluster where every node is connected to every other node see my other video or maybe look out for that video on the Linux Channel featuring the surf 7 and some other small form factor machines that have dual Thunderbolt dual pcie tunneling devices but overall metal design solid engineering from b-link I like what I see not really a lot to complain about model this level one there's been a quick look at the scr7 if you think of any fun uses that you want to see with this let me knowso you're doing your homework on the Ser 7 or 7 from b-link is it too good to be true it's tiny it's metal it has a proprietary 19 volt connector but there is actually a valid engineering reason you might want this kind of a connector over a barrel connector we'll talk about dual USBC on the back USBC on the front you can do power delivery you can do display port can you do pcie connectivity USB USB USB 2.5 gigabit and it's tiny it's already in A3 it's four nanometers let's take a closer look okay if you've been following the Mini PC craze for the last year or so the 7000 series AMD CPUs are killing it I'm not talking about am5 I'm actually talking about the notebook processors this is a notebook processor not in a notebook juice to the max in terms of power delivery and the more of these that I look at the more impressed that I am this particular model is 7840 eight cores lots of horsepower ddr5 5600 out of the box there's dual m.2 slots in here one's empty one is the built-in OS boot Drive you've got DisplayPort HDMI and USBC now that USBC can also do DisplayPort you just need a USBC to DisplayPort adapter it's the whole tunneling thing so you can run two three displays off of this thing no problem and still have your type A and your type c port at the front as well inside if you pop the bottom off it's super easy upgrade ready there's an m.2 slot here it's not two and a half inch it's m.2 but you can slide your m.2 in pop it in there's an auxiliary fan here for cooling this is dual sodium you don't really want to take it apart much more than this because it's a liquid metal but you can pop the screws off here to replace the m.2 boot drive as well as upgrade the memory configuration if you want our configuration here shipped with 32 gigabytes of memory before we get this thing booted up and running our benchmarks let's take a look at the accessories in the Box first power brick with the funky connector is almost larger than the device itself 19 volts at just over 5 amps it's gonna be north of 100 Watts also in the Box you have a very short HDMI cable and a more reasonable length HDMI cable as well as a Visa mounting adapter bracket so what what it is this metal plate screws into the bottom of the b-link which then screws into the Visa holes in the back of your monitor and then you can mount this thing to the back of a monitor and have an all-in-one type machine this is really cool I've showed this before this is not really anything new what is kind of new from b-link is this sort of round flat connector it could possibly become a standard the reason that a DC barrel adapter like what you have on a laptop is perhaps undesirable is that if you rotate the barrel connection it can uh intermittently have a better or worse connection to the machine in question at lower wattages like a typical laptop wattages it doesn't really matter but more and more laptops demand more power so they end up having more power filter circuitry if you have this kind of a connector or it's not going to move around very much you need less of that kind of filtering circuitry that's really the only thing that I can possibly think of that may be this type of connector makes more sense over the more standard DC Barrel type connector I mean certainly there are laptops that are high wattage that have a barrel top connector but those laptops are probably also built with a power circuit that will deal with the noise induced by rotating the barrel connector in its connector which is the thing that happens so I guess okay maybe this will become a standard maybe not I don't know but as a backup plan it does do USBC power delivery all right in terms of Baseline benchmarks out of the box ddr5600 it's okay means it's going to be stable but it's unremarkable memory timings so we're talking about a latency of about 91 nanoseconds for many PCs this is great but think about an am5 tuned desktop your latency at this point from the very latest Giza is going to be more along the lines of 60 70 nanoseconds it's a pretty significant savings but most of the time you really only benefit from the dramatically faster memory when everything else in the system is also dramatically faster there's no dedicated GPU here you're relying on the built-in Apu rdna3 which is no slouch it's great for streaming it's got built-in uh Hardware encode decode for a bunch of different codecs it can work I would like to see something faster in terms of timing but it is what it is it's also 5620 not 5600 which tells me that b-link has Juiced things just a little bit that is very very slight overclock but it doesn't seem to sacrifice stability in the least this is also an ipu configured for 45 Watts they're a kilowatt meter here we're seeing Peak power draws of about 75 Watts for desktop type tasks when you're doing desktop and type and gaming type workloads with a fully loaded configuration you can exceed 100 Watts as reported by the kilowatt which makes sense and is well within the parameters of what our power brick and the power delivery system can deliver so nothing unusual there our cpu-z single and multi-core score of course is pretty respectable eight cores 16 threads 32 gigabytes of ddr5 memory this is an extremely impressive little platform this actually will run circles around two three year old full desktop systems all but the the the highest end Enthusiast desktops from a few years ago a business class desktop from two or three years ago this is this is considerably faster and it's going to feel faster just because of the single course scores I mean okay awesome the built-in SSD is nothing to write home about it's the crucial P3 ct-1000 P3 ssd8 it's the OEM name for their Gen 4 one terabyte pretty decent SSD it's not going to set the world on fire but it is faster than the fastest gen 3 drives so about five gigabytes per second read speed again entirely respectable pretty awesome that it's a Gen 4 drive this SSD uses the Faison ps5021 e21t 4 channel controller it's a micron 176 layer SSD there they do something interesting here with 64 megabytes of of memory like most of the time the memory is not actually a cache but there is 64 megabytes of SLC like cash it's a special sauce thing that feistin and Micron have done to make everything go faster that said this is a this is a qlc SSD which means that the rights will quench fairly quickly so if you're doing something like a memory card offload and you're offloading more than say 100 gigabytes of pictures at a time you know you're going to copy it to your computer and you're going to do some image processing and then copy it to a Nas kind of thing you will quench the right cache on the SSD if it's more than a little bit full more than 20 or 30 percent full with that kind of an operation so basically the Fuller the drive is the slower it gets and you're going to notice more because this is a qlc drive rather than a TLC Drive there's nothing wrong with it it's just that if you're thinking wow my drive's 80 full and I'm noticing that it's seems like it's slowed down that's not just you it's just how those drives work to be more precise than that though this drive is one of the best in its class of affordable ssds I didn't cut any Corners the quality of the nand is good and all of those so as a drive in a productivity machine it's a perfectly reasonable logical Choice it's just there are much higher end systems so if you're even if you're thinking about buying this as like an Esports thing I'm gonna play Esports games I mean for reads yeah that kind of stuff is basically okay but if you're constantly cycling through games in your steam Library might be worth getting that second SSD crucial says that the right speed of this drive is going to be up to about five gigabytes per second like the read speed but real world after I've cycled this drive with you know basically filling it up and emptying it and filling it up and emptying it about three times well our right speed is down to about 3.5 gigabytes per second and this is at 60 capacity so it's not terrible it's just okay our geekbench scores very very impressive this is geekbench 6.1 so we're looking at over 2500 for our single core score and that means we're we're at almost 12 000 points for our multi-core score and keep in mind this is a system that is running at a TDP of 45 Watts about 100 Watts from the wall or less in almost all scenarios shadow of the Tomb Raider is basically a pretty good stand-in for AAA ish games 1080p low average FPS 33 not bad not bad for an APU if you drop down to 720 or you use upscaling technology like FSR you can achieve 4550 FPS with a freesync monitor it's actually playable I'd still rather stream from a better gaming machine though oh and one last note in case you're annoyed by the lack of USB or other ports on a Mini PC like this don't forget there are inexpensive USBC breakout adapters these are usually used with laptops they often have pass-through power delivery can give you a second Network Port can give you a ton of extra type A ports USBC 10 gigabit to a bunch of these or even a thunderbolt dock will work with this so you've got a lot of options to add yet more connectivity if you don't have enough USB ports or other connections depending on what you're looking for I mean I'm connecting my HDMI monitor through the USBC Port plus also extra type a USB etc etc now you wouldn't want to do this with a gaming display or a high refresh display but if it's a secondary or an informational monitor this is fine and you've got the onboard display port full size and the onboard HDMI but I just wanted to show you that you can get these in all kinds of different port configurations so no matter what sort of weird thing you're looking to do you can do it through the USB type-c connections so rdna3 for gaming it's weird if it's in a portable or a handheld it's really good if it's in a desktop Mini PC it's really good as long as you're sticking to Esports titles or older games I mean you can get 30-ish FPS in pubg at 1080p on low and other games it's not bad but I would still prefer a different Mini PC that has a built-in dedicated GPU even if it's weak if that makes sense because even a built-in week dedicated GPU is still going to be better than an APU but for steam streaming from another gaming machine this is very good very low latency Hardware decode all the Fixins can work well this is a parent's machine grandparents machine friend of the family guest room computer some computer that's dedicated for a specific task then that works really well also these machines have gotten so cheap for things like paying your taxes and online banking and that sort of thing as a security measure having an entirely separate machine for that makes a lot of sense maybe not one that's nice you can get a lesser model that's way less expensive and use that for your online banking and paying your taxes and anything that's critically important and only that and having that level of separation is really really nice from a security perspective having a machine that's you know not networked are only very lightly networked for your password manager or like the the password managers password manager where only certain passwords are stored for certain critically important things this is the world that we are living in now like I say this machines may be a little too nice to do that with but if you think in those terms and you can start to think how can fill your life with lots and lots of mini PCS for off-label uses things like running home assistant or a Home Server or something like that you should take a look at this machine's big brother from b-link which has dual two and a half gig it's physically a little larger a little bit more connectivity a little bit more horsepower it's Juiced a little more in terms of power I think something like that for the higher end would uh probably interest you or at least be worth a look the only real dark side of these mini PCS especially the AMD mini PCS based around the 7000 series CPUs is there's this kind of no man's land with driver support and bios updates virtually none of the many PC vendors provide you know an updated bios after the fact or at least historical track record for the 6000 and so far the 7000 series apus from AMD is that you're basically on your own it sort of puts AMD in a tough spot is AMD going to chase down how all the different people that build with this build and then provide a unified driver they've kind of painted themselves into a corner AMD is going to get the reputation hit I think because you can't just go to amd's website and download the drivers for these and it's kind of true with laptops as well if you have a 7840 or a 78 well it's pretty much any 77 000 series mobile driver it's very hit and miss as to whether you can download the file from amd's website and have it not wreck everything that's not specific to b-link that's true of many but not all 7000 series system drivers I think AMD probably has some guidelines for how you should implement the 7000 series chip and if you stick to that then their drivers will work but if you don't then the drivers will kind of work but they potentially will break things on the system for example on the the bigger brother system of this the fingerprint scanner sort of gets wrecked if you install the AMD website version but you can download the drivers from b-link so it's weird it's a weird situation in terms of what is and is not supported that's really the darkest thing about these I like the cooling Solution on this with the liquid metal the worst temperatures that we saw were under 80 degrees C which is well below I mean in laptops it's going to be a sub-optimal cooling situation blah blah blah for the cooling that this chip was designed for this is more than adequate Cooling at arm's length the noise that this thing makes at idle and on the desktop is below the noise floor of my uh my studio not really super professional audio testing environment subjectively at arm's length when this thing is running Full Tilt 3D Mark you know maxing out the GPU and the CPU it is audible but it's more of a whoosh sound than a than a whiny sound I prefer the whoosh sound to the whiny sound and tuning the fans is it's not always tricky I would like to see the design evolve into a single fan design having the fan in the bottom and the top is a little annoying because there's you know you've doubled the chances that you might have some mechanical problem at some point in the future but the fan in the bottom is designed to overcome the fact that well ddr5 memory even a 5600 is going to run pretty toasty and we've also got one perhaps two m.2 in here and there's not enough passive airflow from the top fan cooling the CPU sucking air in through the bottom in order to be able to cool the one or two m.2 plus your ddr5 so I get why it was just ah let's add another second fan to deal with this I think probably a smarter motherboard design in the future or maybe this is an AMD engineering thing that they could do a larger slower fan that cools everything in the top probably makes more sense than two smaller fans just engineering 101 I don't think it's terrible it's just something to keep in mind but in terms of performance and where we are I can't believe how fast the mini PCS are in general and I can't believe that we're at a point where 8 12 14 cores in many PCs depending on whether you swing you know team blue or team red as this one is is kind of the norm but as we've seen from Modern game releases and modern application releases basically everything these days can use six eight cores no problem six eight cores for just desktop mundane uses a lot of browser tabs switching back and forth between applications 32 gigabytes of memory it's where we are in 2023 and even more than eight cores might be nice but these eight cores are generally faster than the 12 and 14 core things that are available uh from from Intel so this is going to perform better this 7000 series mobile Apu that this is based around generally will perform better and especially it performs better in the 45 ish watt power envelope now 45 watt TDP power draw at the wall 100 Watts worst case scenario 75 Watts nominal ah it's just it just depends on how you count that number you know me off label uses okay pcie tunneling as it's called in the AMD platform means that we may be able to plug in a thunderbolt dock Thunderbolt confirmed working oh I'm sorry I'm sorry pcie tunneling confirmed working what this means is that yes you could upgrade your GPU keep in mind it's limited to pcie3 four lanes so you're not going to upgrade it much you really shouldn't use an external GPU anything faster than like an RX 6600 7600 Maybe you're going to pretty severely bottleneck through that connection but it is an option for the home lab use case use a thunderbolt 10 gigabit network card or use the Thunderbolt port for a direct crossover connection as we recently did in my video except that the Thunderbolt net driver is not quite complete on the AMD side you'll have to patch the module you can come to the Forum get that up and running but it does work you just gotta add some devices to your table of stuff that Thunderbolt net runs over you got to be careful on the AMD platforms too because not necessarily every USBC Port is capable of Thunderbolt tunneling I think strictly speaking the platform only supports two such ports it didn't like it when I switched to the other rear USBC port and said there wasn't enough resources in the system so I'm going to reboot and see if that works and of course Windows update and much to my surprise the second usb-c port on the rear does also function for pcie tunneling however it was a weird and quirky experience sometimes in the second USB port when you were rebooting the machine it would just hang on a black screen and sometimes when shutting it down it would just hang on a black screen it didn't do that with no with the external GPU enclosure not attached to the system and I think but I'm not sure this is down to the Thunderbolt security model so in the old days you would just plug something in and it could do whatever it needed to do and it turns out that wasn't great from a security standpoint because if you plugged in a malicious device it could steal memory from the host computer including encryption keys and everything else Under the Sun that it shouldn't have access to so later versions of Thunderbolt eventually sort of kind of implemented security and that I don't think has been super bug free on any platform and I think that when the system boots with a thunderbolt pcie tunneling device attached to it uh it doesn't always get the security settings right it always seems to work better plugging it in after the fact and letting Windows find it that said there is an app in the uh Microsoft store called Thunderbolt control center although if you search for it on an unsupported system it goes to Great Links to hide it from you and if you just use Google instead and install it that way then you can install it from the Microsoft App Store this is by the way why it has like a one one and a half star rating because the Microsoft app store is absolutely worthless and has a bunch of garbage applications on it in addition to applications that are actually useful what this Intel utility does is it lets you set the security settings normally this is only for an Intel platform but I thought hey let's give it a try on the AMD platform turns out not really a thing the b-link BIOS doesn't expose the settings for pcie tunneling security there should be a bio setting that just says yeah let's go with the no security option it doesn't give you the option and the AMD utilities for the platform for PCI tunneling to do that also not done yet supposed to be plug and play it can be Plug and Play If you're willing to be a little experimental but you can use an external GPU dock if you're willing for it to be slightly Rough Around the Edges but it can work and more importantly two ports so if you're willing to get your hands dirty on the Linux side of things you can build a three node cluster where every node is connected to every other node see my other video or maybe look out for that video on the Linux Channel featuring the surf 7 and some other small form factor machines that have dual Thunderbolt dual pcie tunneling devices but overall metal design solid engineering from b-link I like what I see not really a lot to complain about model this level one there's been a quick look at the scr7 if you think of any fun uses that you want to see with this let me know\n"